Aloha. I started writing poetry when I was nine years old. I remember writing in bursts. I had a wonderful teacher that year, and she was encouraging us to write beyond what the class assignments required us to do for the poetry unit. I first learned about haiku and sonnets and I was hooked! I wrote anywhere and anytime, and on any surface — from napkins to spiral notebooks. By…
Aloha. K.A. Doore wrote an essay yesterday about the reader’s buying power and how the support of an independent bookstore helps save jobs and sustain a vibrant literary community. I have nothing to add to her excellent work – she said it so eloquently. I want to say that I’m so deeply grateful I have the love and support of Counterpoint Press. This amazing independent press was brave to embrace…
I could not be more thrilled to welcome this week’s guest, Kirstin Chen, to the debutante ball! Kirstin Chen’s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, the…
I am not a finance person. When I think of the words “financial” and “realities” in the same sentence, my brain tries to make a little symbolic dive under a sofa. All I can do with this post is just lay it out there and be honest. I have no problem telling everyone exactly what my book finances have been so far, because I think it’s important…
Aloha: It’s tax season and this is a perfect time to remember that unless your last name is GRISHAM or KING, it is difficult to make a living writing books. Don’t let it deter you: creating a writing life is a noble calling, it just doesn’t pay well for the aspiring or newbie writers. It doesn’t pay well for poets. You should know that it’s madness in a way, to…
As a Deb this year, I’ve had the enormous privilege of working with four amazing, super-talented writers. And I’m so pleased to be able to finally sing the praises of Martine Fournier Watson’s debut novel, The Dream Peddler. I love this novel so much! It is dreamy, spooky, suspenseful. A sleepy town awakens when a young boy goes missing and the Dream Peddler arrives. The intertwining stories between the townspeople…
If you’ve never seen Love Story starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, then you many not know that yes, it’s a love story but spoiler, she dies at the end. When I started thinking about my “perfect” day for this week’s post, for some reason my mind went to that movie, because there’s a scene near the end that I’ve always found interesting. I can’t remember exactly what Ali…
My book is out tomorrow. My book. Is out. Tomorrow. That is a weird thing to say. A weird thing to type. A weird thing to think. Just two years ago, I was writing The Perfect Assassin. I was carefully setting goals and timelines and getting up early and writing during naps and writing in the middle of the night – forget about sleeping when baby sleeps: write when baby…
In my novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, I tried to capture the real world — the nonfiction world of the main character — from her earliest memories to the day she is shot by police and lays bleeding in her driveway. It’s a short novel. I tried to capture what she remembered, what she lived through — it was a pleasure to include such iconic moments as Woodstock…
I’ve been planning the movie of The Dream Peddler for a long, long time. I believe I’ve even mentioned Bradley Cooper a couple of times on this very blog. So I have a pretty good idea of which actors I would ideally cast for each role. The best part about this week’s blog is that I have full control. Every actor I’ve ever loved is not only available…
