Epic Writer's Block

SDPEN Listing Available

Google just alerted me that my listing now appears in the roster of the San Diego Professional Editors Network (SDPEN). The group's website is interesting, especially for writers who have never worked with an editor. It is several levels deep, with useful information about the value of professional editing. The section on Reference Tools is particularly useful for writers.

Free Online Book Promotion

While I don't advocate leaving it up to the Web, even Web 2.0, as the sole technique for marketing a book, Dorothy Thompson's blog, Pump Up Your Online Book Promotion, offers links to these resources:

Would you like to be interviewed?
Beyond the Books
Would you like to tell us your backstory?
The Story Behind the Book
Would you like to tell us how you promote your books?
Book Marketing Buzz

With Internet marketing the key to selling books online is word of mouth advertising, getting people to talk about the book (buzz) and to tell others about it (viral). Simply launching a Google AdWords speck into the cybersphere only lines the pockets of Google. Think events, like a Blog Book Tour, a webinar with added value, and most of all appearances on multiple venues.

The beauty and genius of Internet marketing means you never have to leave home. Travel costs are eliminated. Agoraphobics stay safe and comfortable. On the other hand, it is still hard work, sometimes complicated, and may require investments in technologies beyond what you already have. Then there's the learning curve -- or you can pay others to set all this up for you.

Editing Your Own Work

"What are common writing errors?" is the most popular question for editors. The answer is that it depends on the type of writing. [Almost all responses to all questions begin with, "it depends." Annoying, but true.] One of the top problems I see, both in fiction and nonfiction, is a restriction of vocabulary.

Most often this is expressed as "repetition": too often using the same word, same phrase, same construction. That is a simplistic explanation, masking a deeper problem. When a writer is too lazy to use a larger vocabulary or lacks the words for variety in expression, the writing is dull, boring and ultimately uninteresting. If it is nonfiction, the piece may appear to be uninformative. If it is fiction, it won't sparkle and hold readers' interest.

Solution for flabby writing: exercise! Build up those vocabulary muscles (words). Practice using new or different words. Yes, it takes time and effort. Is it worthwhile to write well? Use a thesaurus, read the dictionary for fun, work crossword puzzles (go ahead and cheat, but learn new words and how to use them).

The second most popular question for editors is this: do you edit your emails and posts? Yes. I believe in teaching by example, so I edit everything I write. And I still make mistakes. I rush. The hand is quicker than the eye between the brain, keyboard and screen. The fingers stumble, and the eyes tell the brain what it wants to see. That's how I recently managed to send out 40 invitations a with last paragraph that read, "Join in honoring ourselves at tour luncheon. You're expected, unless you RSVP regrets to ******@gmail.com or call 858-571-5390 a good excuse!" (I left out "with" after the phone number and my finger stuttered on the "t" key.)

Solution for sloppy writing: slow down and take the time to spell-check, pause a while, then review the writing with a relatively fresh look. Maybe you're writing too much, too fast.

Web 2.0 as Weapon

Every once in a while I carp about having posts scraped from my RSS feed and showing up on other's blogs with no links or permission, complete with copyright symbol. I usually send the violators an invoice from PayPal. (Most recent is a guy in China--slim chance there of getting paid!) See Fighting Against Blog Scrapers for more prevention and remedy possibilities. F'rinstance, I had not thought of "social sabotage" as a way of fighting back. Hmm. Yet another reason to sign up with Facebook and Twitter, especially. Web 2.0 as weapon.

Find Free Photos in the Morgue

Always looking out for graphics resources. The morguefile.com Where photo reference lives has finally finished reconstructing itself, so now I can suggest it as a place to find free photos. They explain:

The morguefile free photo reference archive provides the public and creative community with a repository of free raw photo materials. These images can be used in your commercial or private projects. If you have any questions, read the FAQs, if you can't find your answer or are having technical difficulties, submit a trouble ticket to the help desk Search or browse the archive below. If you would like to contribute photos, please register first. Please be sure to consult the terms and conditions of the site.

