Independent Bookstore Day is on April 24th, and so we’re celebrating our favorite indie sellers here at the Deb Ball. I’ve loved many bookstores in my life, starting with Half Price Books in my hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, to The Raven in Lawrence, Kansas where I attended graduate school, to Green Apple Books in San Francisco. But my favorite favorite of all my favorites has to be East Bay…
Thank you to Simone st. James for talking to us about her new novel, THE SUN DOWN MOTEL. If you missed Denny’s interview with Stacie Murphy about her forthcoming novel, A DEADLY FORTUNE, you can still watch it now at our Instagram page. Tune in to @thedebball tomorrow, 10/19, when J.S. Dewes, author of THE LAST WATCH, takes over our Instagram account for the day, finishing with an interview with…
I wrote last week about how I hadn’t planned on becoming a writer, and how writing was something I came to after being unemployed for a long time. So already my path to publication was a little longer and had more forking paths than some people. I completed the rough draft of my novel in about six months in 2011, and I spent the next four years first learning how…
Greetings and salutations and welcome to the Debutante Ball! I was so excited when I read the first words of the email I received on a Sunday morning in early August of 2019 informing me that I’d been chosen as one of the 5 debut authors who would chronicle her “big dance” toward publication. I had been following the Debutante Ball blog for more than a year and eagerly…
It’s so easy to be jealous. To let the green-eyed monster into your mental house, allow it to sit at the kitchen table in your cerebellum and tell you stories about how things could be so much better if your life was just like that person’s over there. And this is especially true if you’re a writer trying to make it in this often-cruel world. After all, things aren’t fair….
I’m turning forty this year. And when you’re a middle-aged mom writing science fiction at four in the morning, it’s hard to look at all the startling young ingenues in their adorable city apartments, writing life-changing novels, getting MFAs, doing interviews with Lithub— —Let’s just say that I’ve been there. I understand. I thought my life was over in my early thirties when I turned out a truly awful epic…
As someone who dealt with many complications getting pregnant, I was excited to talk to Sarah DiGregorio, who writes about premature birth in her book EARLY: An Intimate History of Premature Birth and What It Teaches Us About Being Human (Harper). In this reported memoir, the freelance journalist, who covers both healthcare and food for many publications (including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and Catapult)…
Let’s be honest. Most of us who write novels want them to be made into films. It’s just really fun, and the option money isn’t bad, either. (Plus, we all secretly fear more people will probably experience our stuff if it shows up on Netflix someday.) I’ve worked in small-scale videomaking for over a decade — YouTube, music videos, weddings, and commercials, both shooting and editing. I’ve never worked on…
God, the word “brand” seems to be the antithesis of actual writing. But when you’re writing non-fiction that’s what publishers want to know. Not, “I have an idea for the greatest relationship advice book in the world,” but, who are YOU to write a relationship book?? See even if it’s the greatest business/relationship/pregnancy book in the world, or even a memoir on addiction/prison/infertility — it’s going to have to join dozens…
It’s Christmas Eve, which means I’m type type typing, attempting to finish my long list of deadlines before I put on my Santa hat and artfully arrange presents around a tree for my baby daughter who doesn’t even know who Santa is quite yet. Anyway, here’s a short list of the reads that made my 2019 delightful and fun. I firmly believe that we are absolutely, completely, one hundred percent…
