Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 16

Semi-Professonally Pairing Books With Wine

By Susan Gregg Gilmore My grandfather was a moonshiner. He was good at it, too, till he wandered into a tent revival and came out a clean, sober man. But the love of the business was in his blood, and I think he passed that passion on to me. See, ...

I Want You To Love Adverbs, Guardians Of Surprise

By Robin Black I want you to love adverbs. More than that, I want you to believe, as I do, that adverbs are the part of speech that best captures the human condition. But first, let’s review what we’ve all been told: Adverbs are bad. Adverbs should be excised from ...

What Kind Of Writer Are You? Take The Quiz & Find Out

A QUIZ By Becky Tuch 1. Your writing desk faces: a) A window that allows you to see wind rustling tree branches outside. b) A wall with five different to-do lists on them, each one offering its own unique form of potential panic attack. c) A painting, sculpture or other ...

Friday Faves: Blocked, Booked, and Mortarboarded

By Nichole Bernier The week’s end is here, and we at Beyond the Margins bring you some of our favorite links of the past handful of days:   Stuck: OCD and Writer’s Block  Are the two conditions related? Fletcher Wortmann, author of Triggered:  A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, thinks so, and explains ...

The Absolutely True Diary of a Socially Challenged Author

By Chris Abouzeid By now, every writer and would-be writer on the internet knows what it takes to be successful. Not a great story. Not magnificent prose. Just a great public persona. You don’t just get up and read at your local bookstore anymore. You make everyone in the room ...

How To Enjoy Audio Books More & Listen More Widely

By Sue Katz Want to increase your reading time? Care to try out new authors and different genres? Consider listening to audiobooks as you drive. There are now multiplying delivery systems for audiobooks, but I’ve been using CDs because my car has a CD player and my library system has ...

Beg, Borrow, or Steal: What We Owe Other Writers

By Kim Triedman Fifteen years ago, almost to the day, one novel inadvertently begat another. I’d been reading in bed – the first few pages of Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible” – and I fell asleep to her extraordinary opening incantation: “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have ...

Ask Margie: On Writing Workshops & Stockholm Syndrome

Dear Margie, I’m in a creative writing workshop and there is one student who monopolizes the entire class. And he is consistently negative with feedback . The teacher seems not to notice (or care?) I do like the instructor and what he has to say when he says something. Any ...

Ooh La La: The Do’s and Don’ts of Translation

 By Charles Garabedian Picture  this opening scene: A small Armenian bakery on the outskirts of Boston in 1925. Inside, the matronly owner argues with her employee, an eighteen-year-old Armenian immigrant who threatens to quit in order to work the type of jobs held by American girls her age. This important ...

Creative Altruism, Altruistic Creativity: Writing for Love Sometimes

    By Jennifer Haupt ______ (Note: Haupt’s mini-memoir, “Will you be my mother? The Quest to Answer Yes,” is available on Amazon and Shebooks.net. All author profits ($1/book) during May 2014 will be donated to mothers2mothers, a nonprofit working to stop the legacy of AIDS in Africa by creating ...