1. Sybil pointed this little nugget out to me. I laughed all day. According to the Books-A-Million website - my new favorite website, by the way - the authors of When Good Things Happen To Bad Boys are: “New York Times bestselling author Lori Foster is joined by USA Today [...]

Tess Gerritsen made a guest appearance on the blog Murder She Writes and gave some writing advice on the difference between thinking your way through a book and feeling your way.
It’s not the first time I’ve given this advice to a writer: “Stop thinking and start feeling.” The writers who most often need to hear [...]

For a different kind of Valentine’s Day book…
Controversy seems to find author Ayelet Waldman. Frankly, I think she courts it, but whatever works for her. I’ve written about her before here. Yeah, she’s an author. Yeah, she’s married to Michael Chabon. Yeah, she caused a brouhaha awhile back when she [...]

The Sunday edition of The Washington Post Book World was dedicated to Love and Heartbreak (their title, not mine). In addition to the regular love books - you know, the one about Castro and the other about Bin Laden - Book World reviewed a few actual romances. All except one [...]

The general rule goes like this: self-publishing is not the same as being published. The bottom line is that publishers pay authors and not the other way around. If you’re self-published, I’m not saying you’re not a writer. I’m not saying you lack talent. I’m just saying you’re not published [...]

I enjoy the show Lost for many reasons. It’s sharp and clever. The diverse cast is a tad more representative of real life than, say, the cast of Friends. It features at least one gigantic polar bear, life-like black smoke and a guy who was hidden in an underground shelter for years [...]

Wendy knows my fascination - one could even say obsession without being accused of embellishment - with book covers. She pointed out these now-you-see-it/now-you-see-it-again covers:

The hearts. The titles. The overall look. The concept. These are a bit too similar for comfort. A possible coincidence but - yowza - [...]

Last week, instead of running home to hide at the end of a long mid-week workday, I dragged my lazy butt into D.C. to hear Jennifer Crusie give a talk at the Smithsonian. The list of authors for whom I would ride the metro is very short. I tend to get, shall [...]

The “he” in that sentence being Stephen King. Admittedly, I haven’t read a Stephen King book (except On Writing) since The Stand. According to BookScan, King’s newest Cell debuted at #1 for the week ending January 29, 2006. The rest of the top 15 looks like this:
1 CELL, Stephen King [...]

I missed this book when it came out: Diamonds Take Forever by Jessica Jiji. Jiji works at the United Nations. After a tough day of international politics, she liked to come home and escape into magazines and books. She started writing chick lit because, basically, she thought she could [...]