Barbara Gregorich's Blog, page 8

My Writing Life: 8

In my previous blog I mentioned that researching Women at Play was an intense, four-year affair, and that it forever colored my attitude toward writing nonfiction. The nonfiction subjects I chose after Women at Play were individuals: Jack Graney on the one hand, Earl Derr Biggers on the other.

Everything about Women at Play was intense and time-consuming, not only during the research stage, but also during the writing stage (see How I Wrote a Book in 92 Days), and then during the after-public...

The F Words: October Rules

In September of 2022 The F Words moved from a frontlist book to a backlist book. A publisher’s backlist consists of all the books it still carries that were published a year ago, or longer. Some books a publisher carries go out of print. Others stay in print forever, bringing in revenues to the publisher at a steady pace. Consider the Harry Potter titles, or the Boxcar Children series, or  Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

When an author’s book goes into backlist, that doesn’t mean the author ...

My Writing Life: 7

When I was a student at Kent State University I carried a double major: English and History. Anybody perusing my life in writing would think that I have employed only my knowledge of English and have disregarded my knowledge of History. But when it came to researching the hidden history of women in baseball and writing a book about it, I think I was employing all the history research skills I ever learned in college. Plus more.

After the publication of She’s on First I opined that “somebody s...

The F Words: The Power Of F

On November 5, 2022, I will be one of several presenters at the Plainfield (Illinois) Public Library’s day-long event for writers, running from 10:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. You can read about the individual events, and register for them, by clicking here. As you can see, my presentation is titled The Power of F Words.

For almost two years I’ve been blogging about various aspects of my novel, The F Words, including such topics as Poetry, Writing from the Middle, English Teacher Hero, Humor, Frie...

My Writing Life: 6

In 1977 Contemporary Books published my first novel, She’s on First. I’ve published a lot of books since, but you need not fear that I’m going to write a blog about each of them. That would take me to something like “My Writing Life: 147,” and I suspect I would lose many (if not all!) of my readers en route.

I do, however, want to talk about my first novel because I think writers remember, for better or worse, their first published book. My experience happened to be good, and for that I’m gra...

The F Words: Interview with Tamara Rolan, Book Reviewer

Two months ago a wonderful five-star review of The F Words appeared on GoodReads. After I shared this review on Facebook and Twitter, I learned that several people (who had somehow resisted buying The F Words up until this time) were so swayed by the review that they bought my book.

Well, I thought: this is a very persuasive review. And so I decided that I wanted to interview the book reviewer for my blog: not only because she wrote such a positive review, but mainly because I think readers w...

My Writing Life: 5

The first year or two that I began to freelance as a writer, I looked for all kinds of writing and editing work (hence the refrigeration manual I blogged about earlier). Eventually, however, I gravitated toward writing mainly educational materials for grades K through 12, as I may have explained in a previous blog.

In the course of doing so I ended up attending many, many educational conferences. Some of these may not even exist any more. My main purpose in attending was to learn about the pu...

The F Words: Libraries

Libraries have played an important part in the development of my sense of justice and my social consciousness. In my teens I used to read books by Black authors of the Harlem Renaissance: writers like Langston Hughes,  Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen.  Nobody assigned me these books. Nobody told me about them. Somehow, in browsing the library’s shelves, I came upon these books and was interested in what they had to say.

Of course I was only one of millions of teens who,...

My Writing Life: 4

Eventually I gave up my day job, knowing it would mean a decline in income, but an increase in opportunity to write and sell what I wrote. During my first three months of self-employment, I had grave concerns about my decision — mainly because I had said yes to a gigantic editing job for a company that sold refrigerators and refrigeration systems. It was my job to thoroughly edit the refrigeration manuals, so that both the customers and the sales force knew what was being said. 

This meant th...

The F Words: The Gift of Fire

After the 5,000-year-old body of the Iceman (later named Otzi) was discovered preserved in a glacier in the Alps in 1991, scientists began examining  everything they could about this person — in order to better understand the past and its importance to the present. Among the many things they discovered about the Iceman was this: he carried with him fire-lighting tools which included tinder fungus, flint, and pyrite. Fire enabled him to cook food, to stay warm, and to ward off wolves and other pr...