Susan K. Perry's Blog: Creating in Flow, page 40

Persistence is All in a Day's Work

A Bad Day's Work by Nora McFarland is a lighthearted debut mystery about a shooter (photographer) at a Bakersfield TV station. While solving a murder, Lilly Hawkins realizes that she has a hard time making friends due to her inadvertently off-putting personality. Not that Lilly and her blunders aren't a hoot to read about. I recently conducted an email interview with McFarland.

Q: It seems to me that characters often don't change very much in the course of a series mystery, though I could b...

9 (Arbitrary) Ways to Get Your Writing Rejected

When novelist Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew's Last Stand) was asked to help winnow entries for short story contests and literary journals, it was her turn to switch from seeking approval to giving it out.  Sparingly.  As she puts it:

Having spent many years putting hours of effort and creativity into my own work -- sending off brown envelopes filled with still-warm pages, to various editors and judges -- it is rather horrifying to discover that it takes me about a minute to know that yet...

More Cool Kids' Books by Famous Authors [Part 3 of 3]

If you've been following this blog, you already know that celebrated authors you never expected to write for kids have done so, with delightful results. This post is a continuation of parts 1 and 2, this time about books of rhymes for young readers.

In addition to some of the verse-containing books mentioned in the two previous posts, what follows are poetry books for children written by notable poets (or by novelists crossing over).

A LIST TO SAVOR

Brodsky, Joseph, Discovery (Farrar, Straus...

Creativity Abounds in Cool Kids' Books [Part 2 of 3]

Next time you read a book by a favorite author or poet, look closely at that page where "previous works" are listed. Sometimes you'll discover a pleasant surprise, especially if you have kids or work with them: a book for children. Some of these have become classics in their own right.

This post is a continuation of Part 1, a necessarily incomplete list of good books for children by celebrated authors of adult fiction, including James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Amy Tan. Again, the...

Obama Joins Authors Writing Lit for Kids [Part 1 of 3]

Want to expose your children to first-rate reading? Barack Obama's new book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, a picture book aimed at children ages 3 and older (to be released November 16), is only one of many examples of children's books written by famous authors of adult works.

I started collecting these kinds of real literature for kids when my own kids were young. By choosing such books by celebrated writers, you know at the outset that they'll (generally) be written well. These ...