Lev Raphael's Blog, page 62

Leaving New York and Finding Myself

I said yes to Michigan three decades ago and have never regretted it.



That's not what you'd expect a native New Yorker to say, but I fell in love with the state within days of arriving to start a PhD at Michigan State University. I came in the spring and the campus was unbelievably lush and beautiful. But better than that, within weeks, a new friend and I were driving north to the Upper Peninsula.



I crossed the Mackinac Bridge at sunset and the icy water and the snow everywhere in sight turne...

Romney's Reveal

Joan Walsh at Salon just wrote a powerful piece about Romney that cuts to the heart of who he is. Called "Romney's Haunting Smirk," it focuses on the totally inappropriate smirk he gave after his impromptu press conference about the terrible events in Benghazi where four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed.



Walsh is doing something we don't do enough when we talk politics: She's analyzing Romney's physical behavior. All too often pundits focus only on what politicians sa...

(More) Sh*t People Say to Authors

Nobody tells you that when you publish a book, it becomes a license for total strangers to say outrageous things to you that yourself could never imagine saying to anyone. I'm not just talking about people who've actually bought your book; even people who haven't read your book feel encouraged to share, based on what they've gleaned from friends, reviews, the Internet, or ESP.



At first, when you're on tour, it's surprising, then tiring -- but eventually it's funny, and sometimes even offers y...

Is Molly Ringwald Right? Is Writing Like Acting?

Molly Ringwald of The Breakfast Club fame is publishing fiction now and in today's New York Times she claims that writing and acting share some important similarities. Actors, she says, often compose elaborate back stories for their characters, and that's in effect writing fiction. Not only that, when we read we're acting out the author's words.



I've only acted in college, but I've been a regular theater goer for as long as I've been a published author, and I think her comparisons don't hold u...

The Blurbs That Got Away

I've been lucky in my publishing career to get blurbs from wonderful, well-known authors I admire and respect. But I've also missed out a few crucial times.



When Doubleday published my co-authored book about healing shame for a LGBT audience, our editor asked us whom they should approach for blurbs. I suggested a famous feminist author and the editor said, "Brilliant! We would never have thought of her!"



A little while later, this same editor, who was working on a LGBT book by an author with a...

The E-Books Are Coming! Run for Your Lives!

Many reviewers have been complaining for a while about the democratization of publishing and the "flood" of e-books.



These traditional reviewers who tend to review books published by major houses are troubled by the supposed difficulties of finding good books now that Amazon has so many hundreds of thousands of indie authors. How are you supposed to weed out the crap? And how are good authors and good books going to make it?



That last question is one that authors, editors and agents were asking...

Blogging in the Shower

I'm always blogging in the shower. The isolation, the quiet, the warmth, and the steady stream of water from multiple shower heads relax my body and free my mind. Ideas arrive with ease and I write in my head until I can get to the computer or my iPad. Or sometimes even a piece of paper.



I've been blogging at HP for a little over two years now. I came to it after many years of print and radio reviewing and writing across genres: mystery, novel, short story, psychology, historical fiction, memo...

When Letting Go On Vacation Isn't Easy

On a recent trip to Florence, I did something radical. I cut myself off.



Okay, not completely. I had my iPad in my hotel and an international cell phone on me at all times to monitor an emerging family health crisis.



But I did not have a smart phone. I had traded it in for an old clam shell-style phone that did much less and didn't make me crazy. My smart phone had simply become an albatross, its physical weight matching its psychological burden. Wherever I went, I checked email: standing on...

Don't Be Held Hostage By Reviewers

Wannabe authors imagine that once they get published, life will be glorious. That's because they haven't thought much about bad reviews. Every author gets them, and sometimes they're crushing.



As a published, working author, you learn to live with the reality of bad reviews in different ways. You can stop reading reviews. You can have someone you trust vet them for you and warn you so that poisonous splinters of prose don't lodge in your brain. You can leave town and stay off the grid when yo...

Riding the E-Book Wave

Back in the spring, I gave a workshop on e-book publishing at a writers' conference in Michigan and someone asked me if I'd done any "shorts" for Amazon. I hadn't.



Afterwards, it hit me that I had some good, juicy material I'd filed away not so long ago while doing research in the Gilded Age for a historical novel riffing off of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.



The material I'd set aside was mainly a bordello sex scene I really liked, but hadn't figured out how to use. When I got home from...