Book Giveaway - Night Noise

I am giving away two free copies of my most recent book, Night Noise, an ecothriller with romantic elements, through March. Go to Goodreads Giveaways to enter.

Murder can ruin a spring morning. And destroy everything Miller Abel has loved and trusted. Her family murdered, Miller is living in the dead zone and planning revenge, when FBI antiterrorist agent, Robert Matisse, knocks on her door. Grabbing at the opportunity to work with him and unravel a connection between the murders and his ecoterrorism case, she throws herself into the path of a killer and there's no way Matisse can stop her.

Poem for a Young Girl

This is a poem for Emily on the two year anniversary of her death. I found the poem recently, apparently having written in the midst of our very big sadness. The sharing of a sense of loss must be a part of the human condition so as to not be alone.

POEM FOR A YOUNG GIRL-GONE

by Judi Romaine

POEM FOR A YOUNG GIRL GONE

I am sad.
The little mouse, alone now in its glass cage.
Waiting.
The room with nothing there like a life.
Or a life concluded at eight with pink slippers and dolls. And some videos of us when we were happy.
Nothing is there.
Where did she go?
Where does a person’s life go?
It evaporates into the air, except those few,
who leave behind a monument, a book, a creation of some sort
—or a child.

WHAT ARE YOU READING? WHAT ARE OTHERS READING?

Our choices in books are so personal to us--and there are so many choices out there. Of course, many of us are influenced by the best sellers. As my friends can tell you, I became a Stieg Larsson fanatic when I picked up his first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

What are you reading these days. I'm reading "The Murderer's Daughters"by Randy Susan Meyers, an exceptionally well written book that I believe would be considered Womens Fiction based around families broken due to violence. It's not my normal reading and I am struggling a bit with the plot, since I favor more desperate, on-edge plots aka Dragon Tattoo, but reading different genres is interesting.


Some statistics on what we are all reading these days
From Romance Writers of America web site:

Comparison of fiction sales in 2010:

• Romance: $1.358 billion
• Religion/inspirational: $759 million
• Mystery: $682 million
• Science fiction/fantasy: $559 million
• Classic literary fiction: $455 million

The five hottest books right now 
From The Daily Book Beast:

° My Long Trip Home
by Mark Whitaker
An award-winning journalist turns his pen on his own complex family history.

° Mr. Fox
by Helen Oyeyemi
A battle of the sexes sets the stage for this fairytale-inspired novel.

° Headhunters
by Jo Nesbo
Norway’s most successful author pens a cerebral thriller for the crime-fiction junkie.

° American Gangbang
by Sam Benjamin
In this hilarious memoir, an Ivy-League grad pursues his dream to make artful pornography.
   
° Loose Diamonds
by Amy Ephron
Fascinating recollections from author Amy Ephron


10 Best Summer Beach Reading *probably appealing to women
From Good Housekeeping:
Then Came You
by Jennifer Weiner
The queen of chick lit returns with a new novel about four women, bound by obligation and opportunity, who must struggle to become a family.

The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
The twenties are roaring, and a not-yet-famous Ernest Hemingway has just met the woman who will be his first (of four) wives; she narrates this engrossing novel about their love and its undoing.

State of Wonder
by Ann Patchett
A researcher flies to Brazil in search of her former mentor, who in turn is hunting for a drug that can extend fertility past 60. Delusion? Think Heart of Darkness with formidable female leads.

Planting Dandelions
by Kyran Pittman
Pittman's memoir wryly and perceptively traces her improbable path from a bohemian 70s childhood in Newfoundland to her current “semi-domesticated” life as a wife and a mother of three in the American South.

The Gap Year
By Sarah Bird
A shy teen takes up with the high school football star, then vanishes with her trust fund. Her parents (exes) reunite to track her down. A funny story about growing pains, with a twist or three.

The Memory of All That
by Katharine Weber
Weber’s family boasts a slew of characters: Grandma was Gershwin’s mistress, while a granddad inspired Annie’s Daddy Warbucks. This rollicking memoir does them all justice.

Conquistadora
by Esmeralda Santiago
A Spanish bride sails to Puerto Rico in 1844 to help run her in-laws’ plantation. There, she battles heat, disease, and the cruelty of slavery — and comes out on top, defying convention at every turn.

