Last week, I got a Houdini action figure for my birthday. He came complete with handcuffs, leg irons, rope, a straightjacket, and a chair to which to bind him. I’ve been having entirely too much fun tying him up in various poses on my desk. Escapology fascinates me to no end – in fact, a character in the book I’m working on now is a young aspiring magician and escape…
If you walk into my house you can usually tell if I’m deeply involved in working on a book. Once I’m sucked in, everything around me goes to hell. The dishes sit undone in the sink. Laundry piles up. Toys left on the floor tend to stay there. Taped to the walls are huge sheets of newsprint covered in story boards, chapter outlines and various other novel-related brainstorming. Coffee and…
I thought I’d go off topic today, because what I’ve been obsessing about lately isn’t astrology, but titles. But perhaps my trouble with titles has something to do with me being a Gemini – with being moody and indecisive sometimes to the point of paralysis. See, I’ve got a list of possible new titles for my young adult book taped up on the wall above my desk. It’s been there for…
It’s time for me to go off-topic, not only because I haven’t done it in ages but also because if I were going to detail my quirks, I’d probably have to subject you to a novella. I’d like instead to pay tribute to the shockingly amazing writers who blurbed my book — and explain how I got them. To my knowledge, nobody really talks or writes that much about blurbing…
I gave a talk at Miami Dade College on Friday. There were two groups of students there, English students and math students, and let me tell you, college students are a tough audience. For one thing, they have their bored look so down. I haven’t been able to arrange my face in that position for years, though I’m quite sure I was a real pro at it when I was…
The first apartment I lived in on my own was a tiny place in Berea, Kentucky. I was maybe 20, in college, doing an off-campus semester. I ended up in Berea in an ill-advised attempt to be closer to a girl, who, it turned out, didn’t really want to be closer to me. But Berea was charming, full of folk artists making traditional Appalachian crafts – dulcimers, rocking chairs, woven…
I had a hard time debating the title for this post (side note: yes, this is how I spend my days, coming up with good titles for my posts rather than finishing my option material for Berkley). It was a dead heat between “Room with a Moo” and “Click, Clack, Moo” (the title of a darling children’s book by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin), and the latter was obviously the…
The Debutantes are honored to present guest blogger Allison Winn Scotch, debut author of The Department of Lost and Found, coming from Morrow, May 2007. Hey debs – Thanks a million for having me here! I’m honored to be filling in today! Okay, now to the nitty-gritty. For me, the writing process is not unlike going to the gym: I know that I should, I know that I have to,…
You know you’re a workaholic when “lunch” sounds like an unnecessary indulgence. Lunch? You mean that food I inhale, some of which inevitably ends up corroding my keyboard keys because it’s being consumed when I’m catching up on emails or finishing a scene? (Right now? Pot stickers from Whole Foods and so far, so good on the keys.) I remember the days I worked in an office, when “I’m going…
Reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh turned me into a writer. Eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch (the M her own invention), as you may or may not recall, wants to be a writer. So to prepare for being a writer, she decides to become a spy. She keeps a notebook full of observations of the world around her — brutally honest observations about her friends, people she sees on the…
