Jennifer Niven's Blog, page 557

Behind the Book — Creating a Character

I spent yesterday at the Central Library downtown, gathering the most enormous armful of books you've ever seen on everything from Darryl Zanuck to Louella Parsons to a history of Los Angeles itself. I spent today at my desk, constructing a timeline for the book– listing every interesting event or incident that happened in L.A. [...]

Behind the Book — Author Photos That Might Have Been

For every author photo that appears on a book, there are hundreds of possibilities of photos that could have been used but weren't. In keeping with the fact that I'm in the midst of choosing a new author photo for Velva Jean #3, here is a little gallery of author photos that might have been [...]

Behind the Book — The Author Photo

It's that time again: my publisher needs a new author photo for the upcoming book. When I was starting out, back in 2000, before my first book, The Ice Master, entered production, my then-publisher Hyperion let me know that a very famous and important photographer specializing in author photos (he's done half of the portraits [...]

Behind the Book — Taking a Creative Day

When I was in high school in Indiana, my best friend Joe Kraemer and I would sometimes take what we called a "Creative Day," which meant that we skipped school so we could work on outside projects– namely our writing and having fun. While our parents weren't all too thrilled about this (when they found [...]

Behind the Book — The Ghost and Velva Jean

I've written my books in various settings. The Ice Master was completed at a duplex just off busy Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, CA. Ada Blackjack was composed in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I began Velva Jean Learns to Drive while living in a 100-year-old bungalow in Atlanta's inner city Grant Park. I finished [...]

Behind the Book — You Are What You Write

"To give words meaning, you must first know the reality, the thoughts, sensations and experiences that the words stand for." — Lee Strasberg People who aren't writers often assume that you're only writing when you're sitting in front of your computer. But, as many writers will tell you, as soon as you start a new [...]

Behind the Book — Becoming Your Own Best Publicist

It seems like only yesterday my mother was teaching me to read. And now, many, many years later, I'm teaching her the ins and outs of social media. While she was visiting from North Carolina for Christmas, we set aside one day for a Social Media Crash Course (aka Teaching Mom to Tweet). My mother [...]

Behind the Book — In Search of Hollywood History

Since Christmas I've been immersed in a nice big stack of brand new Velva Jean research books, including one about the MGM backlot, the most famous backlot in history. Everything from The Wizard of Oz to Ben-Hur to Singin' in the Rain was shot there, and it's estimated that twenty percent of movies made in [...]

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny

When I was seven going on eight, I began worrying over Santa Claus. This was because some of the other kids in my second grade class were spreading rumors about how Santa might not exist. To be fair, it's something I had started wondering about in first grade. Sometime around Easter, I went to my [...]

A Very Scary Christmas

Because I handed in the edited manuscript Wednesday, and because it is, after all, the holiday season, I'm giving myself a couple of days off to rest, recharge, and focus on Christmas. But I'll be back to blogging about the book next week. In the meantime, I wanted to share one of my funniest and [...]