Happy Release Day, Kerry Schafer!

Today marks a very exciting day for a friend and colleague of mine, Kerry Schafer. As you may recall, back in January of last year, I came across Kerry's manuscript on Book Country and passed it along to the editorial staff at Penguin, who quickly fell in love with it as I had, acquiring a two-book deal from the debut author.

Now, the day has come that the fabulous manuscript is bound and hitting the shelves!

Vivian Maylor can’t sleep. Maybe it’s because she just broke up with her boyfriend and moved to a new town, or it could be the stress of her new job at the hospital. But perhaps it’s because her dreams have started to bleed through into her waking hours. 

All of her life Vivian has rejected her mother’s insane ramblings about Dreamworlds for concrete science and fact, until an emergency room patient ranting about dragons spontaneously combusts before her eyes—forcing Viv to consider the idea that her visions of mythical beasts might be real. 

And when a chance encounter leads her to a man she knows only from her dreams, Vivian finds herself falling into a world that seems strange and familiar all at once—a world where the line between dream and reality is hard to determine, and hard to control…

In honor of the release of BETWEEN (Ace Books), Kerry took time out of her busy blog tour schedule to do a little Q&A with me:

DP: So, the big question...how does it feel to be a published author?!

KS: Honestly? It feels like I've walked into my own book. Reality has become a little fuzzy, in all the good ways. I just can't believe my book is actually really going to be on bookshelves! I've been throwing around a lot of exclamation marks.

DP: What inspired the story behind BETWEEN?

KS: A lot of factors came together at just the right moment: an errant penguin (who happened to be named Vivian), my introduction to the works of MC Escher, and long, fascinating conversations on the nature of reality with my friend and co-worker, Jamie. Oh, and Nanowrimo! I'm pretty sure that writing fast and furiously had something to do with those disparate elements coalescing as they did.

DP: The revision process can be a tricky--and exhausting--one. What was the hardest thing for you to revise/rewrite? Did you have to kill any of your darlings?

KS: I have an entire graveyard full of darlings. Very few elements of the initial draft remain, in fact. I eliminated favorite characters and entire plot arcs and even my very favorite phrases.

DP: Tell us a little about your experience with the publishing process. Any particular likes, dislikes, surprises? Give it to me straight!

KS: Publishing is a strange animal. One of the fascinating (and frustrating) things about it is the aspect of "hurry up and wait." You are given some sort of a deadline. You clear your schedule, forego important aspects of daily living, and drive yourself to the finish line. You turn your manuscript or your revisions or copy edits or whatever in on time, excited by your success at meeting said deadline. Time then passes. Slowly. Two months later, your editor is just finding time to get to what you slaved away to turn in! I know this isn't just my story, because I hear it from my friends. Also? This isn't because editors are sitting around with their feet up, gossiping about their authors and drinking Margaritas. They too are busting their butts.

DP: Who, if anyone, guided you or acted as your mentor as you went from being an aspiring writer to a debut author?

KS: It wasn't just one person – sort of that "it takes a village" thing. My wonderful agent, Deidre Knight, for starters. And my friend Leigh Evans blazed the path for me – her debut (The Trouble with Fate, and you should definitely read this!) released about a month before Between. She was awesome about sharing information and her experience, which kept me from panic a few times, and from blunders a lot of times. Also, Julie Butcher, who has been through the book release experience with loved ones more times than I can easily count. My whole Twitter support team, people at work – the list is very long.

DP: Do you have a blog tour or any signings lined up that we should be putting on our calendars?

KS: I do have a fabulous blog tour lined up, which is currently ongoing. You can see the details of that here on my blog. I will be signing at Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, WA on February 16 at 2 pm. And I'm planning to be at RT in Kansas City.

DP: What's up next??

KS: The second Book of the Between, tentatively titled Wakeworld. This is currently with my editor. (Reference question #4 and the whole waiting thing.)

Thank you so much for having me at your blog today! And thank you for discovering me on Book Country!!

Thank YOU for joining us, Kerry! 

HAPPY RELEASE DAY!

A Lesson in Life...and Publishing

Not always what they seem to be...

I was emailing last night with a new friend of mine in Alaska and telling him a bit about New York City. I told him stories of subway antics, dating woes, the works, and it reminded me that even people you think you know are not always what they seem. This is, of course, something I know very well--we all do--but a little remembering can't hurt when you're out there in the wild, wild world.

Given that, the article I read this morning on HuffingtonPost.com was very fitting. A story of a new author whose first agent turned out to be more than just a "hack":

Some people say life imitates art. Other people say art imitates life.

Here's a true story that clearly supports the "life imitates art" argument, and when it does, life can turn out stranger than the art it set out to imitate in the first place.

It goes like this: At the turn of the century I wrote the first draft of Hack, a novel which, after 12 years and several close calls has just been published by Harper Davis Publishers. In it, the protagonist fakes his own death and returns under a new identity to bilk fat sums of dough from greedy rich guys.

Hold that thought.

I signed on with my first literary agent, Melanie Mills of North Myrtle Beach, SC, on August 26 2002.

Dear Mr. Harrison: 

I have reviewed your work titled "Hack" and have reached a positive evaluation of the property. I feel this property could have a great market appeal and if you choose I would like to market this book for you.

A "positive evaluation of the property"? Hallelujah!

I worked on the manuscript through the winter and in the spring we submitted and got four "good" rejections. Melanie was encouraged: all four editors agreed Hack was a riveting story with quirky characters, but the premise was too far fetched to be believable.

Then it was Spring Break, and by chance I found an almost-free timeshare in Myrtle Beach, which in April promised family fun and a face-to-face meeting with my agent.

And so I went to meet Melanie Mills. Beyond the paved roads and onto rutted single tracks snaking between shacks on stilts crammed together, I found her: a tiny elf-like being, hunched over the deck railing of her falling-down shack. She was scraping at some old paint, a cig dangling from her lips, and a blonde wig, teased and blown into a platinum rat's nest, resting atop her pointy little head.

We sat on her deck overlooking the slough. She talked while I noticed that it smelled more like the county dump than the salty seashore. She showed me the handful of rejection letters as she pounded back Dr. Peppers, puffed on pack after pack of Dorals, and drawled like John Wayne on Dilaudid.

She even explained that her great legs (she stood up to show me) were due to six-miles-a-day beach walks. She also mentioned that she was hosting a writers' conference during a Harley rally in Myrtle Beach the following month, and another in the fall in Banff Lake Louise.

