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Oooh! First blurb. And, only 11 months to pub date

December 19, 2012 Leave a Comment

Each step of the publishing process makes Montana feel a little more real (as if sweating over it for two years didn’t feel real).

This latest is really fun, a blurb from Leonard Rosen, author of All Cry Chaos, a finalist for an Edgar first novel award, and winner of the Macavity Award for best first novel. He writes:

In Gwen Florio’s entertaining debut, war correspondent Lola Wicks finds the greatest threat to her safety is not dodging bullets in Afghanistan but discovering who killed her friend and fellow correspondent in Magpie, Montana. Florio knows her territory.  She gives us wind on the high plains and the wet nose of a horse hungry for sugar.  There’s fire in the hills, trouble in the governor’s race, and a county awash in drugs.  Magpie’s the old West with daunting new problems, and the scrappy Lola Wicks takes them on. 

My translation:  buybook

In a mere eleven months – Montana is scheduled for publication in November 2013 – you’ll be able to see for yourself. But who’s counting?

(Image: WooFreakinHoo.squarespace.com)

 

Tags: Montana: The Novel

‘Tis the season of lists — book lists, that is, no subject too obscure

December 16, 2012 1 Comment

Image: HudsonAreaLibrary.org

Image: HudsonAreaLibrary.org

Every time I turn around, it seems as though another “best of” book list is mocking me with all the titles I never got around to reading this year. There’s New York Times’ 10 best books of 2012, and NPR’s list of indie booksellers’ choices, too.

Amazon lists 100 best, and Barnes and Noble has a hefty list of its own. (Meanwhile, those indie booksellers took a jab at Amazon by recommending “50 Best Uses for a Dead Kindle” as a holiday gift, The Guardian reported last month.)

It’s not just the heavy hitters.  The Sandusky Register sought suggestions from writers and readers for its list, while the Christian County (Missouri) Public Library turned to its own librarians.

And those are just a very few of the general lists. There’s no end to the (ahem) list of specifics.  Is Tolkien on your list of all-time favorites? Then you’ll want to check out this list of the five best books about “The Hobbit.”

Fancy yourself a photographer? Put that camera down and read. Start with these five.

Firmly on Eddie Arnold’s  side in “Green Acres”? Here’s some books on farm livin’.

Or maybe “Sideways” was more to your viewing taste.  In that case, these books about wine might be able to help you deliver a Paul Giametti-esque zinger about merlot.

Lest all these lists set your head to spinning, here’s the good news: The holidays are a golden time for booksellers, as USA Today’s Bob Minzesheimer details here:

“The holidays remain the heartbeat of print book sales,” says Michael Norris, a publishing analyst for Simba Information, a market research firm. “When you give someone a gift, you want it to have some weight, to see them open it. You can’t really do that with an e-book or a Barnes & Noble gift card.”

Tags: Book lists, Bookselling

Writers’ workshops, and why they work

December 7, 2012 Leave a Comment

Talking to James Rahn makes me happy, even though it happens far too infrequently these days. Rahn leads Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Writers’ Group, quite possibly the country’s longest-running independent writing workshop.  For years, once a week in eight-week segments,  RWG was the high point of my life. I tiptoed into it in the early 1990s, dreadful fiction in hand, with an idea that RWG would help me make it less dreadful. And bless my fellow workshop participants — along with Rahn’s constant exhortations to “push it, push it,” to home in on the uncomfortable, queasy-making stuff — that’s just what happened.

Rittenhouse Writers’ Group

rittenouse

When I left Philly and headed West, RWG ranked right up there with my family in terms of the things I missed most. (OK, and those Tony Luke’s roast pork sandwiches.) Fortunately, Missoula offers The 406 Writers’ Workshop, with sessions in novel writing, poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting offered by the city’s wealth of writers — and populated, just like RWG, with folks who are determined enough to reject descriptions of their writing as a “hobby.”

406writersIn chatting with James this week, I got to hear about the road to publication for his book, Bloodnight, a brutal and gorgeous collection released this year about growing up more or less wild in Atlantic City. Also this year, David Allan Cates – who leads the 406 novel-writing workshops, and who gently steered my own novel away from many a literary cliff – published Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home, which is indeed strange and also gorgeous.

