Beth Kephart's Blog, page 324

Memory Failures

There's a funny thing about memory: It never gets things just right. My version is not your version, and it is certainly not his.



I was reminded of this the other day, as I began to revisit the hundreds of photographs I've taken of Seville and this specific cortijo outside Seville, where the bulk of the action in the novel I'm now revising takes place. Having worked on this novel for the past ten years, my creating mind has altered my recollecting mind, so that I had begun to remember thi...

Novel Submission

Here's the thing about submitting a brand-new novel to editors for the very first time:

You don't know what will happen.

My first novel for adults has gone off today to a handful of editors, thanks to my agent, Amy Rennert. The very best thing for me to do right now is to keep that novel out of my mind. By paying attention to clients. By focusing on my YA Seville novel. By making room in the world for the two books due out in 2010 and room in me for the books of others. By continuing to...

What readergirlz sound like when readergirlz are talking

We readergirlz girlz tore up the keyboards last night talking everything from writerly schedules (thank you, Little Willow, for offering to make me breakfast); TV shows ("So You Think You Can Dance" rocks supreme); the joint appearance by Erin McIntosh and Melissa Walker in the newest six-word memoir book (oh, baby); certain showcase dance number videos that will never be aired (thank you, Mercy, for keeping our secret our secret); the emergence of Priya as a readergirlz street girl; favorite...

readergirlz live chat tonight

In my last official act as the inaugural readergirlz author in residence, I'm participating in a live chat tonight, 6 PM Pacific/9 PM Eastern. Join us at readergirlz.blogspot.com. And then continue the journey with this extraordinary organization as Elizabeth Scott, author of Something, Maybe, The Unwritten Rule, and Love You Hate You Miss You takes over as author in residence.

Searching for Focus

How many times, I begin to wonder, will I have to study a particular passage in this novel I am finalizing before it comes into focus? I'll get the rhythm right and lose the meaning. I'll work toward explicit and fudge the melody. I'll falsify the tone, and I hate falsifying tone. I'll stop and start again.

The Rose Room and a National Book Awards Memory

This past weekend we took refuge, for a spell, inside the New York Public Library, a place I always try to visit whenever I come to New York.

As we stood beneath this Rose Room sky, I recalled, as I always do, my first trip to that building, which happened in the company of my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason. Alane bought three of my books, not just the first, and she brought to each one a rigorous, unyielding eye. Alane cares very much about the state of books, not just in this country, ...

Readergirlz writing contest 4: Our Winner and Runner Up

The final challenge in the readergirlz contest asked writers to study an existing place and see in it something new—to see in a forest nook, for example, a living room, or a in a series of shop windows a shelf crowded with books. Our winner is Charlotte from Australia, who saw in this image not just the fence and the trees beyond but, in her words, an escape route:

Changing Views

I tilted my head; squinting. As always the curtains were parted just wide enough for me to glimpse the world...

The Walt Whitman Bridge

(as photographed from inside the Bolt Bus).

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to be with me, a camera perpetually pressed to my eye.

Ergonimically Challenged (and rescued)

2010 has rushed its way in, with client project after project taking me (often virtually, sometimes in person) to Singapore, Basingstoke, Boston, and myriad sites nearby to learn, and then to write about, the widest range of topics.

There's only one small problem with this blessing of work and that is this: I cannot sit at my computer. Or, I could no longer sit here for more than five minutes at a spell by the time yesterday rolled around (hence my typos of late! forgive me!). I had this fu...

The New York Times Building

This is the lobby of the Renzo Piano-designed New York Times Building, as photographed on a bitterly cold Saturday through the window of an adjoining shop. Annie Leibovitz has, of course, photographed the building far better than I ever could, and I've only been inside once, for a quick cup of tea with an editor for whom, in another life, for another publication, I once wrote.

Still, I love the idea of this building—the way it somehow crafts light, the way trees grow inside, the way the whol...