Randy Susan Meyers's Blog, page 18
February 16, 2017
Book Clubs: Can I Take You to Dinner?
Pre-order “The Widow of Wall Street” & Win A Book Club Dinner in Your Town (With Me!)
February 14, 2017
The Before and After of Author (All?) Photos
February 4, 2017
Book Club Dinner With Me…In Your Town!
My new novel, The Widow of Wall Street, launches on April 11 and I’m celebrating by inviting a book club to join me for a night out in their town. The conversations I’ve had, in person, on Skype, and in person with book clubs have been some of my very best hours as an author.
The rules to enter the drawing are simple:
Any book club pre-ordering 5 or more copies (print or eBooks) can enter the random drawing to be my guests for dinner at a great restaurant in your town.
After pre-ordering The Widow of Wall Street for your book club, email me at randy@randysusanmeyers.com with the subject line: “Dinner: The Widow of Wall Street.”
Include your name, hometown, and the number of books you pre-ordered (and where). Entries will be accepted until April 10th at midnight. The winner will be announced on April 11th on randysusanmeyers.com.
“I dare you not to read The Widow of Wall Street in one big gulp. What is it like to be married to a disgraced wolf of Wall Street, and how do you survive the aftermath of a scandal? Meyers answers the question with a fascinating page turner that somehow manages both to indict and absolve.”
—Melanie Benjamin, NYT bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue
I look forward to a wonderful dinner.
Warmest,
Randy
PS: I love visiting with book clubs—in person or by Skype. If you’re interested in setting up a meeting, please go to my book club page.
February 3, 2017
Celebrate Valentine’s Day by Giving to These Kids!!!
My husband brings me roses every Valentine’s Day, which I love for more than one reason—along with the sentiment and that I adore flowers, it speaks to the lack of tradition I had growing up and feeds my need for the sweetness of security.
But this year I’m asking him for something in place of flowers—sharing our love and happiness. I gathered a list of books and games needed by There are many in need (and sometimes I think I, like you, can suffer from compassion fatigue)—plus, during this season of political fear, many of us are giving everything we can to groups that protect our rights. But I worry about forgetting the most forgotten.
Roxbury House, a residential program, provides a safe home and to support vulnerable at-risk adolescents with a history of trauma, who are naturally easily overwhelmed by circumstances and demands that other persons their age typically handle without safety concerns. The staff at this program work hard long hours to provide stability for these kids.
We often take for granted the things we can provide for our daughters and sons, our nieces, nephews, grandchildren and neighbors. So this Valentines Day, let’s show some love and send the kids of Roxbury House some things they want. Below is a list of gifts and how to send them.
Belmont Books has amazing curated lists of fiction, nonfiction, comics/graphic novels for the YA crowd, and they ship quickly!
Visit any of your closest indie bookstores and find YA books.
Send your Valentine’s Day Gifts to:
Roxbury House
c/o The Home for Little Wanderers
10 Guest Street
Boston, MA 02135
Contact me at randy@randysusanmeyers.com if you’d like to send a gift directly to Roxbury House.
PS: Greater Boston folk: I’ll be having a book launch fundraiser for Roxbury House on April 12, 7PM at Bella Luna Restaurant (with the help of Papercuts Bookstore & the generosity of Bella Luna)
February 1, 2017
Book Club Dinner On Me…In Your Town!
My new novel, The Widow of Wall Street, launches on April 11 and I’m celebrating by inviting a book club to join me for a night out in their town. The conversations I’ve had, in person, on Skype, and in person with book clubs have been some of my very best hours as an author.
The rules to enter the drawing are simple:
Any book club pre-ordering 5 or more copies (print or eBooks) can enter the random drawing to be my guests for dinner at a great restaurant in your town.
After pre-ordering The Widow of Wall Street for your book club, email me at randy@randysusanmeyers.com with the subject line: “Dinner: The Widow of Wall Street.”