Talking to David makes me happy, too, as does talking with the other 406 workshop leaders, not to mention my fellow participants – we got so much from the workshops that we met on our beyond them. It’s energizing to hear about other people’s work, to find the common problems and work through them, and especially to celebrate the successes.

Writing is tough stuff, and other people tend to dismiss it if you’re not cranking out bestsellers and working movie deals. Workshops shut that nonsense out, and force you to take your own, and one another’s, work as the serious business it is. How can it help but get better?

Tags: workshops, Writers, Writing

POTUS promotes independent bookstores; and, an e-reader that helps those stores

November 26, 2012 Leave a Comment

This story could almost make me feel good about holiday shopping:

(Photo: WhiteHouse.gov)

President Barack Obama made a quick trip to a Virginia bookstore for some Christmas shopping.

The president took his daughters, Sasha and Malia, to One More Page Books in Arlington, Va., on Saturday afternoon. … The White House says Obama bought 15 children’s books that will be given as Christmas gifts to family members.

Let’s hope lots of folks follow the president’s example. Meanwhile, closer to home, beloved Missoula bookseller Barbara Theroux has found a way to sell e-books to her customers, and still benefit the Fact and Fiction bookstore that she manages, according to Jenna Cederberg’s story in the Missoulian:

The bookstore is now offering “ebooks, ereaders and eaccesssories” at factandfictionbooks.com through Kobo, a Canadian e-reading company that has partnered with the American Association of Booksellers to help offer its service to independent booksellers. … An important Kobo system feature allows the store to get credit each time a user makes a purchase using their Fact and Fiction account, allowing customers to “shop indie” even online, Theroux said.

In addition to offering the Kobo ereader, Theroux is participating in the “Thanks for shopping indie” campaign when 20 titles will be 20 percent off through Dec. 22.

Tags: Bookselling

Let’s hear it for Shannon Wong. At 17, she stands up to school board, gets Stephen King book back in library

October 28, 2012 2 Comments

(Photo: American Library Association)

Couldn’t agree more with today’s Los Angeles Times editorial praising a 17-year-old high school student for standing up on behalf of a Stephen King story collection when it was removed from her school library.

The Times reports that:

(Photo: StephenKing.com)

“Different Seasons” isn’t on the American Library Assn.’s inventory of 100 most frequently challenged books (the Harry Potter series tops the most recent list), but a rape scene in one story led to a complaint from a parent at Rocklin High School. …

A school committee voted to pull the book from the library shelves, with only 17-year-old senior Amanda Wong dissenting. The other members of the committee, all adults, reportedly didn’t even read the book through before voting. Amanda complained to the school board and got results.

Different Seasons contains both “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me,” both of which were made into movies. The story causing the controversy was “Apt Pupil,” also made into a movie.

It’s all the more crazy-making to hear Wong explain, in a Sacramento CBS interview, that she was the only person on the board who’d read the entire book when the decision was made.

Tags: Banned books

Congrats, Jenny Shank, on High Plains Book Award!

October 25, 2012 Leave a Comment

Jenny Shank‘s novel, The Ringer (The Permanent Press) won this year’s High Plains Book Award for fiction.

“Shank’s first at-bat as a novelist is a hit,” says Kirkus, of Shank’s tale of Denver cop Ed O’Fallon, involved in drug raid gone wrong. Both O’Fallon and the family of the raid’s victim come together over their sons’ baseball teams.

Shank, of Boulder, Colo., shares this year’s High Plains awards with, among others, Shann Ray for his “American Masculine” short stories and Jim Harrison for his poetry collection, “Songs of Unreason.”

Tom McGuane was named the Emeritus Award winner.

Tags: Awards, Writers

Author photos: Badass guys, smiley women, and smokin’ Jo Nesbø

October 22, 2012 1 Comment

Had to check out (mostly as a diversionary tactic from writing) Amazon’s recently unveiled list of its most popular authors. It didn’t take me long to stop paying attention to names – especially once I realized I’d only read two of the Top 10 – and turn to the faces.