At her suggestion, when I got back to Fairfield County I made some broad brush changes to the manuscript, such as making the female protagonist "less of a bitch" (Melanie's words) and sent it back to her. Her assistant, Kat Baker told me that Melanie was traveling in Germany. I waited three weeks, and when I didn't hear from her, I contacted her office again. I received this email in reply:

Last week, during her trip to Europe due to a death in the family, Melanie Mills had a fatal car accident. Therefore, all submission to publishers have been retracted, all events cancelled, and all existing publishing contracts have been reverted over to the individual authors. I'm very sorry. This has been, and still is, a very emotional time for her entire family and friends, 

Good luck to all of you,

Kat Baker
Assistant to Melanie Mills

Never mind that she looked like Dobby with a fright wig and sounded like The Duke, I had sipped 7Up at her table in Myrtle Beach. We shared laughs. And we had talked about Hack, my story of faked death and identity fraud.

So, when I heard this news, I felt as if someone had kicked me in the crotch. I couldn't breath; I lost the feeling in my hands. And I bemoaned my bad luck. Now what was I going to do? My literary agent was dead!

I began scouting for a new agent. I didn't think it would be too hard -- "Hey, my agent died, would you mind reading a few chapters of the novel she was representing?"

I was right. I had many tire kickers right away, and by the following spring a new agent with a whole notebook full of new ideas for Hack. But somewhere along the line, someone suggested I look at the website "Writer Beware". And it was here that I discovered what really happened to Melanie Mills.

She didn't die in a car wreck in Germany. Not only did I learn that my former agent was still quite alive, but that she had roughly 15 aliases and that she was wanted for real estate fraud across the southern part of the United States, including, of course, Myrtle Beach.

She was also wanted for the attempted murder of her own mother who she pinned to a cement table with her car, crushing her pelvis.

Oddly enough, she had also published "a mystery novel under the pseudonym L.R. Thomas.

Her pitch letter to publishers began: "What would you do when your mother, who leads you to believe she had died, shows up months later and tries to kill you?"

Melanie Mills obviously had a thing for resurrection.

So how did she finally get caught? As it turns out, before she "died" she did organize that writers' conference in Banff Lake Louise, that she'd mentioned when I met with her. Ironically, she did not encourage me to register, supposedly because I already had an agent (her).

The conference advertised big name authors, publishers, and agents, all drooling to make a six-figure deal. She organized and published the schedule on a dedicated website, advertised on all the sites where unpublished writers troll for agents, deployed a reservation system and started collecting money.

After defrauding writers of the fees for the conference, she took off for Germany and was killed, unrecognizably mangled in a bloody wreck. Of course the planned conference attendees, upset though they were by her death, wanted their money back. But when the authorities went looking, they found not a trace -- no bank accounts, no real estate, nothing to indicate that she had ever existed.

And in Arkansas and Myrtle Beach, where she was wanted for real estate fraud and attempted murder, more authorities started to follow the her trail. With the help of Writer Beware, they made the connection between various aliases and found her. Last I heard, she has yet to be extradited to Arkansas to face attempted murder and fraud charges, and a judge had declared her unfit for trial: She'd shed her orange jumpsuit in the courtroom and was commando underneath, leading to a diagnosis of acute schizophrenia. I suppose she won't be doing any Martha Stewart-style hard time soon.

So we've got life imitating art all over the place here, and yet, Melanie Mills never charged me a nickel for her services. Usually literary agent con artists charge a reading fee, an editing fee, a submission fee and then they don't shop your book. I guess Melanie Mills was ever the anomaly, or perhaps playing legit with me was her way of thanking me for giving her the idea for her biggest con.

I will probably go to my grave wondering if Hack's fake death, and his return as a swingin', Harley-ridin', Mexican with a ponytail and pencil-thin mustache, along with his plan to rip off as many people as possible, got Melanie Mills thinking -- maybe such a plot isn't so far-fetched after all? I guess she found out.

Read the original post HERE

Eyes open, friends. Do your homework. Be careful and look out for yourself in all areas of your life!

Guest Blogger, Paul La Rosa: On Writing a Memoir

I consider myself an experienced writer. After all, I’ve been a newspaper reporter, a producer for CBS News, and the author of four true crime books. But I had never written a memoir until I began trying two years ago.

Writing a memoir is different.

My first challenge was deciding which tense to write in. Initially, I chose to write in the past tense, as I’ve mostly done in all my previous books. But then I went to a memoir writing workshop on in Guatemala and began to change my mind. I don’t remember if one of the writers leading the workshop (Joyce Maynard and Laura Lippman) suggested switching to the present tense or if it was one of the other students but that’s what I did.

That might seem minor but it made a world of difference. Writing in the past tense means seeing your life in hindsight, with 20/20 vision, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be always making judgments about the past, as if “Wow, it was much harder being a reporter without the internet.” Boring.

I wanted to experience the past as I had done when I was living it, at least as much as possible and the present tense allowed that to happen. I was seeing my life through the eyes of a kid who was kind of clueless and overwhelmed by most things. I also tried to temper my voice a bit, not using as big words when I was seven years old as in later chapters when I was a college student. That was tricky but one reviewer picked up on it so I thought I was successful.

One is also influenced by other writers, and around the time I began my book Leaving Story Avenue; My journey from the projects to the front page I was reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I loved the rushing, kind of staccato pace of his writing and tried to give my own writing that feeling of immediacy.

If you read the first chapter of my book – about the fast-paced Daily News city room at deadline -- I think you’ll see what I mean. After that, when my book goes into my backstory, I had to slow down until I got back to writing about the newsroom again.

Writing aside, I also had to make some big decisions about content. When you’re writing about a life, you have to ask yourself a lot of questions: What goes in? What stays out? How honest do you really want to be? Some of what you’ve experienced is bound to be embarrassing; can you stand exposing yourself that way?

Of course, the answer is that you have to be honest to pull a reader into your story but you can never put in every experience you’ve had. That too would be way too boring. So I was always honest – there’s no James Frey moments in the book where I said I spent time in jail but did not – and told some embarrassing stories about myself, but I also left out some moments that would have made me too uncomfortable.

I also decided to end my memoir in 1983. People ask me why and there are several reasons. I felt the story had come to a natural end. The point had been made. I wanted the book to be about my journey from being a clueless kid in a Bronx housing project to being a sardonic writer for the largest circulating newspaper in the country. How did that happen? Well, if you read the book, you’ll hopefully understand.