The galleries move by swiftly enough, if the thumbnails are a little too small, but I couldn't get the hang of the search engine yet. Maybe you have to be registered.

Ways With Words

Yesterday my car received its most expensive semi-annual wash EVAR! I handed the cashier my punch ticket for an eventually free wash, my $2-off coupon, and a ten dollar bill. "That's $10.99," she said. "The coupon is only good within two weeks." She pointed to some fine print that I couldn't read.

"Huh? Oh, but they've always given me the two dollars off before, and I've been coming here for years!" I pointed to the earliest date stamped on the card: March 2006.

"I know they did, but when we changed the prices, we stopped."

"You raised the price, so now you don't honor the coupons after two weeks? Is that right?" I asked. She nodded, as if this made sense. I guess it did to the management.

Incensed, I strutted my size four jeans two blocks down the street to try out a new Burger King mini-hamburger. (I know, I still haven't gotten over my weight loss victory! Bear with me.) I asked the cashier if I could buy just one and a drink. He mumbled. All kids mumble more as I age. Finally I caught, "Two or six."

I could have eaten just one, unlike Lay's potato chips. How do you think I lost 55 pounds? The fast food chain won't sell just one. When my two bites arrived, I understood why. The patties are linked together. I had to twist them apart to eat just one. And I did. And it was good. So was the other one.

Bad Grammar Makes Me [Sic]

From the OneHorseShy.com stable.

Branding Writers

Over at The Big Money, Jill Prilluck answers a question, "Can, and should, book authors become brands?":

A cubbyholed author—and often the publisher and agent—can be left hanging out to dry with a brand that no one really wants.

What do you think? Would it help or hinder your career if you branded yourself and your work a la Stephen King? It's too late for me, and looking back at the wide range of writing that I've done, I don't see how it would have been advantageous. It seems no different from "type casting" for movie stars.

Bed Side Reading

TBR is a label or heading seen in many other lit blogs, meaning "To Be Read". Because I retire to read, my TBRs pile up beside my bed. Hence, BSR, Bed Side Reading. The current tower is topped by an advance uncorrected proof of CAPENTARIA, Alexis Wright's insights of contemporary Aboriginals around the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. It is just the place I have wanted to visit--and didn't know! Wright's depiction of the blackfellas is quite different from everything else I've read. Although it is fiction, I can't help but believe the view is true, as the author is a member of the indigenous Waanyi tribe.

Remember all my carping about poorly-written YA vampire novels? I have to take some of the bitching back with my first reading in Jeaniene Frost's A Night Huntress series. AT GRAVE'S END (gift from a friend) is goooood! Good story, characters, interesting different vampire lore and best of all well-written. I have three other vampire books waiting, the first of another series and also from the same friend (Fangs, Betsy!) Well see if Richelle Mead's writing measures up.

Solidifying my leaning pillar of prose are both the ARC and finished copy of THE INVENTION OF AIR by Steven Johnson, whose publicist expected a reviewer to be able to evaluate nonfiction about Joseph Priestly sans notes, index, biblio or any other supporting material. I protested. He caved (the PR guy, I mean).

Others in the pile include the softcover of MATALA by Craig Holden (the hardbound version left me speechless, so I guess they thought they'd try sneaking it in again. It still goes down fast, but I'll spout about it this time. Promise!

MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE by Karen Harper sounds good (what if Shakespeare's wife wrote...?) and a surprise offering plunged into my back yard in the form of an expensively bound REVENGE OF THE SPELLMANS by Lisa Lutz. As if the hard copy silver binding isn't flashy enough, the dust jacket sports cutouts, and the colors (yellow, hot pink, chartreuse) just scream CHICK-LIT!!! Don't they? It's touted as humorous. I'll read any funny. And vampire. Any funny vampires out there? Oh, riiiight. There was one, CLUCK! the zombie chicken. Not chick-lit.
Rim shot.

