Barbara Gregorich's Blog, page 2

Creating Book Club Discussion Questions

Writers, especially writers who publish their books independently, need to spend a lot of time marketing. That’s because the US is glutted with books: three million new titles published each year. How is a potential reader to know of a book unless they hear about it somewhere? Marketing is necessary.

I’ve been marketing Exit Velocity (and, at the same time, my other books) in many different ways. But one way that I never got around to trying (because I was busy with other ways!) was marke...

Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’

“Though the streams are swollen / Keep them dogies rollin’”

You might think this blog post is going to be about Rawhide, either the 1960s TV show starring Clint Eastwood, or the theme song of the same title by Frankie Laine. Or, if you remember that I’ve posted a couple of times about being a Roadie for my husband (Phil Passen) when he has a gig, you might think this is another Roadie blog.

In all three cases you would be wrong. Today’s post is about the ordeals many authors face in prepar...

A Love of Rectangles

Do you remember grade-school crafts such as making pot holders on a metal loom? This is the earliest craft I remember learning, way before paint-by-numbers and other such activities.

I think the flat, squarish pot holders imprinted themselves on my brain. I say that because years later, when I learned how to crochet, I got stuck in the granny-square phase. It gave me immense pleasure to crochet those flat squares and eventually stitch them together to make something else. (You can read ab...

Titles vs. Subtitles: Making the Right Choice

Subtitles of books are interesting. In some cases they are definitely sub: they provide a second level of information about the book. Something extra. In other cases, they serve as the real title — because the main title is super clever and has great appeal . . . but it doesn’t tell you what the book is about. I wrote about these matters in a previous blog, “Nonfiction Titles: Dead Bodies at the End.”

My last two novels (Exit Velocity and The F Words) were in no need of subtitles because they...

Politics and Literature: The Gift of Fire

It’s always fun to publish a book. In fact, once a book is published, I usually forget about all the hard work that led up to its publication. Such is the case with my latest book, The Gift of Fire: Justice Matters.

Many of the books I write are on my mind years before I begin writing them. And then years while I am writing them. This was the case with my early reader, Waltur Buys a Pig in a Poke. I thought about it from the time I was six years old until I was in my late forties. And what I ...

Ubiquity — It’s Everywhere!

A writer’s life is full of serendipity: the occurrence of events by chance, in a happy and beneficial way. Maybe all lives are full of serendipity, but perhaps writers (and maybe playwrights, song writers, and such) just notice it more. 

Many is the time I’ve been in a group of writers discussing books we’ve written and the problems we encountered in doing so — and somebody brings up a serendipitous event that helped them with a problem. Usually a plot problem, but sometimes one of cause-and-...

Rediscovering Science Fiction

When I was a tween (though that word wasn’t around back then), I was an avid reader (and still am). I read classics such as Great Expectations, mysteries such as the Trixie Belden series, westerns such as Riders of the Purple Sage, and science fiction such as the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. When I went away to college, George Orwell’s 1984 was assigned reading.

Then, for some reason, I stopped reading science fiction. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just something that happ...

The F Words, More Than Ever

In my eleven years as a blogger, I have written more blog posts about The F Words than any other subject. The forty-plus posts cover topics such as immigrant rights, student rights, free speech, the right to protest, and the right to remain silent when accused of a crime. There are more, but to list them would take up a lot of space.

To be honest, I wasn’t counting the number of posts on this subject as I was writing them. Only when I thought that I might collect the blog posts and publish th...

Mastering Video Scripts with a Teleprompter

Several years ago I began making videos to post on YouTube. Thus far the videos have been about some aspect of one of my books. In the video about Women at Play, for example, I talk about how my editor taught me to think in terms of proper nouns in order to write a book that would appeal to more people than would a chronological history book. In one of the videos about The F Words, I talk about the role that protest poetry plays in the novel. 

You would be right if you inferred that my videos...

The Past Is Always There

Unlike many writers, I move from topic to topic and genre to genre. I write fiction and nonfiction and feel equally comfortable with both. I write for children and for adults. Mostly I write stand-alones.

None of this makes me better or worse than other writers (those who write in one genre or for one age group), it just means that I leave platforms and places and they probably don’t. Michael Connelly, for example, always has Harry Bosch and/or Renée Ballard in his head. I, on the other hand,...