I’ve lived a lot of life since 1983. I left The News, the paper I grew up with and loved, for television. I also had children. Again, I was placed in situations where I was clueless and had to learn but, you know what, that’s the subject of another book somewhere down the line.

One final note: This time, instead of being published by one of the Big-6 publishers, I’m being published by a small independent in Brooklyn just starting out (Park Slope Publishing). Why? Well, the Big-6 editors loved my book but weren’t giving me the love I wanted to feel. This house in Brooklyn did that, so I traded in broad distribution for mostly buying the book online.
I think that’s how most people buy books these days anyway. I love bookstores but, even when they carried my other books, they were always hard to find. Let’s see how it goes just being available online and in a few bookstores near where I live. I did want the book to be available as a trade paperback and it is because I did not want to ignore those people who love the feel of the page.

At the same time, we made the book available in all e-reader formats so as not to shut someone out. I hope our plans work. We shall see but, hey, you can help by, you know, buying the book. It’s relatively cheap and it’s online everywhere!


About the blogger: Paul LaRosa is a journalist with more than 30 years experience in print and television. For nearly 20 years, he’s been a successful producer for the CBS News magazine “48 Hours.” He’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and has authored four previous non-fiction books. To read his blog and for more information, please go to his website: www.paullarosa.com.

Release Day Giveaway! A SLIVER OF SHADOW by Allison Pang!

Abby Sinclair is back and better than ever in Allison Pang's follow-up to A Brush of Darkness (Pocket, Jan. '11), A Sliver of Shadow. And don't worry--Phin, Ion, Mel, Talivar, and rest of the gang's all there too! ;)

WAR IS HELL. AND WAR WITH HELL IS NO FUN EITHER.

Just when her new life as a TouchStone—a mortal bound to help OtherFolk cross between Faery and human worlds—seems to be settling down, Abby Sinclair is left in charge when the Protectorate, Moira, leaves for the Faery Court. And when the Protectorate’s away . . . let’s just say things spiral out of control when a spell on Abby backfires and the Faery Queen declares the Doors between their worlds officially closed. The results are disastrous for both sides: OtherFolk trapped in the mortal world are beginning to fade, while Faery is on the brink of war with the daemons of Hell. Along with her brooding elven prince Talivar and sexy incubus Brystion, Abby ventures to the CrossRoads in an attempt to override the Queen’s magic. But nothing in this beautiful, dangerous realm will compare to the discoveries she’s making about her past, her destiny, and what she will sacrifice for those she loves.

Even though I read the manuscript at various stages, I'm stoked to see and read the finished product in all its printed glory. Just to hold the book in my hands will be amazing! I mean, let's remember last year when A Brush of Darkness came out, folks. ---->

Yes, that's right. I swaddled it like a little baby and we photographed it.

Because THAT is how much I LOVE this series and Allison.

So, now, it's time for y'all to show the love too.

Comment on this post with your favorite thing about Allison and her books (OR with a note about the kind of things you want to hear from HER on her current blog tour!) and you'll be tossed in the ring to receive a free...

Now, wait for it....

There will be TWO lucky readers this time--one will receive a copy of A SLIVER OF SHADOW and another will receive a full set of Allison's beautiful character trading cards!

This giveaway won't last long though so make sure to comment by 9pm EST tomorrow, Wednesday, February 29th when the "winners" will be selected!

GO GO GO!

HAPPY RELEASE DAY, ALLISON!!!

Happy Release Day! : AN AFFAIR WITH MR. KENNEDY by Jillian Stone

Today is a very special day. One of my favorite acquisitions from when I was working back in editorial, an awesome Victorian historical romance called An Affair with Mr. Kennedy, is hitting the shelves!

Not only is this great series--The Gentlemen of Scotland Yard--finally going to be shared with the world but it marks the author, Jillian Stone's debut into the literary world! Whee!!

Congrats, Jill!!

In honor of this wonderful occasion, Jill and I chatted a bit about the book, her writing, and what's next for the Yard Men:

DP: Thanks for being with us today, Jill! Tell me, what was the inspiration behind An Affair with Mr. Kennedy? How did the idea for the novel come to you? Did you write it with publication in mind?

JS: I knew I wanted to write a historical romantic suspense series and got to thinking about Scotland Yard detectives. It seemed to me that Yard men were always portrayed as bumbling inspectors, five moves behind Sherlock Holmes. So I thought, what if there was an elite group of detectives? So I began to do some research and found out that there was a division of Scotland Yard created in 1882 called Special Branch. I added a dash (as in dashing) of James Bond Steampunk and that was the start of The Gentlemen of Scotland Yard.

DP: As a debut author (with two multi-book deals with two publishing houses!), you were thrown into the industry with a vengeance. What surprised you most about the book business? What was the hardest thing to adjust to? What was your reaction to the often-shocking (and grueling) editorial process?

JS: Shocking and grueling, I think you summed it up well, Danielle! No writer’s workshop can prepare you for your first set of notes/edits. Once I picked myself up off the floor, and got a grip, I started evaluating what my editor wanted to see and what I knew was right for the story. Actually, I’m not sure how I got through it. But I survived and my favorite part of learning the editing process was when I realized OMG, the book is getting even better!

DP: Tell us a little about your writing process. Do you have a designated space to write? Rituals? Etc.?

JS: My process is I’m always writing because I’m not a fast writer. Plus, I enjoy small character details and world building, and that tends to take a lot of finessing. So I’m constantly at my computer when I’m in the middle of a book.

DP: Your hero and heroine--Zeno and Cassie--are such vibrant, fun (and sexy!) characters. If you were to cast them for a film version of the story, what actor/actress would you pick?

JS: Probably Clive Owen and Scarlet Johansson.

DP: When writing a novel, almost every author has to kill some of his/her darlings, as they say. Is there a scene, character, or plot (or something else!) that was particularly difficult for you to change or cut?

JS: I was asked to cut some love scenes to keep the suspense plot moving, which I did. The opening scene between Cassie and her mother almost bit the edit dust, but I held onto it by adding more heroine GMC. And it stayed in.

DP: You paint such a detailed and visceral picture of late-Victorian life in your book. How much research do you do? What are your favorite research tricks/go-to resources? Do you research as you go or study up before you begin?