Writing Business Pitfalls

Pitfalls litter the way to success for any writing business, now more than ever. Why am I keenly suited to warn about them? Because I've fallen into just about every one, starting back in the 50s: I sent three weeks' allowances in response to an ad in a comic book for a kit of "Sea Monkeys". The fairy shrimp eggs that arrived didn't even hatch!


When I began, it was all print advertising and snail mail. Now we are bombarded with pitches via various electronic modes, and the level of sophistication in scams, frauds, and cons has reached an overwhelming pinnacle. The worst ones prey on the most desperate and vulnerable: job seekers.

Most people know by now to avoid Craigslist, so notorious that it warns viewers about its own postings. But you're not safe if you only patronize well-known job boards. They lack the resources to adequately verify all information and to screen postings. The greatest problem is that con methods constantly evolve and fraud practices escalate. Here are some more tips to help you to protect yourself:

* don't provide bank or Social Security data
* ensure you're dealing with a legitimate company
* use a "disposable" email address
* follow practices outlined in Avoid Scams
* never pay for job leads
* follow my "Three Steps Rule" *
* avoid blind postings (no company name)

How can a job offer be a con? When there is no job, only a sales presentation, pressure to buy more false promises. How about identity theft via collection of information? Or scummy recruiters just out to collect resumes to boost their inventory for promoting their services to employers rather than offering job opportunities to the unemployed?

* Three Step Rule: Never take more than three steps to discover the identity of the employer, e.g., three clicks, visits to three different websites, three separate actions. By the time you finish the third step, if you still don't know who posted the job ad, it's likely bogus or at the least, you're probably not qualified.

Where You @?

Did you ever use the "at" sign before in email addresses and wonder how it was invented? I recall puzzling over that symbol on the typewriter, occasionally using it in a postal address for someone who was temporarily staying with someone else and using their address--but I wasn't sure that was proper.

In the archive of a British site about the language, I found this:

It's called the "at" or "ape tail" in English, the "arroba" in Spanish, the "chiocciola" in Italian. Everyone familiar with the internet knows we're talking about the symbol in an e-mail address separating the addressee's or sender's name from the server name.

It became part of cyberspace because in 1972 Ray Tomlinson, an American engineer who is one of the founding fathers of Arpanet, the predecessor to the present Internet,invented a system for individual electronic mail and used the @ symbol to distinguish a sender's name from the name of the electronic mail box. According to one source, Tomlinson chose this symbol "just because it was on the keyboard".

But where did the symbol come from? In documents of 16th century Italian businessmen in the International Institute for History of the Economy in Prado, IT, a researcher named Stabile found that the @ symbol was used to designate an "amphora", a unit of measure for wine commerce, especially in Venice. But the roots are even more antique. In an Arabic-Italian dictionary from 1492, Stabile found the Arabic word written as "@" meaning "amphora".

We Has Changes

Cheezburgers! We has 'em! (Like LOLcats)
Changes! We has 'em too, but you need to look at the blog's home page to see anything. You'll note, I hope, all the additions to the Reciprocity list down in the right column. Soon as I finished scouring the Web for new links and reconstructing this template to accommodate them, four more popped up. Why? The additions will be:

Antje's Notes
Blue Mango Books
Momentum of the Muse
The Night Country

Or am I so addled that I'm beginning to duplicate entries?

A new search engine graces the top of the same column. This one is supplied by BlogCatalog. It allows topic searches of this blog and displays them in a BlogCatalog window, along with a tab that gives the option of performing the same search in my social networks. Be sure to open it in a new window or tab, so you don't lose the connection with A Writer's Edge, just in case I forget to go back and adjust the script.

I found a semi-permanent setting for the Blogger's Choice Award badge at the top of the left column, by adding a text link for LinkedIn at the end of the menu beside my mug, completely removing the badge:
What else? Following up on Lori Tiron-Pandit's complaint the other day in the post on Blog Bloat about difficulty going back in the current posts because Blogger uses an Archives system, I moved 'em down to the bottom of the column...closer to where you'll be if you read posts to the end of the page and want to go farther back in time.

