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Category Archives: Books

Writing resolutions 2012

This year, I will: • write every day • spend 2 hours or more every week marketing my work • travel to Spain for research • finish another print-worthy novel • have something I wrote for sale (or bought) by November • volunteer to judge or coordinate 3 writing contests • continue to volunteer as [...]

Posted 02 January 2012 † nickyp § Learning § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Writing successes 2011

This past year, I: • spent more than 300 hours writing (not web-surfing or sitting, but writing) • spent more than 120 hours doing volunteer work • finished 1 print-worthy book (!) • submitted my work to agents and editors, and got good critiques and notes • wrote 1 good short story and started 2 [...]

Posted 01 January 2012 † nickyp § Learning § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

The country’s library

This past Saturday I got to tour the Library of Congress with my some of my buddies from Washington Romance Writers. A WRW member, Virginia Virtucci, worked at LoC for 38 years and now volunteers as a docent, and she took us down hallways, up stairs and all around, describing just a few of the [...]

Posted 09 June 2011 † nickyp § Learning § Playing ‡ Comments (0) °

Conventioneering

This week, I’m headed to Los Angeles for the RT Booklovers convention. It’s put on by RT Book Reviews magazine, formerly Romantic Times magazine but it’s branched out to cover most genre fiction (mystery, fantasy, horror, etc.). I’ve not been before, but I hear it has fun parties and good workshops. Unlike the other writing [...]

Posted 04 April 2011 † nickyp § Marketing § Writing ‡ Comments (0) °

Release the queries!

So, I’ve started shopping my latest story. Here is the work-in-progress description. Next week, I’m thinking of adding another excerpt on the blog from later in story. Like the news lately, it’s about unarmed people gathering together and facing threat from armed forces. [UPDATE: Uh-oh, the scene also has a couple spoilers in it, so [...]

Posted 21 March 2011 † nickyp § Marketing § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

What are your favorite books about the brain?

Over at the Dana Foundation, we are gathering a list of the best neuroscience books for general readers, to publish later this year in our Cerebrum e-magazine. Our current list was published in 1999, so it’s time for an update. Please help us out by taking our quick survey. You can name just one book, or [...]

Posted 10 June 2010 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) °

Housekeeping

Last month’s book-club pick was Marilynne Robinson’s HOUSEKEEPING, and it has taken me weeks to decide how I feel about it. Actually, I knew how I felt right away but discounted it because it doesn’t seem to match the tide of accolades the book has received. But I just didn’t enjoy it. It seems to [...]

Posted 30 April 2010 † nickyp § Playing ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged:

How the reading is going

So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling. But I have never thought that traits that are [...]

Posted 06 February 2010 † nickyp § Reading § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Midnight’s Children

I found Salman Rushdie’s breakout novel all it was cracked up to be, though it did take me about 50 pages to fully commit. It is dense and circular, eschews some common internal punctuation, and has a fantastic story bedded in sharp detail and joy in the wordsmithing. For a dense book, I read it [...]

Posted 21 December 2009 † nickyp § Reading ‡ Comments (0) °

Writing in the present tense

So, in clearing the decks for National Novel Writing Month, I’m crash-reading NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, and, no surprise, it’s not working. Gaskell’s writing demands a slow read, tasting all her clear phrases and cogent observations. And I know I said this earlier about MARY BARTON, but it reads so darn modern, I [...]

Posted 31 October 2009 † nickyp § Reading § Writing ‡ Comments (1) °