Celestial Chicken Blog

…than a box of your books, just arrived, the ink still drying on their pages?

Sometimes, it’s great to be working on a college campus, even if it is just the community college. Monday I attended the distribution party for our campus’ literary magazine, called Currents. One of my department members, who is also a student, had three of his works published in the book. Getting into Currents is not [...]

I needed to add a new scene to The Book With No Name to press forward the romance. I removed a big chunk of completely out-of-place and overly-dramatic action, and had to put something else in there to take its place, something that made sense. So, I put the two of them in church. What [...]

Okay, I started reading a book by Johanna Lindsay that I had not read yet. She is one of my favorite historical romance writers, although I think she’s not writing any more. But one of my problems with her is the strange names she comes up with for her characters. This current book, [...]

I am reluctant to tell you who said this, as most of you already know I’d bake him into a cake and eat him if I thought I could…but this comes from Neil Gaiman’s blog today, in answer to a 16 year old’s query about what Neil would tell his younger self about writing if [...]

From USAToday: LONDON — A heavyweight study of the future of soft cheese has won Britain’s annual competition to find the year’s oddest book title. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, by Philip M. Parker won the Diagram Prize, awarded Friday by trade magazine The Bookseller. The runner-up was primate study [...]

Just suggest that you are going to put their latest crush, best friend, or themselves in your book. “Mah-uh-uhm!” I hear from the back seat as I’m driving when I say that I should put local news reporter Ryan Dean in my next book. “He’s MINE!” I reminded her that there are more than [...]

I continue to work on The Book With No Name. I was editing the beginning, but felt like I needed to edit the end, so I headed to the end and chopped and remolded and chopped again and remolded. Having to change the historical footprint for the book has been a big PITA, [...]