Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 48

As The Writer Turns: Ann Leary’s Book Has a Braggy Title

Today, in the heartbreak of our writer turning, her trip to a Hollywood-worthy book launch is torn apart by her jealous, always ready to hiss, frenemy.

Friday Faves: In Honor of the Inauguration, Poets, and Martin Luther King Day

  By Julie Wu Sure, Obama was grand, but let’s face it: we see him speak all the time.  What makes the inauguration truly ceremonial is the inauguration poem.  How often does a poet speak before the nation? In honor of the inauguration, Richard Blanco, and Martin Luther King day, ...

The Silence of the Quandts, or Why I Write

  By Christiane Alsop Parent-child relationships are complex matters. Layers of dependence, loyalty, neediness, and ambivalence, among other messy emotions, mark them. They also are marked by loving and caring. Imagine adding to this complicated mix the vague, nagging notion that your father or mother or both were involved in crimes against ...

Bookstore Boss

By Chuck Leddy I toiled in a Cambridge, Massachusetts bookstore in the late 1990s, making an embarrassingly low salary and working for an eccentric boss with one of those dramatic Southern Gothic names, in this case Jefferson Beauregard Jackson. I’ll call him Jeff. He was 45 years old, thin, with ...

Anatomy of a First Chapter: Make Your Beginning Count

By Dell Smith [Photo by delgrosso] First chapters. They introduce your fictive world to your readers. Your locations, your characters, the story’s tone, and the conflict or conflicts. Your first chapter essentially trains your readers how to read your story, how to navigate what comes next. It’s the set up ...

Ruthless Revision: Part 2

By Randy Susan Meyers “To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” Somerset Maugham After the macro revision and after deconstructing your premise, themes, etc put your manuscript away. Let it cool down. As written so brilliantly by Kathy Crowley, what happens in the drawer is a bit of magic. ...

Friday Faves: Reviews, Reviews, Reviews

By Randy Susan Meyers Hey book reviewers out there who wonder if you’re relevant: you sure are to me.  Hey writers soothing yourselves with the declaration that no one reads reviews: sorry, I do. I read them with a pad (sometimes electronic) and pen.  I sample. I list. I buy. ...

Pinterest for Novelists: Inspiration, Book Design and Book Trailers

By Laura Harrington When I first started hearing about Pinterest, I thought: Are you kidding me? There’s something else we’re supposed to be doing to connect to our readers/ build our platform? I was sure I didn’t have one more iota of available brain space for anything that was not ...

Nominees for the 2013 Above and Beyond Award

By Kathy Crowley As many of you may know, a year ago Beyond the Margins accepted nominations for our first ever Above and Beyond Award.  We were thrilled when the first nomination arrived. “Look–someone reads our blog!” we said. And we were even more thrilled when another arrived, and another, ...

Grubbing For Sex

By Liz Moore This post originally ran at Grub Daily in November 2012. Sex, lurid or otherwise, wasn’t covered in Grub Street’s Novel Incubator 2011- 12*, the first year-long workshop.  Or maybe it was, and I repressed it, or perhaps felt I didn’t need to pay attention since my novel ...