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,…
I am so pleased to welcome debut author Christine Hyung-Oak Lee to The Debutante Ball! Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, The Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is a…
When I finally felt as though I had a reasonable draft of The Dream Peddler, the one I began sending out to agents, it came in at right around seventy-nine thousand words. This was a nice length for a debut literary book, as in, appropriate to the genre and not so long as to be scary. I had cut many things, because I tend to go on and…
Damn, these debutante ladies are really teaching me some stuff. Constantly reminding me that I need to get out of my literary fiction rut and read books like this more often. This book is absolutely page-turningly fascinating and delicious in every way. Layne’s characters are so real that it feels like they might leap off the page and bite me, and I’m not sure if the bite will…
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…
Beware of jealousy. It creeps up on a debut writer like that unexpected knife-wielding plot twist that she threw into chapter sixteen just for fun, never considering how it might feel if the knife was suddenly plunged into her sensitive debut heart. Or something like that. When I first noticed that we were going to cover the topic of jealousy this week, I pictured my post being thousands (and…
How will I limit this post to a reasonable length? The list of authors I fangirl over is long. Really long. So I’m just going to start with those at the top and stop when I think you may have passed out from reading too much gushing. You may remember, way back in September when our group took over this blog, that our very first guest…
Aloha! This week we are supposed to talk about the authors we fangirl over. I have a rather long list of writers across a wide range of genres. Instead of going on and on for a rather long time I will compile my Top 10 favorite authors and books, as of this week. These are the books I go to when I’m bored, and I want to immerse myself in…
I’ve moved around a lot in the past decade, and I’ve had to cull my writing friends from a number of different sources. The first time I joined an actual writing group was when I moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia and found one through Meetup that was only a few minutes from my children’s school. In many ways, Just Write changed my life. I had started a…
I am so excited to welcome former Deb Lara Lillibridge back to the ball this week! I feel as though I’ve known Lara forever, although I suppose it’s been less than a year. She was the deb from last year who first emailed me to ask if I would like to be one of this year’s five, so let’s just say I’ve been fond of her ever since. She…