But more change plans are in the works. As I bounced around the net last night, I spotted a greatly reduced Archives feature: reduce them to a drop down menu/form. Of course I can't remember where I saw it, nor did I study the underlying code, but hey! How hard can it be? *she asked naively*

Resume Writing & Critiques

Hard times. Hard times. All sorts of writers are affected by these hard times. For many, and always for beginners, it's hard times as far as employment and writing are concerned. Lacking a sugar daddy or mama, we still must pay our bills. Many writers are moonlighters, part-timers, or have a "day job" and write in spare time.

Writing a resume is like no other writing. Resume styles change from time to time. The way you learned may not be the currently expected presentation. Now we tailor resumes to specific jobs. Broadcasting a general resume is an utter waste. We must quantify every jot and tittle of experience that we can. Keep a focus on finance. Money saved. Span of management. Numbers supervised.

One key is discovering what a company really needs and fitting your skills and record to fill that need. Be specific. If ever a piece of writing needed every word to count, it is in a resume. Write tight. Tighter still. That's easy to do if your have no experience or skills or a special talent. Workers just starting out have the most difficulty with resumes, because they feel they have nothing to say. You have more experience than you know.

To cop yet another cliché in this post, "due to popular demand" I am temporarily offering resume critiques, edits and general assistance. Don't forget the February Valentine Discount of 14% off any editorial services, resumes included. Send a copy of the job description and your resume, I'll take a look, and we'll work out a plan to help you find employment to support your writing habit.

Wiki Wars

Occasionally I flaunt (not flout) my ignorance on Yahoo Answers, a loosely vetted sort of public Q&A forum. I stick to the category closest to what I know best and the most about. Maybe.

I also belong to Answers.com, which is associated in some mysterious (to me) fashion with WikiAnswers, and if you're confused, too, it might have to do with the almost identical banners at the tops of the two sites' home pages. Apparently there's not enough differences between them to merit separate blogs, because the No Stupid Answers blog answers for both. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Earlier this month in WikiAnswers: setting the record straight. the company defended it's integrity (or something similar) against Jimmy Wales'statement on Wikia’s site that he is the “founder of Wikianswers”. Wikia is a wiki about wikis. If you don't know what a wiki is by now, I'm too dizzy to explain.

I do wonder, though, about Wikipedia. I thought it was the oldest informational wiki around. I know, I know, I'm missing the point. I just liked the title "Wiki Wars".

Valentine's Day Love from AWE

THE PURRRFECT GIFT!

Valentines for Writers

Select service, contact me and mention the 2009 Valentine gift, and you will receive a 14% discount on any services listed on the Editing Services page. Happy Valentine's Day 2009.

Plurals with Apostrophes

It's that insidious apostrophe again! Remember Lynne Truss' Apostrophe Posse from Eats, Shoots & Leaves? I should call them out to ride herd on the person writing copy for the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. Yesterday I resumed my weekly creative escapes to Balboa Park to view a small exhibit of Edward Steichen: The Early Years in the atrium gallery.

Being a wordy person, I can't just look at the pictures; reading the words of the adjacent display notes is mandatory, nay, compulsive. Twice, in different displays and on the website, the following appears:

....Steichen’s beautifully toned landscapes, sensual nudes and still life’s, and psychological portraits...

I thought perhaps "still life" was a special term. Should it be "still lives", I pondered. The apostrophe just didn't look right to me.

Out of the numerous returns when I searched Google, I chose dependable American and British references to consult the Beeb (BBC) and OWL at Purdue agreed that pluralizing nouns with an apostrophe is a no-no.

Simply put, from Answers:

*Dictionary: still life

n., pl. still lifes.

1. Representation of inanimate objects, such as flowers or fruit, in painting or photography.
2. A painting, picture, or photograph of inanimate objects.

I even scoured references from the Art Dictionary and Photography Dictionary at Answers, but they neatly skirted the issue by using the term as an adjective preceding words like images and pictures.

