If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
I've always been making up stories about people I see, whether in restaurants, malls, parks, theaters, wherever. hat's just how I see the world, or the many worlds within this world. One of those is the enormous health club that I've belonged to for 20 years.
What does it take to be an explorer? What are the challenges and risks? What are the payoffs? These are some of the questions that young students and others will get answered at the USA Science & Engineering Festival.
For authors, book club events are complicated and many-layered. The novel might have been a personal agony to write. It might have caused hurt to family or loved ones. But readers don't need to hear all that.
It almost seems antithetical that Blackness and Coolness are as interwoven as they are given the short shrift Black life has always been given in this nation. In Rebecca Walker's most recent offering, Black Cool, she holds an open dialogue on the question: What is Black Cool?
Does durability, for example, constitute an important definition of what is or becomes a literary novel? How does a novel become a classic? Who determines what becomes a classic?
Now, maybe some writers can write to a formula, can churn out books that try to catch the cultural mood, books that mimic best sellers, but I suspect most authors are like me: We write the books we want to.
Our planet Earth is so big and the subject so vast, that you might think that kids are overwhelmed . You might be surprised at what they really do say.
Begging for blurbs is one of the more misery-producing aspects of being published. It can leave us desperate and depressed. It's humiliating to have to grovel for blurbs, rather than have your publisher secure them for you.
"Pie It Forward, the book, is my homage to all that's both homey AND glamorous about pie."
Doing publicity takes time away from writing, but without it, the writing you do doesn't get out there. If you're lucky, the PR can be fun.
On World Read Aloud Day, I honor the many authors who write for children, for their tender care of the precious lives and understandings of children. Of their fears, hopes and dreams. Of using language to say, beloved child, you are never alone.
Valentine's Day -- the day of roses, heart-shaped boxes, and cupids with arrows -- is passing, which is symbolic because the age of equating love with roses, heart-shaped boxes, and cupids is passing.
There are some differences in how traditional and indie books are publicized, but those differences are shrinking by the nanosecond.
Yet when the day comes that they change their policies to take more of our value, don't get caught without an independent web platform of your own. Start now to anchor that taproot in your own garden, and reap the benefits of your own hard work for years to come.
Roxane Gay recently pointed out in Salon that all our discussions about whether women writers like best selling Jennifer Weiner don't get enough press...
People want to write books for a lot of reasons. They want to be famous. They want to make a pile of money. They want everybody from high school to see that they're not a big fat loser after all. But there's really only one good reason to write a book.
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AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOEDby Khaled Hosseini
AMERICANAHby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A GUIDE TO BEING BORNby Ramona Ausubel
THE GOLEM AND THE JINNIby Helene Wecker
Published on April 23rd, 2013
