Teri Coyne

Skeletons in the closet and the explosive dynamics that result can devastate a family—or drive them together. Last week in LitChat we discussed character flaws and fetishes in fiction, this week we’re taking it a bit further in examining books that hinge on what happens when the ghosts of the past dredge up their unsavory secrets.

Joining us on Friday, October 23 is Teri Coyne, author of The Last Bridge, a novel about family secrets and the devastation they have on people and relationships. Teri says this about The Last Bridge:

“The idea for The Last Bridge started with an image and a voice I heard in my head. The image was of the kitchen of an old farmhouse with garbage bags taped to the walls and a note in a Ziploc® bag on the table. The voice in my head spoke the opening line, ‘Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head’.”

Over the last 25 years, Teri has embarked on a creative journey, exploring the crafts of filmmaking, playwriting, producing, directing and acting. Teri also wrote and performed stand-up comedy in clubs around New York City for many years. She studied poetry with Philip Shultz at NYU, novel writing at the Iowa Summer Writers Workshop, memoir with Frank McCourt at the Southampton Summer Writer’s Program and fiction with Masha Hamilton at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. Although Teri has written across multiple genres, The Last Bridge is her first novel.

In addition to her creative pursuits, Teri renovated a 110-year-old house on the North Fork of Long Island. She also works in the legal industry as technical writer and learning facilitator. Teri divides her time between the City and her home on Long Island and is currently at work on her second novel.

Follow Teri on Twitter at @TeriCoyne.

Brooks Sigler

No one likes a boring character. You know the type: always on time, never argues, questions authority, drives the speed limit, et al. Fiction is full of flawed characters. People like us. This week in LitChat we’ll discuss books with crazy, delinquent, perverted, rebellious and otherwise contrary characters and why we love them.

Joining us on Friday, October 16th, is author Brooks Sigler, whose debut novel, Five Finger Fiction, features a lovable Irish Catholic family that reeks of dysfunction. To compensate for her family’s freakiness–her father’s a peeping tom and her mother rules the roost like Peggy Bundy on steriods–protagonist Lila O’Farrell tries humor, subversion, a British accent, and eventually kleptomania to find her own way. Breaking the law and casting aside social mores is nothing to Lila compared to challenging her mother’s authority.

“Brooks Sigler’s deliciously irreverent and deadpan voice makes this unabashedly quirky coming-of-age tale a most singularly irresistible read.” –Steve Kluger, author of Last Days of Summer

Brooks lives with her husband, fish, and cats in a quaint, New England town. She also has a turtle, who she thinks may be slightly off his shell. When not teaching English at her favorite charter school, the author likes to bombard her bosses, coworkers, family, and friends with a flurry of questions which no one can answer. Her other resolution, to produce progeny, has not come to fruition, yet.

Follow Brooks on Twitter at @BrooksSigler

Publishing is a big business that stretches around the globe and into your home through the books that you read. At the top of the publishing pyramid are conglomerates with household names: Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Random House. The large houses have dozens of smaller imprints that often focus on specific genres. The buying power of these large publishers often gives them front-of-the-bookstore displays and reviews in major publications.

Running alongside the big houses are the independents. Indie publishers often operate on a shoe-string budget that doesn’t allow for front-of-the-store displays and slick advertising. They may or may not be available in brick-and-mortar stores, but their books sell well against comparable titles through online channels. Indie books are often extremely well-written, but the topic or theme doesn’t fit a large publisher’s list.

This week in LitChat we’ll meet some of the indies: editors, publicists and authors. We’ll discuss the merits of publishing with an indie press and get an inside peek at what they’re looking for.

Joining the discussion so far are Unbridled Books, Publishing Works, Chronicle Books.

Last week in LitChat we discussed where ideas come from, a conversation geared to the reader and the writer. We’re talking primarily to writers this week with a conversation about what to do with the ideas when they come. Successful authors understand the necessity of productive writing time–a time devoted to capturing the words that give substance to the ideas. What is it that holds writers back from deploying the skills they have to achieve victory in their writing endeavors? Steven Presssfield would say it’s Resistance.

Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield graduated from Duke University in 1965. His struggles to earn a living as a writer (it took 17 years to get the first paycheck) are detailed in his 2002 book, The War of Art. Steven has worked as an advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout and attendant in a mental hospital. He has picked fruit in Washington state and written screenplays in Tinseltown.

With the publication of The Legend of Bagger Vance in 1995, Steven became a writer of books once and for all. His writing philosophy is, not surprisingly, a kind of warrior code–internal rather than external–in which the enemy is identified as those forms of self-sabotage that Pressfield has labeled “Resistance” with a capital R (in The War of Art) and the technique for combating these foes can be described as “turning pro.”

Steven believes in previous lives. He believes in the Muse. He believes that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists. Steven’s conception of the artist’s role is a combination of reverence for the unknowable nature of “where it all comes from” and a no-nonsense, blue-collar demystification of the process by which this mystery is approached. In other words, a paradox.

Follow Steven on Twitter at @SPressfield