Caleb’s Crossing
by Geraldine Brooks
Curl up, literary romantics: It’s 1665, and a secret, risky friendship is set to unfold between a Native American graduate of Harvard and a minister’s daughter who herself yearns for education

Nothing Daunted
by Dorothy Wickenden
Drawing on a cache of old letters, Wickenden tells the true story of two Smith grads (one of them her grandmother) who venture out to rugged Colorado in 1916 to teach in a frontier school and leave an indelible mark.

Sister
by Rosamund Lupton
When her artist sister is found dead, Bee doesn’t buy the suicide verdict. She moves into Tess’s London flat, befriends her friends, and gnaws her way toward the truth. Taut and tingling.


So what are you reading and why are you reading it?  Just asking, since so many of us fill our leisure with books, and hey, you wouldn't have come to this web site unless you read and/or wrote. What do you suggest we read?

WHERE DID ALL THOSE RULES COME FROM?

HERE'S SOME INTERESTING HISTORY OF WRITING - FROM PUNCTUATION TO GRAMMAR. FOR FURTHER READING, SEE THE LINKS TO THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE WEB SITES.

HISTORY OF PUNCTUATION AND GRAMMAR

Many punctuation marks are less venerable than we might imagine. Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520.
onlinewsj.com

HEMINGWAY'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS PUNCTUATION

"My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. . . . You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements."
(Ernest Hemingway, letter to Horace Liveright, May 22, 1925)

Hemingway's attitude toward punctuation sounds eminently sensible: make sure that you know the rules before you break them. Sensible, maybe, but not entirely satisfactory. After all, just who made up these rules (or conventions) in the first place?
GRAMMAR.ABOUT.COM

A brief history of grammar teaching in England
 
You may wonder why grammar teaching has been out of fashion for some time, and why it has come back. The following very brief history may help you to put the recent history into context. Click here for more details about developments in the twentieth century.
    •    The ancient world took grammar teaching very seriously as a foundation for instruction in writing skills - hence the link between the word grammar and the Greek gramma, 'written character'. Another perceived benefit was for thinking skills, where grammar was paired with logic and rhetoric.
    •    The 18th century developed prescriptive grammar teaching, and tried to analyse English grammar as though it was the same as Latin grammar. Grammar teaching in school was mainly about (a) Latin and (b) avoiding 'errors' in English.
    •    The 19th century developed historical linguistics as an important university research subject, with heavy emphasis on how languages are related but little impact on school grammar teaching. Meanwhile, English literature, in the struggle to establish itself as a university subject, saw language as its competitor for the title 'English'.
    •    The early 20th century saw a steady decline in the quality of grammar teaching in English schools, and increasing calls for its abandonment. One reason for this decline was the complete lack of university-level research on English grammar, which led a government report in 1921 to conclude that [it is] “…impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is…”. Another reason was an energetic campaign on behalf of literature, presented as a liberal and liberating alternative to the the so-called 'grammar-grind'.
    •    The later 20th century (from about 1960) saw two competing trends.
    •    Most schools stopped teaching grammar in English (and somewhat later in MFL); meanwhile, Latin teaching had largely died out too, so pupils no longer had any systematic instruction in grammar. This is the educational background of most young English teachers.
    •    English grammar became an important research subject, partly driven by the overseas publishing market in English as a Foreign Language and partly by the intellectual impetus of theoretical linguistics. Most universities now have a department of Linguistics or of English Language where undergraduates study English grammar. This is the research background of the 'modern grammar' espoused by the KS3 Strategy.
UCL-AC-UK

History of Grammar
 
The first attempts to study grammar began in about the 4th cent. B.C., in India with Panini's grammar of Sanskrit and in Greece with Plato's dialogue Cratylus. The Greeks, and later the Romans, approached the study of grammar through philosophy. Concerned only with the study of their own language and not with foreign languages, early Greek and Latin grammars were devoted primarily to defining the parts of speech. The biblical commentator Rashi attempted to decipher the rules of ancient Hebrew grammar. It was not until the Middle Ages that grammarians became interested in languages other than their own. The scientific grammatical analysis of language began in the 19th cent. with the realization that languages have a history; this led to attempts at the genealogical classification of languages through comparative linguistics. Grammatical analysis was further developed in the 20th cent. and was greatly advanced by the theories of structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar (see linguistics).
Read more: grammar: History — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0858447.html#ixzz1bkE2479H
Infoplease.com

HAVING REJECTION BLUES?