* The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Blog Bloat

Here it comes again, like when I forget to take lactase before drinking milk. BLOAT is overtaking the main page of this blog. Like Miss Marple's Nurse said in Murder by Death, "I can't help it. I'm old!"

The longer I blog, the farther the Archives list extends. There must be some alternative to omitting it entirely. Omitting it partially? (A very little joke on myself there. Avoid adverbs.)

I realized this problem, creeping up like the rising tide, as I pondered where to put the latest bling, the badge for the Blogger's Choice Award nomination. Don't worry, I'm not going to mention it every day. Would once a week be too much? Monthly? Should I check the stats daily? Am I obsessed? No, overjoyed!

Seriously, if I try to follow the advice I give others about a web page not forcing readers to scroll down more than two screens, I wouldn't be able to fit in all the Reciprocity listings, let alone everything else I want. Too much blog bling? How do you feel about blog pages that just go on and on?

Vote for A Writer's Edge

Isn't this just the cutest little thing?

You can actually read the words if you visit the page. Many thanks to the fabulous Lori Widmer (who I do not even know) of Words on the Page (from which I'm learning lots) for nominating A Writer's Edge for a Blogger's Choice Award. She selected the category of Business Blogs, thereby saving me the embarrassment of nominating my own blog as Best Blog Evar!

Best Blogs Awards Again

Best Blogs is once again hosting the fabulous Blogger's Choice Awards in a variety of categories, none of which A Writer's Edge fits into, unless you count "Best Blog Design" or "Best Blog of All Time" (I doubt).

They greet us with:

Welcome to the Blogger's Choice Awards, the most popular user-generated blog voting site on the planet! We are now accepting nominations for the 2009 competition. Sign up and vote for your favorite (and least favorite) blogs to help determine the winners for next year.

Take a look and tell me what you think. Last year's winners are available. It's a long scroll. And if you feel so inclined as to nominate A Writer's Edge, please let me know that you did and in which category. Send that info to writers.edge[AT]gmail.com and you will win a bribe prize!

Cliché, Trite & Unworthy

If I never again hear the following phrases, I won't miss them:

on a daily basis

life as we know it

I suspect these are clichés in the making, hence the title of this post. What about you? What contemporary overused phrases are driving you up the wall?

I looked back over the few times I've previously posted on clichés. Remember the guy who asked for a source of them? He was on deadline and "needed" a cliché for a headline, he said. I was quite happy to see that Cliche Finder is still alive and kicking (oops!) I wonder if you could search there to confirm a phrase's status?

Oh well. Add your most unfave phrases in comments below this post.

Self-Published Book Reviewed

Stop the presses! A major newspaper reviews a self-published book. The San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Caroline Dipping today interviews David Nuffer, author of The Best Friend I Ever Had, yet another book about Ernest Hemingway. Well, O.K., to be honest, the article in the Currents/Passages (obits) section is not really a book review, although Dipping writes,

...Nuffer reveals Hemingway in a personal light that even early reviews by scholars grudgingly admit they never knew....

and mentions the publisher, Xlibris, on the front page. Towards the end of the article she mentions Nuffer's decision to self-publish after shopping his manuscript to only five agents, and she quotes him, "They all came back and said 'No.' I knew I had to self publish."

Happy Birthday, Cali

Divine wisdom from the Oracle on Escobar:

Know what happened this week back in 1850, 158 years ago?

California became a state.
The State had no electricity.
The State had no money.
Almost everyone spoke Spanish.
There were gunfights in the streets.

So basically, it was just like California today; except back then, women had real breasts and the men didn't hold hands.

Amazon Omnivoracious Widget

I'm not sure this will display, but I'm going to attempt to show a new (to me) Amazon Widget that I just stumbled across. It's called Omnivoracious and reveals snippets of book reviews from the Amazon blog on books. You can put it on your website, a web page, into the template of your blog (it comes in different sizes). Here goes:

If nothing shows above, then JavaScripts still doesn't work inside a post, and I'll try to insert a screenshot. (I have no place in my template to put it.)

