Randy Susan Meyers

"I distrust styles... To have a style is to be trapped."

I love books. Reading probably kept me from teen pregnancy, heroin, and robbing convenience stores with a badass boyfriend. I've read great books, good books, mediocre books, and books so awful they damaged my eyes, and it wasn't genre...

Upon hearing about Atria Book's plan for a multi-author twelve-city bus tour, I could only be grateful that it wasn't me who'd be stuck in a bus for umpteen days (Eight? Twelve? Two hundred? ) However long, I could only imagine bad food, cramped quarters, and the wheels of the...

I woke up (just moments ago) with the proverbial pounding 3 a.m. heart. I had a nightmare about trying to convince unresponsive authorities about young girls being attacked. The specifics of my nightmare don't matter (is there anything more boring than hearing someone recount their dreams point by point? It...

Recently, a thread in an online writer's community popped up, beginning with someone (who hadn't begun querying) asking why folks sent query letters to so many agents.

Did they have that many "dream agents?

Why not send to just one or two top choices?

And, really, how long does it...

"My definition (for myself) of a working title is: A title that doesn't work." -- Robin Black

Picture having a baby. You named that baby so soon after conception. Dear little Lev. It's the Russian version of your father's name. It has great meaning. Birth! The nurse places...

It's funny how folks who work at home (writers, painters, composers, phone-sex workers, though not those who use Skype visuals) will so often use working in my pajamas! as their number one perk.

But is it really true?

Is it still true, when hearing the UPS truck coming down the...

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint." --Socrates, with dispute about attribution

Sometimes you get lucky and you realize (in the midst of worrying about war, famine and the economy) that Socrates...

"Don't forget; Jewish people read an enormous amount," my lovely (and Jewish) literary agent said before my book launch. "We really love books."

I nodded. Yes, I knew that -- at least I knew it in as much as I was Jewish and I read -- as did my mother,...

Write a book that breaks your own heart. That's one of the reminders I wrote myself before outlining my novel. (The other was don't rescue your characters -- a reminder not to fall so in love with them that I couldn't bear having them in pain.

Whether or not a...

"I got sick of reading the same old story, told by Jewish writers, of the same old stereotypes -- the possessive mothers, the worn-out fathers, all the rest of the neurotic rebellious unhappy self-hating tribe," she said. "I wanted to write a different novel about Jews -- and a truer...

Every now and then an article leaps out of the paper and punches me in the chest. (Actually, this should probably happen with 90% of the articles I read. Sometimes I don't know why all of us morning-paper-readers don't end up weeping, railing or marching after closing the last page.)

What makes you buy a book? Is it different from what makes you watch a movie? Pick a television show? It seems so, because it's so private -- just you and the bookseller or librarian... or, these days, as likely, your computer. Do you try it on like a dress...

"How did you get published? Do you have an MFA?" a reader asked last week. I struggled for the right answer -- how to tell her that, no, I don't have an MFA, but still, I credit being published on other people's teaching.

A number of years ago (about ten...

Books are my life. Without reading, I'd be lost. Perhaps that's why I'm baffled about the rampant indignation about the price of e-books. Are readers being forced at gunpoint to buy these books? Is there a cabal I haven't heard about? Are publishers from Little Brown to Graywolf Press in...

I belong to what might be one of the longest running women's groups in the country. We began during the era of consciousness-raising (mothers in our early 20s, we discussed nursing bras as much as bralessness) and supported each other through divorce, death, and contemplations of cosmetic surgery. (So far...

Love me! Read me! Buy me!

Writing a book takes a certain set of skills: intense concentration, imagination, the ability to read the same 400 pages time after time, and the fortitude to take criticism (excuse me, ahem, critique) without weeping. You must learn to shut out all noise at...

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

For every moment of awe a writer has at seeing her book on a shelf, at being told by readers what comfort they found in your words, come the times when you read the word "blech" in a...

I started Jesse, A Mother's Story, twice.

The stark beauty of this memoir hit me the moment I began. Marianne Leone's narrative, written with an unrelenting immediacy, yanked me into her world.

Leone's son Jesse owned me from his first moment on the page. By the end of...

Whatever his politics, and I am certain we'd disagree far more than agree, I bless Senator Scott Brown for revealing the sexual and physical abuse he suffered as a child.

What could be a more compelling argument for being truthful about abuse suffered than the fact that so many of...

Could it be possible that our lust for the bad boys -- a hunger which begets dreams that bear nightmares -- begins the night we aim our reading flashlights on Rhett Butler and his ilk? Face it, who took away our breath? Who were we trained to want? Namby-pamby Ashley...