C.C's Friend Comments

Just received another good review for Under the Red Moon — A Chinese Family in Diaspora:

Friends, I just received a nice review of my book:
"I was much impressed by Amy's careful attention to the historical background for the events that happened during that period in her novel. She also did good research that provided her with accurate factual information such as foot binding and how bound feet had to be managed and taken care of. They lend verisimilitude, which to me is all the more important since the audience comes from individuals who are mostly unfamiliar with Chinese cultural values.
Novels dealing with traditional Chinese values tend to display a maudlin concern when describing family relationships. Amy successfully avoids this pitfall, for the old traditions were often set against the westernized influences brought in by their daughters from the missionary school and from the family's forced move to Shanghai. It is a good story, which I enjoyed reading. I shall pass it on to my former colleague who teaches Chinese language and on Chinese novels in English translation at Occidental College.
Wellington D.K. Chan, Ph.D., NEH Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA"
Thanks, Dr. Chan Amy Kwei

"I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."
— Raymond Carver

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
– Edgar Rice Burroughs

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
– Jane Yolen

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
– Anne McCaffrey

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write."
– Terry Pratchett

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
– Gustave Flaubert

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
– William Faulkner

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.
– Harlan Ellison

I thought it would be cool to inform the ones who are aspiring writers that if you go to www.amazon.com/concursoindie (when you click on this page it will show up in spanish tho)...but basically it says they're doing a contest: submit your manuscript within July 1-August 31 and they will choose one winner that will get there work published in print & audio format in Spanish and English, also win $2,500 :D Goodluck if you join