Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 20

Soothing Words For Bad Reviews

  By Randy Susan Meyers It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. For every moment of awe a writer has at seeing her book on a shelf, at being told by readers they found comfort they found in your words, for each time you visit ...

Unrequited Love Letters

  By Rachel Kadish  One crisp autumn afternoon, my nine-year-old daughter handed me the first love note she’d ever received. It was a white paper napkin tied with a bit of shiny blue ribbon. Below the ribbon were pink magic-marker dots and a green number 1. A boy had slipped it ...

Untamed Novel, Untamed Life

By Tova Mirvis In cold snowy Boston the hike had sounded like a good plan – 24 kilometers, from the Los Patos ranger station to the Sirena station in a remote part of the Costa Rican rain forest. But after landing on a propeller plane in the Osa Peninsula without ...

Untamed novel, Untamed life

By Tova Mirvis In cold snowy Boston the hike had sounded like a good plan – 24 kilometers, from the Los Patos ranger station to the Sirena station in a remote part of the Costa Rican rain forest. But after landing on a propeller plane in the Osa Peninsula without ...

In Defense of Adjuncts, Students and Writers: an Open Letter to AWP

Hi there, AWP, We’ve known each other for awhile. We first met in 2009 in New York and it was love at first sight. You plied me with talks about writing craft, you offered table after table of literary magazines and small presses. I got the idea to start a ...

Timelines

By Kathy Crowley The action of my current work-in-progress takes place over only a few months – a nice relief, in some ways, from the novel I’ve put aside for the moment, which is overrun with timeshifts, flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks.  Even in this relatively straightforward story, though, I ...

Is There Any Such Thing As A Perfect Start?

By Nichole Bernier The log was 30 feet up in the air, a sort of telephone pole of a balance beam. I was supposed to walk from one end to the other, holding onto nothing. The rest of the group had done it. Ten minutes had passed, and I was ...

Is There Such A Thing As The Perfect Start?

  By Nichole Bernier The log was 30 feet up in the air, a sort of telephone pole of a balance beam. I was supposed to walk from one end to the other, holding onto nothing. The rest of the group had done it. Ten minutes had passed, and I ...

Can Authors and Book Reviewers Be Friends?

By Harvey Freedenberg Since 2005, I’ve reviewed more than 275 books—slightly weighted in favor of fiction, mostly literary—for three websites and a regional magazine. I guess you’d call me a gentleman farmer of the reviewing world, since intellectual property law is my day job. But something happened recently that has ...

Ask Margie: When Family Won’t Read *sniff*

  Dear Margie, How do you get over that people in your family don’t read your books? They buy a copy but never read one… I know it’s probably petty, but it really hurts. Signed, Too sensitive Dear Too Sensitive, Well, at least they’re buying it and not checking it ...