 

Check out these various sites recalling those surprising rejections from publishers, some classic authors rejected many, many, many times.

From WritersRelief

1. John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times.
2. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul) received 134 rejections.
3. Beatrix Potter had so much trouble publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she initially had to self-publish it.
4. Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted  

From Neatorama

Everyone's heard the story of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Plenty of publishers took a gander at the Chosen One and decided not to choose him, including bigwigs like Penguin and HarperCollins. Jo Rowling finally decided to try a small London firm called Bloomsbury, who accepted only after the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter read the book and declared it a winner."

"Gone With the Wind – one of the most enduring novels and movies of all time, of course. There aren’t too many people who haven’t heard the phrase, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But it was 38 publishers who didn’t give a damn originally. When Margaret Mitchell finally found a publisher in Macmillan (Macmillan also published White Fang and Call of the Wild)."

From WritersServices


Anais Nin
'There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic.'
Jack Kerouac
'His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation.  But is that enough?  I don't think so.'

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence

'for your own sake do not publish this book.'

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

'an irresponsible holiday story'

And finally, a list of how often famous writers got rejected along with a few coping skills from WritingClasses 

Three tips for coping with rejection:

1. Laugh at your rejections.
2. Learn from your rejections.
3. Always have a new project underway, something that will give you hope no matter how many rejections come your way for the previous project.

You may take some consolation in knowing the rejection history of these writers and works:
Dune by Frank Herbert – 13 rejections
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – 14 rejections
Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis – 17 rejections
Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 18 rejections  
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle – 29 rejections 
Carrie by Stephen King – over 30 rejections 

HELP! I Need a Good Book to Read - Best Book Lately?

Image is from Random House FB

I have been struggling for a year to find some fiction that captivates me as much as The Millennium Trilogy (Stieg Larsson) so I've decided to toss it out to the world and see if there is some great stuff I am missing. Help me find a good book to read - anything you like that's pretty well written and has a captivating story.

Here's what I've sort of read this past year:
1) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
2) The Girl Who Played With Fire
3) The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
4) The Snowman

I know, these are all suspense  - suspense is good but I can read other things. What do you say? 

10 HAPPIEST JOBS IN THE WORLD (AND 10 MOST HATED)

No, this isn't a blog entry about writing (*except Authors are #4 on list) but I was fascinated by the article in Forbes listing the ten happiest jobs so here they are: 

1.  Clergy:  The least worldly are reported to be the happiest of all

2. Firefighters: Eighty percent of firefighters are “very satisfied” with their jobs, which involve helping people.

3. Physical therapists: Social interaction and helping people apparently make this job one of the happiest.

4. Authors: For most authors, the pay is ridiculously low or non-existent, but the autonomy of writing down the contents of your own mind apparently leads to happiness.

5.  Special education teachers: If you don’t care about money, a job as special education teacher might be a happy profession. The annual salary averages just under $50,000.

6. Teachers: Teachers in general report being happy with their jobs, despite the current issues with education funding and classroom conditions. The profession continues to attract young idealists, although fifty percent of new teachers are gone within five years.

7. Artists: Sculptors and painters report high job satisfaction, despite the great difficulty in making a living from it.

8. Psychologists: Psychologists may or may not be able to solve other people’s problems, but it seems that they have managed to solve their own.

9. Financial services sales agents: Sixty-five percent of financial services sales agents are reported to be happy with their jobs. That could be because some of them are clearing more than $90,000 dollars a year on average for a 40-hour work week in a comfortable office environment.

10. Operating engineers: Playing with giant toys like bulldozers, front-end loaders, backhoes, scrapers, motor graders, shovels, derricks, large pumps, and air compressors can be fun.  With more jobs for operating engineers than qualified applicants, operating engineers report being happy.

And then the list of the 10 most hated jobs:

1. Director of Information Technology

2. Director of Sales and Marketing

3. Product Manager

4. Senior Web Developer

5. Technical Specialist

6. Electronics Technician

7. Law Clerk

8. Technical Support Analyst

9. CNC Machinist

10. Marketing Manager

 

For the rest of the story see Forbes Article