(Sidenote before I even begin: My computer is doing this weird thing where everything is bold right now? I don’t understand. Why is the Internet so wonky?)

This past weekend, I had the best writing experience of my life. I’ve been working on my next book, which is a soft sci-fi that will (hopefully) expand into some sort of a multi-book series ( ( Read more... )

Regular readers of this blog will know that the course of book two never did run smooth…at least for this writer (me). But today came some good news-my editor called and told me that she really liked the book we turned in a few weeks ago and she’s going to publish it! INSERT HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF HERE. It has a tentative pub season of Fall 2012, ( Read more... )

So as regular readers may know, my comments tool is trashed for some reason and every comment that’s left here needs to be approved, but I don’t get approval notices, it just pretends that it’s spam. So I often don’t see comments until way after the fact, but anyway Shannel said on my final Watson post:

I love that Jeopardy follows up Watson with ( Read more... )

So as you know, I finished my most recent draft of The Opposite of Hallelujah a week ago and sent it to my agent. It’s at this point, when you’re a writer, that you end up sitting in your pajamas on a Saturday morning wondering, “What do I do NOW?” That’s if, like, you’re single and childless-I’m sure authors who are also parents have plenty to do ( Read more... )

The other day, Alex and I were joking around online about making each other the executors of our literary estates if something were to (God forbid) happen to us, and then a few days later Alex sent me this link to Neil Gaiman’s blog post about “taking care of your posthumous intellectual property.” It includes a downloadable PDF of a will that you ( Read more... )

Now that I’m back in New York (and what an odyssey that has been! But at least I missed the blizzard), I’m going through my Google Reader and taking a look at the “year in review” posts all the authors I follow have written and feel a bit compelled to write my own, especially since it’s my debut year.

Not to be a huge Debbie Downer, because that’s ( Read more... )

I don’t remember the last time I talked in depth about what’s going on in the writing realm of my life these days, and I’m too lazy to go through the archives to figure it out, so let’s just say it’s been a while? This does not mean, however, that I haven’t been working! In August/September/October, I was busy writing The Opposite of Hallelujah, or ( Read more... )

This Harry Potter fan vid. It’s seriously amazing:



I’ve been watching it over and over and over again. It’s pretty much perfect, and very impressive-it amazes me sometimes what people are capable of, and what they’ll do just because, not for money or fame or whatever else people do things for these days (iPads!).

Relatedly, I read this book last ( Read more... )

You guys, I think you might be able to download Beatles music on iTunes now. I just have a feeling…


( Read more... )

I wish I kept a running list of the things I look up when I’m writing a novel. For instance, today I:

• Called my mom for help in figuring out where rich people would live in Chicago in the late 1800s (she suggested somewhere on Prairie Ave)
• Googled, in essence, “that bigger pole on the end of a staircase railing”. The Internet reminded me that a ( Read more... )