Try Something New – Short Stories

A few days ago, I realized I needed to get over this silly thing about not reading short stories…especially now that I’ve been writing them for the last 3 years. I feel like one of those people who shows up in every workshop, who ‘wants to be a writer’ but hasn’t read a book since [...]

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Review of Jumped, by Rita Williams-Garcia

I’m going to try to do this without spoilers…
Early one morning in zero period before regular classes begin, Leticia overhears Dominique, a big basketball-playing “boy girl” say she’s going to “get” Trina that day at 2:45.
On the surface the story is about Leticia’s moral decision: should she “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” like [...]

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What a Story Does

I was commenting on someone else’s story today, and I wanted to say something about what a story is, what it does, and why having characters moving around on the page for 4500 words doesn’t necessarily equal a story.
I knew there was a quote that expressed this beautifully and directly. A quote that I really [...]

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Seeing Double? (Or, Do All Book Designers Use the Same Photo Agency?)

I was reading ‘White Readers Meet Black Authors’ today, and when I clicked on the post about J. California Cooper’s new novel ‘Life Is Short But Wide’, I thought I was seeing Jeffrey Ford’s ‘The Girl in the Glass.’
Stuff like this cracks me up. I freelance as a photo editor, and last month my co-op’s [...]

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Jumped has arrived.

My copy of Jumped arrived yesterday, courtesy of The Happy Nappy Bookseller’s  Black History Month guest post on White Readers Meet Black Authors.
It looks a little younger than the YA I usually read, but the themes are potentially mature, so it will be interesting to see how it is handled.
I’ll be reading it as soon [...]

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I Heart NYT Slideshows

This great slideshow on the NY Times site shows side-by-side photos of identical twins. It’s supposed to be about the effect of environmental factors (smoking, stress, extreme tanning) on the appearance of aging.
I don’t care so much about the scary implications about wrinkles and eyebags, but it is fascinating to go back and forth between [...]

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Best Use of Cannibalism

On the way to work this morning (one of the best times for unfettered thinking, along with showering, tooth-brushing, and cleaning the litter boxes), I realized there *has* been a recent book that effectively utilizes a cannibal character: one of the best books I’ve ever read, James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love.
Samarin is not [...]

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