This week! Books! Quick note that I’ll be away on a brief holiday the week of October 12 and back with fresh content on October 19. Feel free to contact me if you need editing! It’s book award season, and congrats to American poet Louise Glück for winning the Nobel Prize, to this year’s MacArthur […]
Star Wars
RWA implodes (This week in books)
This week! Books! New decade! RIP to legendary Knopf leader Sonny Mehta, whose influence on the world of literature would be hard to overstate. I particularly liked this quote, spotted by Publishers Lunch: I don’t think you can work in this business without faith or optimism. Reading a manuscript, sensing something special about it, and […]
The importance of reversals
This image from the Telegraph inadvertently illustrates one of the most important writing concepts every author should master: The reversal. Storytelling is all about reversals, and we humans are drawn to them like crazies to the Bachelor house. Tatooine farmboys became intergalactic heroes. Greek kings accidentally marry their mother and fall from grace. And in […]
This Week in Books 5/13/11
What a week! Thanks so much to everyone for all of your support during JACOB WONDERBAR launch week, I appreciate it so much. Next week we’ll be getting back to regular programming to give everyone a breather from WONDERBAR WONDERBAR WONDERBAR, but there may be a few contests and surprises in store once everyone has […]
In Defense of Dead and Absent Parents in Children’s Literature
There has been some discussion in the book world lately about the prevalence of absent and/or dead parents in children’s literature. In an interesting article in Publishers Weekly called “The Ol’ Dead Dad Syndrome,” editor and author Leila Sales argues that dead parents in children’s literature are not only troublingly common, they can sometimes be […]
When dreams become expectations
There is a famous psychological study that shows that people who win the lottery and people who are involved in catastrophic accidents return to the same original base level of happiness after two years. People who make more than $75,000 are barely affected by further raises at all. Success and fortune are normative. When we […]