Writing a Life Story

How to tell the story of your life is a writing goal I hear and read about frequently. At a recent gathering of San Diego bloggers, a young man asked me for help for his father, who is trying to produce such a manuscript. "He's had an amazing life, and the situation in [another country] is so terrible!"

Questions revolve around where to start, what to include, how to get a point across. On that last issue, memoir veers off into persuasive essay and the purpose of the writing changes. That is not a good idea. The young man was surprised to hear me say that memoir isn't just a biography with feelings and neither would be successful books if they are therapeutic writings or change efforts.

"If we could just get this story out to the right people in Washington," urged the writer of a different book. He hopes to capture the attention of governmental movers and shakers to correct a condition (that no doubt affects him).

How to untangle the confusion about books of personal persuasion, biography and memoir? All involve at least a part of a person's life, true stories, too. They may disclose heretofore unknown information, like the wife of an "unfairly" convicted murderer insisted when she asked for assistance telling her husband's tale. I could hear rage and indignation; she was fairly frothing to "set the record straight."

I told her that a book based on anger or revenge or a grudge isn't a very good reason to write. It is, however, a perfect example of therapeutic writing, but not a viable candidate for sale to a publisher, so it would not fulfill her purpose of "getting the story out there."

"If you can present verifiable facts, or maybe if your husband is someone famous, then such a book might be successful," I said. It was not what she wanted to hear, I'm sure. "Otherwise you would be wasting a lot of time and effort." I wasn't surprised when she didn't call again.

A biography, on the other hand, is a dispassionate review of the events of a person's life, often beginning to end or to the current time. Once it was fashionable to break it up into a series, but I think few have the patience for that kind of reading these days.

Far more compelling are memoirs, which slip into the newer genre of creative nonfiction. Good ones have a clear focus, a theme, and may cover only a brief period of the author's life. They include emotions and represent a personal view of what the writer experienced. More latitude is "allowed" in writing about the facts of a situation, exactly because it is only one person's interpretation of what happened. Literary devices seen in fiction are common in memoirs.

Too many essays and book proposals (usually a first book written, even novels) have great therapeutic value for the writer. Just don't confuse your enthusiastic investment in the topic for potential readers' interest. Really, one description of the bipolar state, miscarried babies, dysfunctional families, alcoholism and/or drug addiction, sexual abuse, and struggles with depression is enough. At a conference, an editor privately mentioned this list. She said, "If I see another synopsis about one of these, I am going to scream!"

Demand Perfection, Find Failure

When we insist on perfection, we are just asking for failure. How's that?

• Perfection is a statistical impossibility. Sure, the sun will probably rise tomorrow, but we can't have 100% certainty about the event.
• Perfection is a fluctuating, ephemeral set of criteria always subject to change.

Veteran writers are familiar with the truism that you can always continue to edit a piece of writing. Edit it to death, even. Similarly, many writers never feel their productions are perfect; some can't even articulate their standards for the highest quality.

News reporters quickly become familiar with the notion of "good enough", that is, the story is turned in before deadline and the editor does not hand it back for any corrections or changes. Demanding perfection of either yourself or the writing, under those circumstances, would get you fired because you wouldn't be productive enough to keep on the payroll.

The same is true for creative writing--and life in general, I think. I cringe every time I hear the phrase "struggling writer". It is almost always applied to someone writing a novel. If you didn't know it already, here's a publishing secret: it's the story, stupid. It's all about the story. The story is the most important part. Worrying over the words, literally, might apply if you are in the upper echelons of academic, literary writing, aiming for the Nobel, Pulitzer, Orange, or any other top book award.

Why is it that the most important lessons we learn about living seem to come too late: ones like raising a happy only child or easing your parents' last years. By the time you figure out how to do it well, the opportunity has passed. You never get to do it again. I've come to realize something about perfection, perhaps soon enough for it to make a difference in my last years and earlier for you, I hope: because no one and nothing is or ever can be perfect, and so many times "good enough" is good enough, insisting on perfection will always bring sadness and pain. To you, and to others.

