A Time to Give November 29, 2009
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Books Are Great Gifts, literacy.1 comment so far
Topic of the Week: 11/30-12/4, 2009
Tying into our BOOKS ARE GREAT GIFTS campaign, we’re adopting a charity to support for the holidays. Reading Tree is a non-profit organization that collects books–new and used–for schools all over the world.
Phase one of LitChat’s multi-faceted BOOKS ARE GREAT GIFTS (#BAGG) campaign began with the creation of a “twibbon” (http://twibbon.com/join/Books-Are-Great-Gifts) created especially for Twitter users to adorn their avatar as a show of support for book sales. Adding to this phase, LitChat has issued a challenge to give $1 to its adopted literacy charity (The Reading Tree) for every Twitter user who wraps the #BAGG ribbon on their avatar (up to $250).
Phase two includes a section of the LitChat website devoted to book recommendations with links to book publishers, bookstores, book blogs, and reader reviews.
Phase three brings everything together with an auction of books donated and signed by authors. The auction will take place through Twitter on December 18, 2009, beginning at 8 p.m. EST. All proceeds from the Twitter auction will go directly to LitChat’s adopted charity, The Reading Tree.
Read more about how you can promote literacy while also promoting books, authors and publishing here.
On Friday, December 4, John Barger, executive director of Reading Tree will be our guest host. He’ll tell us about ways we can help promote literacy in our own communities, as explain the methods Reading Tree uses with recycling programs to get books into the poorest schools in America, Canada and several third-world countries. It’s exciting work.
Follow John on Twitter: @ReadingTree.
Topic of the Week: Breaking Through the Stereotypes November 23, 2009
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Uncategorized.add a comment
Topic of the Week: November 23-27, 2009
Join the campaign to promote book sales this holiday season. Go to http://bit.ly/W8DsW and drape your Twitter avatar with a BOOKS ARE GREAT GIFTS twibbon.
We’ve all read books where characters seem cut from cardboard, their settings interchangeable and their plots over used. Publishers crank out books like these by the dozens and while they are read and appreciated by many, these titles and their authors rarely rise to the top. This week in LitChat we’ll discuss books that break those stereotypes with memorable characters set in distinctive places; books that would be swept away by the tides of banality except for their fresh voices.
Tish Cohen (with Ryder)
Joining us on Friday, November 27, is bestselling author of tween, teen, and adult fiction, Tish Cohen. Tish’s first novel, Town House, was optioned for film before the novel was sold. She followed that success with a series for tweens featuring the spunky know-it-all Zoe Costello, aka, the Zoe Lama. In her recently released YA novel, Little Black Lies, Tish explores the rich girl/poor girl world of private schools and how far a person will go to fit in.
Tish writes with a magnifying eye for detail, yet her heart for people bleeds through her words. Her second adult novel, Inside-Out Girl, had already been finished and sold to Harper-Collins when she met a young girl with the neurological disorder suffered by one of her characters in the novel. After learning about the challenges this young girl faces daily, Tish pulled back the manuscript for a massive rewrite that addressed the bullying encountered by children who don’t fit the mold.
Tish has been a media buyer at an ad agency, a decorative painter, an art gallery manager, an illustrator, a proofreader, an editor. It was while an editor that she fell in love with “playing with words.” While perusing Oprah’s website on a day she was feeling particularly mopey about the zigzagged direction her career had taken, she happened upon this Anais Nin quote: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” She walked into her office and began writing her first adult manuscript.
All of her zig-zagged experiences are synthesized in the characters Tish creates, the world in which she places them and the zany situations they get into.
Follow Tish on Twitter: @TishCohen.
Topic of the Week: The Craft of Writing November 15, 2009
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in fiction, weekly topics.Tags: Renni Browne, writers, writing
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Join the campaign to promote book sales this holiday season. Go to http://bit.ly/W8DsW and drape your Twitter avatar with a BOOKS ARE GREAT GIFTS twibbon.
Writing is more than just lining up words on a page in the attempt to convey an idea, reveal a fact or tell a story. Good writing is more than just grammatically perfect sentences one after another. Writers worth their ink know that behind every good book is great editing. The editing process begins with the writer. Some writers self-edit as they compose, while others concentrate on the flow and concept as they complete their manuscripts. No matter their writing habits and preferences, the successful writer knows that writing needs editing and it begins with oneself. This week in LitChat we’ll discuss the craft of writing and self-editing.
Renni Browne
On Friday, November 20, Renni Browne joins us as guest host of LitChat. Renni is co-author (with Dave King) of the writing handbook, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. There are many good books on the writing craft, but few tackle the nuts and bolts of what to cut, what to keep, and how to make it better.
Renni has edited fiction and nonfiction at several prestigious publishing houses, including a stint as senior editor at William Morrow. Citing a lack of time to effectively edit the titles she acquired, Renni left mainstream publishing in 1979 and founded The Editorial Department in 1980.
In 1991 she and Dave King wrote Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, now in its fifth printing and second edition from HarperCollins. She has written book reviews and magazine articles and appeared on NPR.
Over the years Renni has given lectures, workshops, and seminars around the country on self-editing, dialogue, getting published, and other topics of interest to writers. She’s originally from Charlotte, NC, and now lives in Asheville with two cats. Hobbies include old-time music festivals, walks in the mountains, and reading fiction. She especially enjoys Elizabeth George’s and Lee Smith’s fiction.