Include your name, hometown, and the number of books you pre-ordered (and where). Entries will be accepted until April 10th at midnight. The winner will be announced on April 11th on randysusanmeyers.com.
“I dare you not to read The Widow of Wall Street in one big gulp. What is it like to be married to a disgraced wolf of Wall Street, and how do you survive the aftermath of a scandal? Meyers answers the question with a fascinating page turner that somehow manages both to indict and absolve.”
—Melanie Benjamin, NYT bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue
I look forward to a wonderful dinner.
Warmest,
Randy
PS: I love visiting with book clubs—in person or by Skype. If you’re interested in setting up a meeting, please go to my book club page.
A Book Club Dinner With Me…In Your Town!
My new novel, The Widow of Wall Street, launches on April 11 and I’m celebrating by inviting a book club to join me for a night out in their town. The conversations I’ve had, in person, on Skype, and in person with book clubs have been some of my very best hours as an author.
The rules to enter the drawing are simple:
Any book club pre-ordering 5 or more copies (print or eBooks) can enter the random drawing to be my guests for dinner at a great restaurant in your town.
After pre-ordering The Widow of Wall Street for your book club, email me at randy@randysusanmeyers.com with the subject line: “Dinner: The Widow of Wall Street.”
Include your name, hometown, and the number of books you pre-ordered (and where). Entries will be accepted until April 10th at midnight. The winner will be announced on April 11th on randysusanmeyers.com.
“I dare you not to read The Widow of Wall Street in one big gulp. What is it like to be married to a disgraced wolf of Wall Street, and how do you survive the aftermath of a scandal? Meyers answers the question with a fascinating page turner that somehow manages both to indict and absolve.”
—Melanie Benjamin, NYT bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue
I look forward to a wonderful dinner.
Warmest,
Randy
PS: I love visiting with book clubs—in person or by Skype. If you’re interested in setting up a meeting, please go to my book club page.
January 26, 2017
KISS Rules: Balancing Vigilance, Work & Life
I write novels. Stories. I’m not a journalist.I work at separating my writing life and political views. But, having grown up with stories of the Holocaust, with family who left (were chased from) Germany and Romania because of politics, I know that there are times when art and life collide. We are all children of immigrants in this country and protecting each other comes first.
Each morning I wake worried for our country. I’ve gone past the stomach aches, inability to work, leaden feelings, sleeplessness, and depression, but I am ever more apprehensive about the panoply of protections being assaulted. I worry about walling off America from those who built our country, those who will continue to make us strong.
So much assaults us, it sometimes feels impossible to stay on top of the issues. I’m trying to figure out what my “KISS principle” should be. (KISS is an acronym for “Keep it simple, stupid” a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960, which states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.)
I don’t want to become numb. Though my husband and I become somnolent with old sitcoms some nights, the days must be spent woke. Finding the right balance between vigilance, work and living is our challenge.
For now, I’m trying to stick to a few rules based on one thing I know, which is this: without being able to immigrate into America, my family might have been extinguished. So, today I made myself a set of KISS rules:
* Whatever I think I should donate to nonprofits doing the hard work of keeping, double it. Rights before luxuries.
* Spread the word about dangers to our country, without deluging just to offload my own anxiety, while concomitantly knowing I may alienate some or become tiresome to social media (and IRL!) buddies. Freedom before popularity.
* Devote writing time to highlighting good: Smart is Beautiful
* Keep in touch with my elected officials by email, phone, and, if needed, visits, despite my social anxiety: Leave the comfort zone.
* Stay educated by reading widely and deeply, by subscribing to and paying for good journalism: Don’t rely on social media.
Some of the rules will be harder than others for me. (I despise making cold phone calls.) Thus I make my secret sixth rule: Everyone needs down time: Sitcoms Rule.
January 24, 2017
Likeability Laced With Betty Crocker Syndrome (In Real Life & Fiction)
Likeability Laced With Betty Crocker Syndrome (Real Life & Fiction)
We shouldn’t judge the behavior of a perpetrator by their victim’s personality.
