Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 41

Looking Good in Author (or any) Photos

 By Randy Susan Meyers If you love every picture of yourself, or you’re one of those naturally photogenic people, you won’t need this post. And I probably don’t want to stand next to you in any photo. For the rest of us, there are tricks to make ourselves look less ...

The Write Apps: This Year’s Top Picks for Busy Authors

By Chris Abouzeid* Wondering what apps are must-haves for authors this year? Our Emerging Technologies department, led by nationally recognized tech author and expert Dr. Digital, spent months testing every app imaginable. They looked for programs that boost creativity, aid in publicity and promotions, increase productivity, strengthen social ties and, ...

When Tragedy Calls: Not My Lemonade to Make

By Ann Bauer The day after the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre, my phone began to ring. The Huffington Post wanted me to do a live forum with autism experts and other mothers. Salon wanted my 2,000-word take on the shooter’s reported Asperger’s diagnosis. Elizabeth Cohen, chief medical correspondent at CNN, was ...

How I Broke Up With (for good I thought) and Fell Back in Love With the Short Story

  By Steven Schwartz   Yes, the short story and I were through.  I’d written two books of stories but decided after one previous failure at writing a novel that I’d try again at forty-two years old.  And this one worked.  It worked so well in fact that I came ...

My Father’s Silent War

By Laura Harrington My father never talked about the war.  Even when we went to a commemorative event in France where he had been stationed in 1944, just north of Paris.  An event with all the pomp and circumstance of town bands, bunting, an exhibition in the local church created ...

Friday Faves: True to U. Thoughts on Style and Voice

By Julie Wu In my final year of medical school, I took a fiction workshop in which we submitted our stories anonymously.  For fun, I tried to throw my classmates off my scent each time I handed something in.  I channeled a mourning Yankee carpenter with terse, muscular prose. I explored the florid malaise ...

A Family of Writers

By Dell Smith For the past few months I’ve been going through my father’s writing. He passed away in 2011, and left behind manuscripts of short stories, a novel or two, the unfinished biography of the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, letters, and pieces he wrote for magazines. There are also journals ...

The Literary Birds & Bees: How A Novel Was Conceived

By Robin Black   Novels are unlike human beings in that we can’t know much about how they, as a species, are conceived. There is no single narrative for spawning a narrative. No sperm and ovum necessary prerequisites – that we know of, anyway, speaking metaphorically, of course. And while, ...

A Satisfying Ending (Or Not)

Beginning a book is easier than ending it (at least for me.) A beginning is exciting and glittery, filled with excitement and hope. First sentences are sexy. They pop into my mind all the time.  If I only had to write the first lines, I could write a million books ...

Your Cast of Characters

  “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” —Gore Vidal by Kathy Crowley Maybe it’s just where I live, but ...