JS: I do tons of research. I have a whole library of Victorian Age reference books. My favorite go-to trick is my subscription to OED online’s historical thesaurus. Invaluable. I research up front and also do a significant amount along the way. I never foresee everything I need, so I am often surfing the internet for some weird, esoteric bit of information late at night––and always on deadline.

DP: Who are some of your favorite authors? Books? Is there a book out there that you wish you had written? (Come on, all us writers have at least one. ;) For me, it’s Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.)

JS: If you’re talking about women’s fiction or romance, I would have to go with Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I have a whole range of favorite authors from Lewis Carroll to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Frank Herbert and Phillip K. Dick.

DP: What’s up next for you and the Yard Men?

JS: A Dangerous Liaison with Detective Lewis. The second book in the Gentlemen of Scotland Yard series is a super fast-paced road story.

Here’s a little taste:

Five years ago, pure as an angel, hot as the devil, Raphael Lewis, did something unforgivable to Fanny Greyville-Nugent. Now, the handsome Scotland Yard agent is assigned to protect the wealthy industrialist heiress. Her life is in danger from the anti-progressive Utopian Society and its leader, Bellecote Mallory, who has tumbled into madness and gone underground. One by one, the diabolical Mallory is executing prominent members of the industrialized world––by their own machines––and Fanny is next in line. Pursued by Mallory’s henchmen, Rafe and Fanny are on the run from Edinburgh to London by train, landship and submersible! Racing against the clock, they are carried away by their passions, but can Rafe ultimately redeem himself?

To further celebrate the release of An Affair with Mr. Kennedy, I just so happen to have an extra copy of the new book to send along to a random reader....

So, leave a comment by 5pm EST on Friday, Feb. 3 about the book , for Jill, or with your own casting choices for Zeno and Cassie, and you just may be that reader!

Author L.A. Banks Dies at 51

As some of you may have heard, sad news has swept the publishing industry today: Beloved bestselling author L.A. Banks (also known as Leslie Esdaile Banks) passed away this morning at age51.

Banks had been in many readers thoughts this summer as she fought to beat out the adrenal cancer that was tragically caught too late. Now, our thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends during this difficult time.

GalleyCat tells us more:

Leslie Esdaile wrote many novels under different pseudonyms, but published her popular Vampire Huntress Legend series and the Crimson Moon series under the name of L.A. Banks. The writer will be honored at a memorial event on August 6th.

Her fan club president posted this brief message on Facebook; add your thoughts and tributes there: “It is with profound sadness that I announce that Leslie Esdaile Banks, our Queen literary passed this morning. I will share details of funeral arrangements as soon as they become available.”

Her family and friends have established a fund to help her family cope with medical bills. Follow this link to donate.

See the original post HERE

Banks was a versatile author whose works touched the hearts of people all over the world. Writing in a variety of genres--romance, crime fiction, non-fiction, and more--her memory is sure to be remembered.

RIP.

An Inside Look at Writers' Homes

I'll admit it...I'm a sucker for visiting famous authors' homes.

When I was in Paris, what was one of my top five things I wanted to do? See Victor Hugo's house.

When I was in Key West? Go to Hemingway's famed home and garden. (Pic of me in his garden, right).

Lucky for me, The Huffington Post ran a piece from Flavorwire last Thursday (I know, I know, I'm behind...again) taking its readers inside the walls of just these kinds of houses:

Last month, The New York Times ran a slideshow of Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, which will be up for sale shortly. This got us thinking about our favorite authors, where they lived, and how much our environment shapes our work. (If it does, then we’re really in trouble, since we mostly write in a dark Brooklyn apartment with neighbors who smoke packs of cigarettes and scream at their children in languages we don’t understand.) A.N. Devers, a literary pilgrim, commissioned Michael Fusco and Emma Straub to make great, inexpensive posters of authors’ domiciles — from Emily Dickinson’s homestead to Zora Neale Hurston’s modest bungalow — and they are available here. If you’re interested in a writer’s first person account of her tour of famous authors’ homes, then check out A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses by Anne Trubek. Click through now to take a virtual tour of some of our favorite writers’ residences.

Truman Capote in his Brooklyn Heights apartment

Slim Aarons took this photo (left) of Truman Capote in 1958, when the author was in his thirties. His penchant for all things kitsch is on display, but the silk wall hanging for whatever reason just kills us. You can view more of Aarons’ photos at Photographers Gallery.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s desk in his apartment in Saint Petersburg, Russia

Our favorite Slavophile lived at this address during the last years of his life, when he was writing The Brothers Karamazov. The apartment was turned into a museum in the late 1990s, so fans can head over to Vladimirskaya/Dostoyevskaya metro and run their hands across the woodwork or try to create a distraction so they can sit at his desk, pretending they too have a glorious beard and intense, world-weary eyes from years of political exile. (Right, Image courtesy of the University of Washington Libraries.)

Agatha Christie’s English summer home

The BBC features images of it pre-renovation here (left), while the Telegraph has some illuminating photos here.

Agatha Christie bought Greenway, a Georgian mansion on the southern tip of England, in the late 1930s. At the time, Christie bought the mansion and 33-acre property for £6,000, and then had an architect renovate it, reportedly telling him, “I want a big bath and I need a ledge because I like to eat apples.”

See the original Flavorwire post HERE

The article also showcases the homes of Norman Mailer, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Yukio Mishima, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and more.

Ethics Police: Pedophile Author Arrested for Obscenity

Some of you might recall back in November when a self-published book on pedophilia popped up on Amazon. The book, which was a how-to guide for pedophiles by a Colorado man, was pulled off the site as soon as it was acknowledged.

Now, the author--Phillip R. Greave--has been arrested on charges of obscenity, opening a huge Bill-of-Rights can of worms, no matter how morally justified it may be.

The Associated Press reports:

A Colorado man who wrote a how-to guide for pedophiles was arrested Monday and will be extradited to Florida to face obscenity charges, after deputies there ordered a copy of the book that has generated online outrage.

Officers arrested Phillip R. Greaves at his home in Pueblo on Monday on a warrant that charges him with violating Florida's obscenity law. During a brief court appearance, Greaves waived his right to fight extradition to Polk County, Fla., where Sheriff Grady Judd claimed jurisdiction because the author sold and mailed his book directly to undercover deputies. Judd said Greaves even signed the book.

"I was outraged by the content," Judd told The Associated Press. "It was clearly a manifesto on how to sexually batter children ... You just can't believe how absolutely disgusting it was."

