Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 12

Pushing Past Political Correctness: Writing Solutions for the Socially Conscious

By Becky Tuch In fiction, as in life, people make choices. Sometimes a fictional character’s choices appear self-evident. It’s a given that Jane will want to leave a bad situation or that Sally will struggle to improve her lot. Such actions hardly need defending as it is obvious why someone (Sally ...

Friday Quiz

                  By Kathy Crowley  

Before I Wrote: A Collage Of Former Selves

By Robin Black   Aspen It’s strangely easy for me to forget now how miserable I was over a period of many years when I was still unable to write. My thirties. It’s not a time I like to think about, much less talk about, not because doing so brings ...

What Would You Do With A Lit Tattoo?

By Nichole Bernier The other day I was at a beach in Massachusetts and everywhere I turned, it seemed, were tattoos, but not images — words. Great scrolling body-ink lines of forever-text. Nosybody that I am, I sidled up wherever I could and began to read. There were two Beatles ...

Potties for Profit & Other Great Bookstore Ideas

By Chris Abouzeid I’ve been working in a local independent bookstore for a month and a half now. I’ve seen the good (customers buying all the books I recommend), the bad (customers buying the books of authors who bullied me in graduate school), and the ugly (customers taking pictures so ...

Book Facts & Stats (Via 2013)

Randy Susan Meyers Truly, it is easier to find out the average cost of a meal or nail polish (found them both in one try) than it is to find out most statistics on book sales (try Googling “average number of books sold per title” in any iteration and you’ll see what I mean). ...

Why We Write: Giving Voice to the Ineffable

By Kim Triedman (Over the years I have greatly enjoyed the column “Why We Write” in Poets and Writers Magazine.  For this post, I decided to take it as a prompt and see where it led me.) I’ve spent this week writing pure crap.  My intention was to do a ...

Babylon Writers

by Bethanne Patrick Each evening at my women’s college it was the same: Dinner tables filled with seemingly predetermined groups. There was the table of Latinas. The table of lesbians. The table of African-Americans. The table of prep-school alums. We all talked about it, especially when it came to the ...

Ask Margie: To Buy Or Not To Buy? That is the Book Group Question

Dear Margie,  I belong to a book group that’s been together for almost three years. We never had an author visit until last week when someone who lived near my town came after we got in touch with her through her website. Mostly it was a great night but after ...

Friday Faves – School’s Out, Buy More Books Edition!

By Dell Smith Welcome to BTM’s early-summer edition of Friday Faves. Where all the links are work friendly. What’s on the agenda? I got summertime book fever! That’s right, crazy for books. When I go on vacation, I tend to put blinders on (my bank account, my full bookshelves at ...