So the question posed to the Debs this week was: Are there any “easter eggs” or “hidden Mickeys” inside your book? And my answer? Boy howdy, are there ever. There are so many, in fact, that I’m offering up an annotated copy of From Unseen Fire once I hit my next Patreon goal, with every one of them marked out and commented upon. (So if you’re interested in knowing what they…
This week, the Debs are discussing authors we fangirl over, and I’ve decided to focus on the one writer who has influenced my brain more than any other. William Shakespeare I mean that so sincerely and entirely. I worked for the man for seven years, after all! My Master’s degree is in Shakespeare studies. I’ve not only read all of his plays, I’ve actually seen all of them. Most of…
For this week’s theme, the Debs are sharing the love and discussing five people without whom our books wouldn’t exist. I use “five” a little loosely — but here goes: My family: I mean, this almost seems too easy, but I couldn’t start anywhere else. My parents have supported my dreams of writing for as long as I’ve had them. They knew I’d be good at it before I did. (My…
This week, to celebrate the Oscar awards, the Debs are writing about our celebrity dream readers. Every year I attend the GrubStreet Muse & the Marketplace writing conference the first weekend of May. They usually have a session called Literary Idol, which is a bit like American Idol, with a panel of editors and agents that listen to the first page of a story, give it a yea or nay…
To paraphrase Gordon Gekko from the movie WALL STREET, envy is good. And I say that as a completely non-psycho, non-egomaniac (at least I think I’m not). I say that as a writer who may still have an unpublished novel if I didn’t let my envy drive me to do what I needed to do. Back in 2012, I read the Facebook update of a dear friend. She just signed with an…
Guess what? It’s time to celebrate Deb Elise Allen’s Populazzi! I met Deb Elise when I was in LA, but we only got to talk for about three minutes, and we were so excited we forgot to take a picture, but I loved her immediately, and reading this book only cemented that. Let me catch you up with a back-of-the-book summary first: Cara has never been one of those girls:…
When I give presentations, I talk about the act of writing a novel as analogous to dragging a magnet across a table full of paper clips. (Why you would want to do such a thing, I don’t know, but just go with it.) By the time you’re done, you’ve got a bunch of paper clips stuck to your magnet, and that’s your novel. For The Weird Sisters, one of the…
As a longtime romance reader and lover of romantic comedies, for a long time I thought love, especially romantic love, was about big gestures. About Richard Gere climbing up the fire escape to Julia Roberts at the end of Pretty Woman. About Orlando papering the forest of Arden with love poems for Rosalind in As You Like It. About dancing and acrobats and lederhosen in Central Park in Enchanted. But…
Yes, yes, I know “Deb E” could be Deb Eleanor as well as Deb Elise, but I wanted the title of the post to be in iambic pentameter, and that’s how I made it scan. Believe me, I totally want to geek out and write this whole post in iambic pentameter, and it’s only in the interest of time that I won’t. Deb Eleanor’s The Weird Sisters comes out this…
Don’t say I didn’t warn you… I have a few dozen diaries and journals I would put in my time capsule. The first is a little fake-blue-leather thing with a lock where I wrote the hilariously precocious longings of my fourth grade soul. The journals become less legible as time goes on until, by the time I was twenty-six and actually writing real journal entries while on stage during my…