The book — "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct" — caused a flap when it showed up on Amazon in November. The book was later removed from the site.

Greaves, who has no criminal record, writes in the book that pedophiles are misunderstood, as the word literally means to love a child. He adds that it is only a crime to act on sexual impulses toward children, and offers advice that purportedly allows pedophiles to abide by the law.

Judd said he was incensed when he heard about the book and that no one had arrested Greaves for selling it. The book, Judd said, included first-person descriptions of sexual encounters, purportedly written from a child's point of view.

"What's wrong with a society that has gotten to the point that we can't arrest child pornographers and child molesters who write a book about how to rape a child?" said Judd, who keeps a Bible on his desk and is known throughout Florida as a crusader against child predators.

Florida' obscenity law — a third-degree felony — prohibits the "distribution of obscene material depicting minors engaged in conduct harmful to minors." Pueblo County sheriff's spokeswoman Laurie Kilpatrick said Greaves would leave for Polk County later in the day.

Legal experts questioned whether Greaves' right to free speech would come into play if there's a trial. If prosecutors can charge Greaves for shipping his book, they ask, what would prevent booksellers from facing prosecution for selling Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," a novel about a pedophile?

"As bad as this book may be, the charge opens a very big Pandora's box," said Dennis J. Kenney, a former police officer in Polk County and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "The charge sounds to me like a significant overreach."

Greaves was among a group of prisoners who made brief appearances before District Court Judge David Crockenberg in Pueblo on Monday, all of them represented by the same public defender. He was the only one not wearing a striped prison uniform although his wrists were handcuffed in front of him.

Dressed in a cream colored T-shirt and khaki pants, Greaves said he understood the extradition process. When Crockenberg asked him if he understood he would be taken to Florida, Greaves responded, "That is correct, your honor."

Judd said his undercover detectives got Greaves to mail the book to them for $50; he told officers it was his last copy.

"If we can get jurisdiction ... we're coming after you," Judd said. "There's nothing in the world more important than our children."

Read the article on Yahoo! News HERE

It's unbelievably disturbing to me what people are capable of. And as Judd points out, we have a responsibility to protect our families and society's youths, and I agree that we should do whatever we can--within reason--to do so.

But I'll admit it is a blurry line to toe given our country's "freedoms." The question is: what is "within reason"? The conditions set out by our founding fathers seem more detrimental than anything else in cases like this, but what can we legally and morally do about it?

As our country is wont to do, I'm sure they'll find other, more "just" and "appropriate" charges on which to take action against Greaves, but they may be sticking their hands into a giant honey pot in doing so.

The Ethics Police are baffled...and sitting here with the creeps, to say the least.

"Hunger Games" Author Speaks Up

Now that the "Hunger Games" series is complete, author Suzanne Collins talks to the Associated Press about the experience, in a fantastic article by Hillel Itali:

NEW YORK – As she worked on the final book of her "Hunger Games" trilogy, Suzanne Collins discovered that her life had changed.

"I started to get calls from people I didn't know, at my home number, which at the time was listed and we had never thought anything about it," says Collins, a 48-year-old mother of two who lives with her husband in rural Connecticut.

"Suddenly, there was this shift. Nothing threatening happened or anything, but it is your home and you want it to be private. So I think that was the point where I felt, `Oh, something different is happening now.'"

With the release of "Mockingjay," an instant chart-topper, Suzanne Collins is a celebrity. Perhaps not the kind you'd spot on the street, but one whose name is known and welcome to millions of readers, young adult and adult. Her fame comes not from wizards or vampires, but from her portrait of a brutish, dystopian future in which young people are forced to fight to the death, on television.

Inspiration, like a sudden phone call, began at home. A few years ago, Collins was surfing channels late at night and found herself switching between a reality program and news reports about the Iraq war. The images blurred in her mind. She wondered whether other viewers could tell them apart.

"We have so much programming coming at us all the time," she says. "Is it too much? Are we becoming desensitized to the entire experience? ... I can't believe a certain amount of that isn't happening."

Narrated by the teenage rebel-heroine Katniss Everdeen, the "Hunger Games" books ("The Hunger Games," "Catching Fire" and "Mockingjay") are also stories of honor and courage in the worst of times, when, as Collins notes, honor and courage may be all you have. The stories begin with Katniss volunteering to stand in when her little sister is called to participate in the televised games, the "hunger games." She learns about love, too. A romantic triangle among Katniss and her noble suitors, Peeta and Gale, has divided readers into "Twilight"-like camps.

Collins' sources run much deeper than television. She cites the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which seven boys and seven girls are sacrificed to keep Athens safe. She was also inspired by "Spartacus," the epic film starring Kirk Douglas as the rebellious Roman slave, and by the classical biographer Plutarch. The stories are set in a country called Panem — in honor of the old Roman expression for mindless diversion, panem et circenses, meaning bread and circuses, or bread and games.

"I have been following her for a long time. She is one of the authors who got my older son reading, so I owe her a personal debt on those grounds," says Rick Riordon, author of the million-selling "Percy Jackson" series and the upcoming "Heroes of Olympus" series, which also draw upon ancient Greek culture.

"I think she does a wonderful job of mixing good action, with strong characters, with a dash of humor and really providing readers everything they need to have a page-turning experience. She's just a masterful writer."

Collins was interviewed recently at the offices of Scholastic Inc., her long, blond hair parted in the middle, wearing a pendant with the "Hunger Games" icon, a golden winged hybrid — a mockingjay — clutching an arrow in its beak. She has a careful, deliberate speaking style and a passion for explaining and clarifying subjects. She is a
storyteller who wants her books not just to entertain, but to provoke. The young are her ideal readers.

"I think right now there's a distinct uneasiness in the country that the kids feel," Collins says, citing the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Dystopian stories are places where you can play out the scenarios in your head — your anxieties — and see what might come of them. And, hopefully, as a young person, with the possibilities of the future waiting for you, you're thinking about how to head these things off."

The daughter of a career Air Force officer, Collins lived all over the world as a child, from New York City to Brussels, and was reading Greek myths at an early age. Her father served in Vietnam and later taught history, not just to college students, but to his own family.

"I believe he felt a great responsibility and urgency about educating his children about war," she says. "He would take us frequently to places like battlefields and war monuments. It would start back with whatever had precipitated the war and moved up through the battlefield you were standing in and through that and after that. It was a very comprehensive tour guide experience. So throughout our lives we basically heard about war."