Never thought you'd hear that from a professional editor, huh? Our goal is to remove all the errors from your writing and polish it to ... not the peak of perfection, just polish it up to sparkle. How's that? There's nothing wrong with aiming for perfection as long as you just hang on to what you've got (R&R lyrics) and rejoice in what's good enough. Willingness to settle for less than perfection must be akin to accepting compromise (another one I'm working on!) Otherwise, your life will be filled with failures of all kinds.

New Feed, Now Ads

Just a note to let you know that I'm aware of the Google ads inserted between blog posts in the email version of A Writer's Edge and in the RSS feeds formerly supplied by FeedBurner, now a part of the giganticus Google family. The new feed address is: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/writers-edge/EElx, however I've been assured that you don't really need to change anything, as the old feed address will be redirected to the new location.

When Google took over, I opted for allowing the advertising temporarily as an experiment. I wanted to see both what the ads look like and which businesses displayed. So far I am not unhappy. If you receive the feed or email version of the blog posts, what do you think?

Is the appearance objectionable? Have I compromised my integrity somehow? And while I'm at it about advertising, is anybody familiar with a service company called "Wikimetro". They are soliciting A Writer's Edge either to carry an ad for them or participate in their self-service advertising market (difficult to decipher their communications).

Answers from Agualusa

"Finally!" some people are saying. "Last summer she promised us an interview with international author José Eduardo Agualusa, held a contest for the best question, and what? Nothing for months!"

The delay produced a sad and ironic twist, especially for the contest winner, Sonya Chrisman. Her entry, "If you could be any character in your book, which would it be, and likewise, which would you not want to be?" won her a copy of Agualusa's THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS. She was also interested in the memory aspects of the book. Upon winning, Sonya wrote:

A memory is very precious to people. They are not only something very personal, they're free. Then, when we begin to lose our memories due to illness or old age, it's a tragedy. In Mr. Agualusa's book, memories are more than just precious. They are a precious commodity. If his world were a reality, which end of the spectrum would he rather be on character wise, the one that sells the memories or the one who receives them?

Then in October, Sonya and her husband, Michael, were injured in a motorcycle accident. These weren't crazy kids, either, just a sedate middle-aged (I think) couple out enjoying a ride in the Midwest autumn when suddenly their lives were changed forever. Sonya wrote recently:

...my comment...was foreboding of what was to come in my life...Michael sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. His memories are blurred, and yes, some have been lost. His short-term memory is shot. Memories are precious and to lose them is tragic. My own words have a deeper meaning.

It is with a heavy heart for Sonya, Michael, and their family and many friends, that I dedicate the interview with Agualusa and my review of his fascinating book (with some of the interview information more artfully arranged, I hope).

Other posts and pages in this saga:

Writing Mini-Reviews
Contest to win a Book
Questioning Jose Agualusa
Book Reviews
Author Interviews

Fun with Books in San Diego

Last night the San Diego Public Library held the 43rd Annual Local Authors Exhibit. Yes, some of the authors were on exhibit, as well as the books they'd published in 2008. This was the first time I'd attended (having never published a book, I was never eligible) thanks to my friend, Betsy Chamberlin. Here she is, near her murder mystery, Death in the Shadow.

I connected with many authors I know, but I'd forgotten that one of my website clients, Ralph Cates' Black October also came out last year. That's us below.


Joseph Wambaugh's newest, Hollywood Crows: A Novel was on display, but I didn't spot our famous ex-cop author. Nor were my eyes sharp enough to read all the name tags to see if attendees included Ken Blanchard, Sylvia Browne, Lee Silber, Thomas Larsen, Ken Kuhlken, Chet Cunningham, or Robert Griswold, although a large turnout enjoyed the event, especially the scrumptious canapes. Warm crab spread on baguette and toasty brie with broccoli en croute were to die for! Kudos to the Friends of the Central Library for their hospitality and hard work.

Residents and visitors to San Diego will be able to view the collection of local authors' books on display in the main library downtown until February 28.