There is a very specific voltage of delight that comes over you when someone finds your book in the wild, reads it, and loves it. Thank you!

How to Get a Great Idea for a Novel

feat. my novel TOWARD ETERNITY, published by HarperCollins everywhere ✨🪐

US: www.harpercollins.com/products/tow...
UK: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/towa...

Another day of trying to just do my normal calls and emails and chores while listening to the president's goons actively work to unravel the fabric of the United States what a time to be alive and have an internet connection beep boop

"of course" doing Olympics-level heavy lifting

Wasn't on board til this extremely compelling platform. You have my vote and I'm ready to commission the opera

Not only a terrific analysis of the particulars of this case but also throws in a banger like "As a technology, it is a net evil for the human race, a stultifying digital Wire Mother wreaking havoc on a population with no natural immunity"?? Emily you absolute diva (complimentary)

The queen in Snow White except instead of seeking constant reassurance from a mirror that I am the fairest in the land, I seek reassurance every time a new AI feature pops up in something I use that the AI still can't satisfyingly finish "Kubla Khan"

Poets--

Smith College just opened submissions for the new Tammis Day Poetry Prize, awarded for an unpublished debut collection by a woman poet over the age of forty.

It is the only such literary prize in the United States.

Full details at the link:
www.ninesyllablespress.com/tdprize

👁️

Just learned from my author Betsy Rubiner that some archives refer to the genre I'd call "life writing" (journals, diaries, memoir, some kinds of blogs and early social media) as "ego media".

EGO! MEDIA!

(Launch event for OUR DIARIES, OURSELVES by Betsy Rubiner at @politicsprose.bsky.social)

Whenever you come to the inevitable conclusion that there's a memoir here...my contact info is on the website

OK but Keble's word isn't "heyyyy oops we built the whole thing with midcentury concrete that is bad at being concrete and now we need to hold classes in tents for years while we fundamentally rethink this"

Those were some fun alumni magazine issues to receive 🫠

www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/raac/

Does anyone else hear "Ro Khanna" and have to remind themselves that's a member of Congress and not a member of the Maquis resisting Cardassian domination

Fuck marry kill but the choices are different ways to cope with a global social disconnection crisis

Huh!

An exuberanly galumphing "I was born on the side of a hill" gets quoted almost as often around here as "where's my other shoe / help me find my other shoe" from She Loves Me gets sung in missing-one-shoe situations

(I have ADHD and little kids so such occasions arise frequently)

oh thank goodness

It keeps happening and yet I am appalled every time

Never in the history of the world has an agent thought "what a clever way to transgress clearly stated processes! This is a person I want to form a business partnership with and link my professional reputation to"

It has happened multiple times and it happened again today. Different guys each time. (Always guys.)

This one asked to speak to an assistant--by name--and said he wanted a personal referral from her to agents who represent his genre.

Cannot underscore enough that the way to find a literary agent is *not* to ignore all the freely available submission guidelines and instead wander around an agency's physical office until someone asks what you're doing there

Do you recite "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much poop in him" in a Lady Macbeth voice when your 3 y/o goes potty or are you normal

Black Friday reminder: You can support independent bookstores and get great deals without lining the pockets of billionaires 😌

"Extraordinarily moving, exquisitely written, and socially revolutionary...RING OF SALT glows with what we need."

Thrilled to see this rave review in the Irish Times for @betsycornwell.bsky.social's new memoir RING OF SALT!

Next time reactionary backlash jerkoffs object to "new" raceblind Disney casting I'm reminding everyone about the time we had a white king and a black queen as the parents of an Asian prince wooing Bernadette Peters' black stepdaughter in 1997 and it absolutely ruled

Oh right of course, so sorry about this Jason Alexander erasure. The Jason Alexander Cinderella also

Sick day with the 3 y/o has moved on from Frozen to the Brandy "Cinderella"

Which of course is also the Bernadette Peters Cinderella and the Whitney Houston Cinderella and the Victor Garber Cinderella and the Whoopi and...

Lesley Ann Warren is still *my* Cinderella, but man this cast is stacked

The way I went "oh god what have they done now"

The handshake meme but it's a giant family tree of Lithuanian Jews and Mayflower Puritans all agreeing everyone else has taken the Christmas decorating too far

I have weirdly moved the other direction on this, in that I went from thinking it did not matter at all to being glad my spouse's family has a similar mix of faith backgrounds

Meanwhile I told my 3 y/o she could select one book to buy. She immediately returned with three copies of a biography of Julie Andrews