A bit of studying (remember, I’m supposed to be writing, so this allowed me a delicious postponement) shows that by and large, the men are serious unto scowly and the women are smiling. Not across the board, of course. Thank you, Laura Lippman, for looking every bit as determined as your accidental PI, Tess Monaghan. And Rick Riordan positively glows with goodwill, while even Bill O’Reilly sports a bit of a smirk.

A bunch of the guys also pose in leather jackets, that universal sign of bad-assedness. Amanda Katz takes note of same in her delightful NPR essay on the whole phenom:

 

Most Popular Authors? What is this, the high school yearbook?  … It’s definitely slightly ridiculous, arraying photos of artfully blown-dry, leather-jacketed, middle-aged authors like so many pinups.

And speaking of pinups, two words:

Jo Nesbø.

That is all.

Tags: Writers

Crooks in D.C? For sure – and cannibals, too.

October 18, 2012 1 Comment

Terrific to see this nod from Cathy Scott to my former Denver Post colleague – and novelist and true crime writer – Ron Franscell, and his new book, The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Washington, D.C. In her Crime, She Writes by Cathy Scott blog, she says:

Ron Franscell

Franscell’s easy style in his use of language makes for a lively and readable trek through time and place. From the grisly (a cannibalistic serial killer at the former St. John’s Orphanage) to political (the Watergate Hotel break-in at the National Democratic Headquarters), it’s a fascinating read.

As Franscell tells it in his introduction, “It will take you to places where our crime history took unexpected, momentous, macabre, or even whimsical turns.” Simply put, he says, “Place matters, even in crime.”

Cool detail – the book includes GPS coordinates. It’s Franscell’s third in the Crime Buff’s Guide series.

 

 

Tags: Writers

Maile Meloy to speak at UM tonight, host student forum tomorrow

October 17, 2012 Leave a Comment

Lucky, lucky University of Montana freshmen. Their First-Year Reading Experience book this year is Maile Meloy‘s “Both Ways is The Only Way I Want It.”

The short-story collection garnered accolades from the New York Times Book Review (10 best books of 2009), the Los Angeles Times (favorite fiction books of the year) and Amazon (top 10 story collections of 2009).  Meloy is no stranger to awards; her first book, “Half in Love” – also a short-story collection – won the PEN/Malamud award in 2003. And this year, her book for young readers, The Apothecary,” tied with “Wildwood” by her brother, Colin Meloy, and his wife, Carson Ellis, for the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award during the Indies Choice Book Awards.

Tonight, Meloy will discuss “Both Ways is The Only Way I Want It” at 8 p.m. in the George and Jane Dennison Theatre. She’ll hold a student forum Thursday at 11:10 a.m. in the University Center Theater.

The First-Year Reading Experience encourages all new students to read the same book, and teachers of freshman classes to use it as part of their curricula.

 

 

Tags: Awards, Writers

What’s your writing music?

October 15, 2012 Leave a Comment

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0]

In the Wall Street Journal’s most excellent Word Craft column a couple of weeks back, Mark Helprin opined about the best conditions for writing. Skip cafes, he recommended, as my flesh began to crawl. (What? No more Break Espresso?) And he wrote approvingly of the silent, empty room:

Handel wrote his “Messiah” cooped up in his room for two weeks. No one saw him, and his meals were allegedly slipped under the door. (Either it was a very strange door or he survived on fruit leather and matzah.)

Well, bully for geniuses. Me, I need music. Lately, I’ve been proofing, so the more mindlessly upbeat the better, to keep me awake during the endless tapping of the delete key. Gaga does the trick.

For real writing, I’ve got a playlist that I’m always adding to. Paperback Writer, of course. The Decemberists’ shout-out to Myla Goldberg, bless their literary hearts. Brandon McGovern’s Charles Bukowski and Bob Hillman’s Tolstoy. And those sly Canadians, Moxy Fruvous. I’m always on the lookout for more. Suggestions?

 

Tags: Writing

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