Collins graduated from Indiana University with a double major in theater and telecommunications, and received a master's in dramatic writing from New York University. She worked on several children's programs, including "Clarissa ExplainsIt All" and "Little Bear." Her work was noticed by "Generation O!" creator James Proimos, who hired her as head writer. They became good friends, and he suggested she try writing books.

"She seemed like a book writer to me; it was sort of her personality. She also had the style and the mind of a novelist," says Proimos, who has written and illustrated several children's books. "I was telling her that you can't do TV forever; it's a young person's business. With books, at the very worst, you start out slow, but you can do them for the rest of your life."

Collins began working on what became her first series, the five-part "Underland Chronicles." She liked the idea of taking the "Alice in Wonderland" story and giving it an urban setting, where you fell through a manhole instead of a rabbit hole. At Proimos' suggestion, Collins contacted his agent, Rosemary B. Stimola of the Stimola Literary Studio. After hearing a little about the author's planned book, Stimola suggested she turn in a sample chapter.

"Quite honestly, I knew from the very first paragraph I had a very gifted writer," says Stimola, who still represents Collins. "It happens like that sometimes. Not often, but when it does it's a thing of beauty. From the very first paragraph she established a character I cared about. She established a story and a mood that touched my heart."

Collins sees her books as variations of war stories. The "Underland" series, she explains, tells five different aspects of conflict — the rescue of a prisoner of war, an assassination, biological weapons, genocide and the use of military intelligence. "The Hunger Games" series is an exploration of "unnecessary" war and "necessary" war, when armed rebellion is the only choice.

"If we introduce kids to these ideas earlier, we could get a dialogue about war going earlier and possibly it would lead to more solutions," she says. "I just feel it isn't discussed, not the way it should be. I think that's because it's uncomfortable for people. It's not pleasant to talk about. I know from my experience that we are quite capable of understanding things and processing them at an early age."

See the article on Yahoo! News HERE

Having just finished Mockingjay not too long ago (considering it for a dueling review, by the way, if anyone is interested in contributing--pro or con!) I was intrigued to hear what Collins had to say about why she wrote the series and what she'd hoped to accomplish. And I gotta say, I'm quite satisfied with her answer! I also was very excited to hear that before writing novels, she was one of the tv writers on Nickelodeon's "Clarissa Explains It All," one of my childhood obsessions!

Guest Blogger, LG: Children's Author Arrested for Child Pornography

Children's author K.P. Bath--author of The Secret of Castle Cant (2006) and Escape from Castle Cant (2007) (I've read neither)--has been arrested and convicted on child pornography charges.

Yes, you read that right.

Children's author K.P. Bath has been arrested and convicted for child pornography!

According to The Oregonian, Bath collected photos of children being raped, sodomized, and tortured. That seems almost to go beyond child pornography. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Sussman noted that Bath "had collected thousands of photographs and more than 125 videos of child pornography." Bath also, according to The Daily Beast, worked in a children's library.

Once your stomach stops churning, read on.

Bath's first two Cant books seem to have garnered decent reviews--at least according to his Amazon.com author page. His publisher, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, dropped Bath and his next book, Flip Side, upon his arrest in April 2009. Disturbing as it is that he wrote children's books (popular or not), I find it even more disturbing that he was a "Homework Helper" in the library. Though no one has thus far come forward saying that Bath molested or touched them, and library officials were quick to say that he was never alone with children, it's easy to imagine that something, somewhere might have happened. Although, it seems that Bath never made face-to-face contact with children in any kind of sexual manner.

Big sigh of relief.

But this post is not to debate the sickness of pedophiles or the horrifying concept of one writing books for children. The question that immediately sprung to my mind? What is a publisher's role when it comes to authors' pasts? Private lives? Legal convictions?

With this thought in mind, I immediately shot an email off to several colleagues in publishing who could find out whether or not their houses legally vet authors. According to my sources at Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, manuscripts are vetted as necessary, not authors (unless, as I was told in one instance, an editor suspects an author of lying about his or her credentials). Publishing houses are concerned with copyrights and content, not personal legal woes unrelated to the material.

LBFYR obviously did the right thing by dropping Bath from their list when the first arrest was made. In this instance, even a legal vetting wouldn't necessarily have uncovered details about child porn. But what a children's author with a violent past? Someone convicted of assault? What about other books? Reality TV producers do background checks on everyone who could be a potential cast member or show character, especially after the horrific "Megan Wants a Millionaire" / Ryan Jenkins murder scandal of 2009.

To quote an anonymous source at S&S: "Gotta watch the company’s back, at the end of the day."

Indeed.

When it comes to adult books, there are many authors with a history of violence, drug abuse, and legal woes--look at the majority of memoirs and 'hood lit. Not to mention the fact that refusing to publish a book based on an author's past would be discriminatory. And denying publication of a great book because of its author would just be ludicrous. Sometimes a shady past can even be a selling point for a publisher.

But when it comes to children's literature, should publishers be more careful?

Winston Ross at The Daily Beast phrased it perfectly:

What’s unexplained is how a guy who writes books designed to educate and illuminate the lives of grade schoolers spent a healthy portion of his free time consuming sexually exploitive images of them.

It's truly baffling.

It looks like Bath will spend the next 6 years in prison, followed by a great many years as a registered sex offender. Thank God.

What do YOU think?

Should Little, Brown Books for Young Readers pull all copies of Bath's books from libraries, shops, and online seller?

Don't forget to check out LG's blog, "Big Girl, Bigger City"!

UPDATE: Steig Larsson's Unfinished Fourth Millenium Novel

You may remember some book news I shared back in June about the discovery of two Steig Larsson short stories, as well as part of the fourth book in his Millenium series, years after his death in 2004.

Now, almost exactly a month later, more news about the incomplete fourth book has surfaced, according to the Associated Press:

STOCKHOLM – It is September in Sachs Harbour, northern Canada. In the cold and desolate landscape, Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander are about to begin a new adventure.

But their journey in the fourth book of Stieg Larsson's best-selling "Millennium"crime series is a mystery. The book was left unfinished on the author's laptop when he died suddenly in 2004 at age 50.

Only two people know about the content of the manuscript: Larsson's longtime partner Eva Gabrielsson, who has refused to talk about it and won't reveal the whereabouts of the last installment in the series, which started with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"; and Larsson's friend John-Henri Holmberg, who received an e-mail about the book from Larsson less than a month before his death on Nov. 9, 2004.

