Happy 4th of July, everyone! I hope you all are having an awesome day of rest and reading. Unfortunately for me, it is a day of guilt and shame because the topic of the week involves a New Year’s resolutions check-in, and I’m not feeling too good about my performance six months in. I made only four, count ’em four, very MODERATE New Year’s Resolutions this year, and my score…
My grandparents drank one dry gin martini every night of their entire adult lives. They would have cocktail hour in front of the PBS NewsHour with their Beefeater gin martinis and a small bowl of nuts. My grandparents were big believers in moderation, and they were very happy people who lived for a long time, like into their nineties. I was thinking about them recently, and I wondered if “Be More Moderate”…
This is my Writer’s Block. I received it as a gift, when I was just starting out in TV. I was a Writers’ Assistant on Saved by the Bell: The New Class, which meant my job was to sit in the room with all the Writers, type up their thoughts and ideas, input their changes into the scripts as they gang-rewrote them, then make sure everything was formatted properly so…
The worst advice I ever got was never to get a puppy, and never get a dog around Christmas. This advice was from my husband. I ignored it, and on Christmas Eve nine years ago, my husband and I brought home nine-month-old Riley, our first-born. You can see him in yesterday’s News Flash. As for bad career advice, the worst I ever got was well-meaning, but wrong. The giver was…
Okay, first piece out of the gate for the new 2011 Debs… no pressure… just following five of the most incredibly talented and all-around menschy women on the web, all of whom just signed off with beautifully bittersweet farewells… I might need a cut man for this one. Oh, Hi! So I’m Elise, a.k.a. Monday Deb, and my debut Young Adult novel, Populazzi, comes out August 1, 2011 from Harcourt…
I had to wait until I had unburied my desk to take this photo. It gets really cluttered—especially when I’m in the middle of a book. On my desk is the only TV in our home. My son watches PBS shows on it, and I watch videos on it for work. I also have the family desktop computer sitting in the middle of my desk, but the computer I use…
It’s fun to discover new authors you heretofore knew nothing about. Evan Handler is one such author. In fact I didn’t even know he was an author. I hardly knew of him as an actor, in fact. As one who rarely gets to Manhattan, I never had the good fortune to catch him in the dozens of well-reviewed Broadway shows in which he appeared. As one who lives in the…
Last night I had an idea for a new cable television show. It would be sort of like SuperNanny, except instead of convincing delinquent, tamper-prone four-year-olds not to flush Sparkles, the family hamster, down the toilet; quick-thinking publicists would jet off across the country to help authors faced with dire publishing emergencies. Or maybe they’d travel in a nitro-powered bookmobile. The show would be called BOOK TOUR 9-1-1. Armed with…
Happy Halloween! I grew up in Denver, Colorado where it never failed to snow on Halloween night. Which means, most of my Halloween memories involve my brother and me, wet and miserable, tromping along in three inches of sidewalk slush, moping because we had to wear our coats over (or worse, under) our costumes. Again. I still love Halloween. I just like it better in Florida. And now, a word…
I don’t watch much TV. For most of my adult life, I’ve lived beyond the reach of cable or broadcast, in the sticks of Vermont, in a time when your only option if you had to watch Beverly Hills 90210 was a satellite dish that could easily hold a Volkswagen bug. Also… I didn’t care. I was contentedly clueless about whatever sitcom or sexy drama everyone was talking about. Now,…
