A Tale of Three Maxims

Ever fallen so in love with a book that you could literally see every moment? You smell the smell of each location, feel the temperature of the air, hear the specific pitch of every voice saying every line? People like us should not watch book-to-movies. I recently finished reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier to my husband J. I’d read it three times already. I love the story and have vivid...

Books that Shaped Us

I'm starting a new post idea called Books that Shaped Us, where we can talk about those books which influenced us most in childhood and what we remember of them. This idea started a few weekends ago when my husband and I went for a family visit to my parents' house. In digging through the basement (for some unfathomable reason), we stumbled upon an old plastic bin full of the books I owned in...

So Many YA Books!

The size of my reading que approaches unbelievable lengths this week. I'm still trying to finish PURE by Terra Elan McVoy--I started this one primarily out of curiosity, to see how an author would handle the Christian faith in a mainstream YA novel about sex and friendship. My search for further volumes of Tanith Lee's CLAIDI JOURNALS turned up empty. Oh, I found them at the library all right,...

Plugging Away at Edits

I never thought I would become one of those grouchy editors who breaks your heart by telling you to rearrange your story! Okay, so I'm never grouchy about telling people that, and I really hope I'm not breaking hearts. But being an assistant editor, I have already run across some stories that are solid gold--if only most of the plot were shuffled around. Sigh. It's hard to give that kind of...

Thwarted Desires

When director Steven Spielberg first watched the recent movie hit "Paranormal Activity" (at that time just a low-budget indie film), he found it successfully scary and wrought with frightening tension. He had only one complaint; change the ending. Though the film succeeded in scripting, acting, tension and creativity, the ending alone could have been enough to sink it. Why? Because the original...