Gabrielsson is in a legal deadlock with Larsson's family over the author's estate.
Holmberg said that Larsson was 320 pages into the fourth book and had planned to complete it by December.

"The plot is set 120 kilometers north of Sachs Harbour, at Banks Island in the month of September," Larsson wrote in the e-mail, which Holmberg made available to The Associated Press. "According to the synopsis it should be 440 pages."

Holmberg, who first met Larsson at a science-fiction convention in the 1970s, said his friend had finished the beginning and the end of the story but had to find another plot for the middle.

"Did you know that 134 people live in Sachs Harbour, whose only contact with the world is a postal plane twice a week when the weather permits?" Larsson wrote. "But there are 48,000 musk-ox and 80 different types of wild flowers that bloom during two weeks in early July, as well as an estimated 1,500 polar bears."

Holmberg says he doesn't know more than that about the plot, but that Larsson had wanted all his books to follow a theme about women.

He says the author probably had a detailed outline of the story among his notes, making it possible for someone such as Gabrielsson — who worked closely with Larsson on the first three books — to complete the manuscript.

However, Holmberg points out that completing the story would have to be done soon so it doesn't become just a "historic curiosity."

"The risk ... is that it turns into one of those idiotic things like 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,'" he said, referring to Charles Dickens' half-finished final work that many other writers tried to complete after his death.

"Give it 10 years" after the last Hollywood film is released, he said. "After that, there will be no meaning to it. And I believe Stieg was focused on having some kind of meaning in what he wrote."

[...]

For now, Norstedts doesn't want to comment on the possibility of a fourth book.

"The question about the fourth manuscript is entirely hypothetical," head of publishing at Norstedts, Eva Gedin, said. "We have never studied this manuscript and therefore don't know if it exists, how much has been written and if so what shape the manuscript is in."

Since Larsson's death the whereabouts of the fourth manuscript has been clouded in mystery. Gabrielsson — who is involved in a thorny conflict with the author's father and brother, Erland and Joakim Larsson — initially acknowledged she had the laptop containing the fourth manuscript. However, in an interview with Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet in June, Gabrielsson said she doesn't want to see any other book in the Millennium series published and said she does not have the manuscript. Joakim Larsson said in an e-mail that he doesn't know where it is now.

Read the complete article HERE

Writers' Tip #6: Don't Be Boring

Hannah Moskowitz is just a regular 19-year-old girl--but she's also a published YA author, and a Publishers Weekly starred review one to boot.

Her first novel, Break, hit shelves last August from Simon Pulse, and was called "viscerally real" (PW) and "unique [and] emotional" (Library Journal).

Hard at work on her second book, Invincible Summer--due out next spring---Hannah is laying low for the most part in the publishing world. But despite not having a current book to promote, I stumbled upon her blog via literary agent extraordinaire, Janet Reid, and must admit, I was quite impressed (and entertained).

Not only did she write Break when she herself was a junior in high school, but her level of maturity and grasp of publishing professionalism is astounding. In fact, this past weekend, Hannah blogged about what it means to be a writer, what is expected of you, and how (and how not) to act:

This post has nothing to do with writing and absolutely everything to do with being a writer.

The stereotype of a writer--the middle-aged man pounding feverishly at a typewriter, cigarette in his mouth, sending hard-copy manuscripts to his agent and protesting the change of every word--has yet to catch up with the reality of what being a writer entails today.

We are not locked in our attics alone. We are not even the romantic writers of the '20s, drinking coffee and discussing literature. We are a legion of overworked, underwashed normals, pounding away at our laptops and shooing the kids to the next room.

And more importantly, we are not alone.

If you are reading this blog, you have obviously already met at least one other writer (hello there.) Chances are, I'm not the only one. Agent, editor, and writer blogs, facebook, forums like Verla Kay and Absolute Write, and God, above all Twitter, mean that, at the very least, most writers are at least a friend of a friend of yours. The term 'networking' is so appropriate here, because, in actuality, we--writers, publishing professionals, book bloggers--are a net. A web of interconnected people.

Which is why the act of being a professional writer has come to mean much more than it used to. Fifty years ago, all most writers had to do was avoid getting arrested and not respond to bad reviews.

You have a much bigger job to undertake. And it's stressful, and it's scary, but it can also be one of the most rewarding parts of this job. Somedays, my writing is absolutely shitty, and the house is a mess, and I'm crying because I can't find my socks, but I have 239 blog followers, Goddamn it, and I said something funny on Twitter today, so at least this day isn't totally for the birds.

You may think that I am the worst possible person ever to talk about how to be a professional. I'm loud and I'm obnoxious and I say fuck like it's a part of my name.

Yeah.

But I'm hoping all that will make me easier to listen to, because when people think 'professional,' they a lot of the time think boring, sanitized, safe. And that's not who you have to be. I'm living fucking proof over here. And I knew from the start that I was taking a big risk, but I hoped that people would find me interesting and remember me.

It's worked pretty well so far. And that, kittens, is the real reason you want to get out there and put on your professional face. So that people will remember you.

Read Hannah's entire post HERE

Hannah goes on to offer some professional guidelines to her fellow writers:

1. Get on Twitter
2. Read About Books
3. Remember Names
4. Don't Alienate
5. Don't Talk About Yourself All the Time
6. Don't Be Boring
7. Remember That You Are a Human Connecting with Other Humans

So, take a look, my dear authors, and bear in mind Hannah's seven insights as you create your writerly identity. She's spot on, you know, in my professional opinion.

The Writer Who Couldn't Read

The other day I was lying in bed unable to sleep. When this happens (which is often), I usually grab my BlackBerry and scroll through my twitter feed, just to kill time and make my eyes tired.
But I found something that particular evening that caught my attention--a news story (by Robert Krulwich) from NPR about an author who couldn't read.

It's a sad, but interesting article about Canadian author, Howard Engel, who one morning woke up unable to read and struggled to regain his literacy via finger tracings and tongue clicks. (You'll see.)

Luckily, in my half-asleep state I thought to e-mail the Tweet to myself to post here on RBtL:

In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was. When he looked at the front page — it was the Toronto Globe and Mail, an English-language journal — the print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely "Serbo-Croatian or Korean," or some language he didn't know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book he knew was in English, and it too was in the same gibberish.

