Every year, I start a new journal. I love the clean page, writing Jan 1 (although not the creeping years slowly). I think I started my first journal more than two decades ago. Let’s just say it was not in this millennium. “A new year! New Resolutions!” I would state, even though they were usually the same resolutions. Write a book. Lose Weight Well, this year I don’t have…
On a couple of Saturday night’s a month, my husband and I pop one of our favorite movies into the DVD player and sit on the living room couch in the pitch dark like patrons do in movie theaters. Recently we watched the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight,” starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. In the story, an innocent woman (Bergman) marries a charming man (Boyer) who tries to drive her…
We can discuss pitching and pitch letters till the sky turns green, but what would probably be more helpful is if I show you my book pitch. Unlike fiction and possibly memoir (the debate is out there on memoir) non-fiction, which needs a lot of research to complete the book, is sold on proposal. (I’ll talk proposals another time). But you still need a pitch letter. So here’s mine. Dear…
Hey, let me tell you what I’m trying to do at this very moment: prep for my author marketing meeting, watch videos for learning how to write a TV treatment, upload all the business cards of people I met at a professional conference this weekend, write an article about a conference I attended two weeks ago, photoshop my author photos, upload guest author interviews and write this piece. Oh, and…
Did you ever notice how, on TV or in the movies, when they want to show the difficulties of writing, they have people sitting in front of a typewriter tossing off crumpled pieces of paper into (or near) the garbage? Real writing isn’t like that. First off, we use computers now, so the visual of trying to write is much less dramatic…just a cursor key going forward and backward. More…
I can’t say I’m good with rejection. Outwardly, I think I project an uh, okaaaaay attitude when I get rejected, but inwardly, a part of me wants to crawl up in a ball and die. Or at least CRY. But no, I keep calm and carry on….Or do I? Sometimes I think it would be better to cry and rail and rant against the gods of rejection because then I’d get it out…
I used to have this weird typo tic where I never got the acronym for work-in-progress right. It always came out WOP. I’ve even tweeted about my wop and never noticed until it was too late. Maybe there was something Freudian about this little tic. Because “wop” always makes me think about a cartoon where some character is being repeatedly bludgeoned over the head. Not that my works…
I don’t have a blooper reel, per se, with regard to The Atlas of Reds and Blues. What I do have is a strong-willed spell check on my computer which made for some humorous moments as I employed Bengali, Hawaiian, Spanish and French vocabulary in to the body of the novel. All of the sudden words like: sandesh, a Bengali dessert, became sadness. español, the language, became sepia. kejuur guur,…
Aloha! This week we are supposed to address “what we cut from our books and why:” Well, technically I had almost everything deleted from my debut novel, The Atlas Of Reds and Blues. On May 17, 2010, the Georgia state police raided my home at gunpoint and confiscated, among other things, my laptop. Even though a state judge in Georgia dismissed all of the charges against my husband back in…
I’m so thrilled the world is now able to get their hands on Layne Fargo’s excellent novel, Temper. It is a masterful thriller, suspenseful and so well-written. It deserves all the accolades it’s going to get. I was hooked from the opening pages, it was cinematic! And I felt I was witnessing an epic battle between the two main characters, Kira and Joanna. These are two strong-willed, deeply-flawed women and…
