Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 10

A Moment I Became A Writer, Fall 1972

By Robin Black   When I was ten years old, my maternal grandmother moved in with us. Grandma was a tough cookie. Stetl born, Lower East Side raised, the second oldest of eight children, seven of them girls, she had the reputation among her own generation as a drill sergeant. ...

When Bad Meditation Inspires Better Writing

  (This article first appeared in September 2012) By Juliette Fay I’ve tried meditation off and on since my twenties, and I love the concept: quieting the mental noise, clearing away the chatter for a period of time, inviting stillness. With four kids and their friends coming and going from ...

Promoting, Over-Promoting, and Sashaying Your Book Around Town

By Randy Susan Meyers Writing a book takes a certain set of skills: intense concentration, imagination, the ability to repeatedly read the same 400 pages, and the fortitude to take disparagement and condemnation (ah, excuse me, ahem, critique) without weeping.  You must learn to shut out all noise at a ...

Paws, for Reflection Or, A Lesson in Observation from My Summer Vacation

by Bethanne Patrick It’s Week Two of my sojourn in Manhattan’s far northern reaches, where I am dogsitting a lovely “mini-mini” schnauzer named Lily. (I promise I won’t take up column inches with my various NYC hijinks, but I do need to set the stage for my topic.) Every day ...

The July Effect

          By Kathy Crowley The piece below originally appeared on the site Cognoscenti, just over a year ago. “Never get sick in July.” Everyone who works in the medical world has heard that line, and while there’s lots of upheaval in teaching hospitals this time of ...

Substance vs. Style: Fanfare for the Common Word

    By Julie Wu There was a flurry of rustling as we all took out our Graham Greene essays for Freshman English. “Now,” Mrs. B said, “Look through your paper and circle your favorite word.” I scanned my words, hand written on blue-lined paper. The best I could come ...

Revision? Try Renovation.

    By Robin Black (This post first appeared October 11, 2011)   What can renovating and reclaiming your home after years of neglecting it teach you about revising fiction?  A lot more than I imagined, it turns out. My husband and I have lived in our house for sixteen ...

Advice To My Pre-Published Self

By Nichole Bernier *originally posted in 2011 Last week at the pediatrician’s office I fell into conversation with a man in the waiting room, the father of a 7-month-old with some undiagnosed problem. We talked as parents do in these situations when you cut to the chase. About the toughness ...

Cara Hoffman on Who Influenced Her Writing on War

First of a series of BTM pieces on authors and the literature that shaped their writing By Cara Hoffman “The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.” –Louis-Ferdinand Celine ...

Smart eBooks: When the Text Is No Longer the Text

by Chris Abouzeid If you’re using a Kindle to read ebooks, Amazon already knows a lot about you. They know you bought all the 50 Shades of Grey books. They know how quickly or slowly you read them. They know on which page you got bored and stopped reading, or ...