Nobody deserves abuse.
Nobody learns (not children, not adults) through terror.
Not in fiction.
Not in real life.
A few years ago, when speaking about my then-just-released novel Accidents of Marriage, a reporter mentioned how surprised she was by her negative reactions to the main character—how the character seemed to ‘provoke’ her husband and how the reporter sympathized with the husband’s anger. The next day, participating on a book festival panel, the moderator spoke of the husband in the book as a virtual out-of-control monster and his wife Maddy as a frightened woman battling emotional abuse.
That their were opposite reactions to my work pleased me. Making characters as nuanced on the page as we are in real life is a priority.Plus, just as an author’s belief system colors their work, readers bring their own experiences to their judgment and fascination with characters. (Similar to how each one of us found our favorite Beatle—mine was George—I’ve always been drawn to the quiet ones).
Never-the-less, there’s a troubling undertone I’ve noted in some reactions to novels about that examine whether a woman (or man) ‘deserves’ to live without verbal, emotional, or any other sort of abuse. In Accidents of Marriage (using multiple points of view: a wife, a husband, and their 14-year-old daughter) Maddy is married to Ben, a man with a trigger-temper; she never knows what will set it off. When he’s charming, he’s terrific: funny, smart, and capable. When he’s irate, he’s terrifying: raging, critical and blaming the world for his troubles.
Relationship interactions are never static in life or novels. Sometimes Maddy placates, working hard to keep her children unaware of the problems she and Ben face; other times she gives in to her frustration and answers back, giving in to her edginess. Plus, she’s a bit messy, a working mother with three children, who’s rarely (if ever) on top of the unending chores facing the family. When life becomes too much, she’ll nibble a Xanax. But none of that is equivalent with ‘deserving’ to be screamed at, raged at, or to be driven at speeds that petrify her. She certainly doesn’t deserve to end up in an accident that changes her entire life.
For years I worked with batterers, criminals, men ordered to a violence intervention program and the hardest nut to crack was convincing them of this: one’s violence, one’s temper, or one’s temperament, should never be contingent on another’s behavior. We must control ourselves. To whit, we scream at our spouses and children—rarely do we verbally attack our bosses no matter how much they enrage us. Why? Because a) our bossed have power over us, and b) we do have control—it’s all about whether we choose to use that skill or not. And yes, it takes work.
Which brings me to the likable character. There’s been a debate for a while in literature (especially when the author and/or main character is a woman) as to whether or not a book should be judged on the likeability of a character. This flies in the face of what I want in a book: to be fascinated by the men and women populating it, to root for them to change, and for them to get through their crucibles as unburned as possible.
And with the ‘bad guys’? I want them to own up to their deeds and pay for them.
In my novel Accidents of Marriage, the only innocents are the children. (And they have their extremely unlikable moments; is there a child that doesn’t?)
Which brings me to Betty Crocker.
When I worked in domestic violence, we spoke about working against the Betty Crocker syndrome (Betty Crocker representing the impossible ‘perfect woman’,) and the overwhelming importance of teaching the public, the men we worked with, and those in the field, how we should never judge the behavior of a perpetrator by the personality of their victim. Nobody deserves to be abused. Nobody learns (not children, not adults) through terror.
Terror is the tool of the abuser. It’s how they off load their own defeat. It’s how they release their own negativity on those around them.
It’s never a tool for building family. Not in real life, not on the pages of a novel.
The very best way to comport oneself is too follow the moral code you’ve built for yourself and not allow it to be mutable based on other’s behavior.
It’s hard work to get there.
In real life.
And on the page. But that’s what I want in the novels I read and write: stories of imperfect men and flawed women taking the long hard journey.
So, I think I’m speaking on behalf of many authors: judge us on our lousy writing, our bad grammar, our lack of plot, our sloppy syntax, and our purple prose. But please don’t expect all us to feature Betty Crocker. Sometimes we really want to get inside the head of the Carmela Sopranos. The complicated women.
