Maria E. Andreu's Blog: Maria E. Andreu on Goodreads, page 59

Guess where I am now!

Okay, so I am lit-e-ra-lly the world’s lamest Instagrammer. Seriously. It’s bad. I hadn’t been on there for years since I signed up until someone wrote a recommendation for my book and I got a notification. (My big attempt at reviving my account was by posting a picture of my adventure boots in a hotel […]

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Letting go during the good times

I have written a lot about letting go of all the things you can’t control in the publishing process. The cover (this is the one that surprises most non-publishing types. No, authors don’t choose covers, although if we’re lucky we’re sometimes consulted). The title. Where bookstores put it. When the price is lowered or raised. […]

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Thank you, Australia

Yesterday I had a wonderful first: a Skype visit with students clear across the world in Australia. How amazing! Somehow a teacher in Braddon had come across my book and thought it was an interesting glimpse into American life and assigned it to her students. Yesterday, after they all read it, I spent some time […]

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Drugged up

I am not one to pine for the good old days of television, back when there were three main channels and cartoons only on Saturday morning. But there’s one way in which I do pine for them: I long for the days before drug commercials. As ubiquitous as they seem now, commercials for prescription drugs […]

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What Coco said

Saturday I chopped off all my hair. I’d been thinking about doing it for a while and on Saturday I did it, kind of spur of the moment. I am what is called follicularly blessed. Hair just grows out of my scalp and down my back without anyeffort. Minimum attention yields luscious waves. But the […]

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Raising feminists

It makes me sad when I hear young women say they don’t consider themselves feminists. The word has gotten some bad PR, but the concepts have benefited most women living in the United States and the Westernized world. If you believe in equal pay and a workplace safe from sexual harassment, you’re a feminist. If […]

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Say 800 to drugs

I sometimes have a hard time making sense of words and acronyms. I am hopeless at word scrambles and, contrary to what people usually imagine, totally stink at Scrabble. (So much so that I’ve only played it a couple of times). I don’t know if it’s some kind of word processing disability. For a long […]

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No, that costume is not empowering you

I am not a prude when it comes to clothing. I have been known to highlight my, ahem, assets, throughout my life. I have boobs that can cause major distraction in a push-up bra, so I deploy them wisely, but strategically, depending on the attention I want. So I get the allure of wearing sexy […]

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No good deed

There have been stray cats by my house as long as I’ve lived here. It’s a bit of a wild wonderland on my block, with a thriving population of critters in residence. There’s the fat little badger that runs away much faster than his tubby frame would suggest he can, or the skunk that quietly […]

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How to win at NaNoWriMo even when losing at NaNoWriMo

This will be my third year of signing up for National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a project started in 1999 by freelance writer Chris Baty in which writers of all stripes and experience commit to writing 50,000 words in the month of November. (It has since branched out to include pushes […]

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