Renni will be tweeting during LitChat as @EditorialDept.
Topic of the Week: Latino Literature November 9, 2009
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in fiction, Latino literature, literary fiction, multi-cultural fiction, weekly topics.Tags: Latino literature, literary fiction, Luis Urrea, multi-cultural fiction, writers
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No matter on which side of the border it’s produced, there’s no argument that Latino authors have produced some of the greatest works of literature in recent history. Despite its invasion by Europeans, Latin America maintains much of the cultural identity and heritage of its native peoples, providing a colorful tapestry for storytelling. Many Latino authors draw on that culture with remarkable stories of survival, conflict, love, mystery, spiritualism and humanity. Authors such as Carlos Castaneda, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Sandra Cisneros and Jorge Luis Borges brought Latino literature into the homes and hearts of readers worldwide. We’ll discuss these authors and other Latino authors on Monday and Wednesday during LitChat.
Luis Urrea
Luis Urrea joins us as guest host on Friday, November 13. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother, Luis grew up on both sides of the border. He compeled his undergrad work in writing at the University of California, San Diego, then went on to study writing at the graduate level at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Nominated for a Pulitzer for The Devil’s Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, Luis has been widely published in literary journals and has 11 books in print.
Publisher’s Weekly said this about Luis’s recently released novel, Into the Beautiful North: “Urrea’s poetic sensibility and journalistic eye for detail in painting the Mexican landscape and sociological complexities create vivid, memorable scenes.”
Alan Cheuse of the Chicago Tribune said, “Awash in a subtle kind of satire… A funny and poignant impossible journey… Into the Beautiful North is a refreshing antidote to all the negativity currently surrounding Mexico.”
After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Luis moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College and the University of Colorado and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
Books Are Great Gifts
Luis’ other titles include The Hummingbird’s Daughter, By the Lake of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering Time. His writing has won an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, a Colorado Center for the Book Award and a Christopher Award. The Devil’s Highway has been optioned for a film by CDI Producciones.
Luis lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Follow Luis on Twitter at: @Urrealism.
Topic of the Week: Alternative Avenues in Publishing November 1, 2009
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in grit lit, self-published authors, self-publishing.Tags: self-published authors
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As publishing continues to morph into an uncertain new model, many authors are taking their careers into their own hands through smart choices in self-publishing. Self-publishing is not to be confused with independent or small press publishers, POD printers, nor is it a true form of “indie” publishing. Self-publishing is when an author pays or shares in the costs for the printing, distribution and marketing of his or her book. A self-published author may use one of the established self-publishing houses (also known as vanity or subsidy publishers) or create a publishing corporation of his/her own.
Print on demand (POD) technology, along with the new wave of ebook formats, plus the marketing muscle of the internet, has simplified the self-publishing equation.
Many self-published books suffer from poor content editing, abysmal copy editing and proofreading, bad covers and interior design, and/or egotistical authors who believe their products to be the undiscovered work of this century’s Shakespeare. This may sound harsh, but those in the field–particularly book reviewers–know it’s true. It’s the proliferation of these self-published books that mire the field and leave reviewers and readers with bad impressions of self-publishing.
We’re pleased to introduce two authors whose work is a pleasant exception to the negative expectations of self-published books. Each of these books could hold its own against others of like genre produced by any of the big, traditional publishers. They are well written and plotted, their covers are attractive, interior design is easy on the eyes, they are relatively free of typos and publishing style errors, but most of all they carry you along from opening to closing. Most interesting of all, both of these authors never pursued traditional publishing with these manuscripts, opting for self-publishing from the start of their projects.
Gint Aras
November 4th will feature Gint Aras, author of Finding the Moon in Sugar. Gint chose to go directly to self-publishing as a means to circumvent big publishing and get his work before the eyes of readers in his own time. His novel, Finding the Moon in Sugar, is a gritty tale of post-teenage wanderings, those years in between closing the past and opening the future. Written in a voice raw from toxic love, readers can’t help but side with Andy, the hapless main character, as he stumbles through one adventure after another in the exotic streets of Vilnius, Lithuania.
Gint Aras (Karolis Gintaras Ukauskas) was born in Cicero, Ill. to immigrants displaced by World War II. He attended the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign and earned his MFA from Columbia University. To support his writing, he has worked as a hearse driver, fast food guy, hotel houseman, pasta cook, actor and delivery man. He currently teaches English and Humanities at Morton College and lives in Oak Park, Ill.
Donna Carrick
On Friday, November 6, guest host will be Donna Carrick, author of three novels, all of them self-published. Donna’s most recent novel,The First Excellence, follows Fa-ling, a young, adopted Canadian Chinese woman on a journey into the heart of mainland China where she was born. While traveling through Zhuang province with a group of Canadian couples adopting Chinese babies, Fa-ling encounters murder, kidnapping, political intrigue and organ theft.
Donna grew up in Canada’s military and now resides in Southern Ontario with her husband Alex and their three children. Along with their beloved family pets, the Carricks spend most of their free time in Ontario’s north country. The First Excellence draws on her experience in adopting a child from China. Here other two novels are Gold And Fishes and The Noon God.
Follow Donna on Twitter at @Donna Carrick.
Follow Gint Aras on Twitter at @Gint_Aras.