Engel had suffered a stroke. It had damaged the part of his brain we use when we read, so he couldn't make sense of letters or words. He was suffering from what the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls "word blindness." His eyes worked. He could see shapes on a page, but they made no sense to him. And because Engel writes detective stories for a living (he authored the Benny Cooperman mystery series, tales of a mild-mannered Toronto private eye), this was an extra-terrible blow. "I thought, well I'm done as a writer. I'm finished."

In his letter to Oliver Sacks, Engel describes his stunning solution, or rather, his painfully executed semirecovery, which you can see in Lev's video.

Briefly put, Engel discovered that if he traced the printed gibberish on a page with his hand, if he simulated the movements that a writer makes as he writes, he could gradually get back the meaning of the words.

Try writing "cat" 20 times, and then on the 21st try, write "cat" in the air with your finger. You know as you write in the air that the motions you make equal "cat." This is called "motor memory." This specific set of strokes triggers the idea of "cat" in your brain.

Engel couldn't see words with his eyes. His visual cortex was broken. But he could "see" when he used the motor part of his brain, first by tracing letters on a page, then by "writing" those same letters in the air, and then, strangely, when he shifted to copying letters with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Tongue-copying was the fastest.

Over the years, says Sacks, Engel has learned to read with his tongue, flicking the shape of the letters on his front teeth. Engel has reached the point where he can almost keep up with the subtitles in a foreign film. He says he can get about half the words before they flash off.

Read the entire article, see the illustrations/video, and hear the NPR Broadcast HERE

New Yorker Announces This Year's "20 Under 40"

This week, the New Yorker announced its list of 20-authors-to-watch-under-40, something the magazine hasn't done in over a decade. The last time they published their "20 Under 40" though, it included international bestsellers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz, as well as authors like Michael Chabon and David Foster Wallace.

Naturally, the current list--recreated by The New York Times--is a little less recognizable...for now:

There are 10 women and 10 men, satirists and modernists, from Miami and Ethiopia and Peru and Chicago. And none of them were born before 1970.

The New Yorker has chosen its “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers worth watching, a group assembled by the magazine’s editors in a lengthy, secretive process that has provoked considerable anxiety among young literary types. The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands Monday. All of the writers were told two weeks ago that they had made the cut.

They are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.

[...]

Beyond their age, the writers on the list have nothing in common, said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.

“If they had too much in common, it would be really boring,” he said in an interview. “This is not an aesthetic grouping. The group is a group of promise, enormous promise. There are people in there that are very conventional in their narrative approach, and there are people who have a big emphasis on voice. There are people who are in some way bringing you the news from another culture.”

It is no secret that publishing these kinds of lists can be tricky. Whatever the intention, they sometimes resemble a publicity stunt. The age cutoff, whether 25 or 35 or 40, can feel capricious. After a list is made public, there is the inevitable sniping that some writers on it were too famous to have been included and that others were unfairly excluded.

[...]

Bill Buford, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker who led the compilation of the list in 1999, said he had no regrets about who was chosen for it.

“By gathering up these writers and gathering them up with some authority and some panache, and saying, with all the stuff that’s out there, you’re saying, here are 20 you should pay attention to,” Mr. Buford said, “it’s a way of getting those authors to a bigger audience.”

Read the full article HERE

I've gotta say I agree with Mr. Buford. These lists aren't saying these are the only promising authors out there. Just like any list of its kind--10 summer movies to watch, top 10 beach reads, etc. etc.--it's clearly subjective and not all-inclusive.

I personally like these lists. It's a great way to discover new artists of all kinds and to give someone whose talent really moves you some recognition. That's all. It's not meant as a slight to those who didn't make the list, though I can, of course, understand that it may feel that way to the artist in question. But just as we all have to sometimes, you gotta just let it roll off your back and realize it's in no way a criticism. Besides, there is likely someone out there singing your praises as you cry in the corner.

Books are Like Ice Cream

As a member of the book publishing industry, I am well aware that my job is more or less subjective. Just like flavors of ice cream, not everyone is going to like a book and not everyone is going to have the same favorite "flavor."

There are some books, however, that we're expected to like, either because it's a "classic" or because it's been on the bestseller list for ages. Sometimes these expectations make us more likely to enjoy it because we assume we should and are looking for reasons to do just that. I, on the other hand, find that I'm much more critical of books that have seen much great acclaim. Prove to me that you deserve it.

Take for example, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. A couple years ago, a book club I was in at the time chose Diaz's novel for its monthly selection. Everyone was stoked to read it since it'd been on the New York Times bestseller list for basically 100 years (clearly, I am exaggerating) and won a Pulitzer. But I was lukewarm even about the concept. But despite my reluctance, we all dove in.

The majority of the members zipped through it so fast

I couldn't believe it. Especially since I was struggling to read each page. It wasn't for me. I didn't get it. I didn't like Diaz's writing or his protagonist. I tried very hard to read the whole thing, but stopped torturing myself about 3/4 of the way in. When I went to the meeting, I was the only one who wasn't head over heels.

So, given my past experience with the matter, I was intrigued when Linnea over at Art Ravels tweeted about The Book Examiner's "50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time." Examiner writer Michelle Kerns researched some of the most renowned authors of all time and found some terrible critiques of their work:

One man's Shakespeare is another man's trash fiction.

Consider this pithy commentary on the Great Bard's work:

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent

writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare....

But, of course, there must be SOME writers we can all agree on as truly great, right? Like Jane Austen. Or not:

Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Robert Frost?

If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.

John Steinbeck, surely?

I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.

Oh, dear.

But don't think these pleasantries were penned in a frolicsome hour by dilettante book critics with an unslaked thirst for a bit of author-bashing.

The Shakespearean take-down was George Bernard Shaw, the Austen shin-bone

basher was Mark Twain, the anti-Frost poet was James Dickey, and the quick!-bring-me-the-bucket-it's-Steinbeck was James Gould Cozzens.

Yes, hell hath no fury like one author gleefully savaging another author's work.

And, lucky for us, there's plenty to be had where that came from.

Cast your eye on these, the 50 most memorable author vs. author put-downs (in no particular order; though if you've got a favorite, by all means, comment on it, below).

1. Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972)

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

2. Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, according to Martin Amis (1986)

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 -- the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that 'Don Quixote' could do.

3. John Keats, according to Lord Byron (1820)

Here are Johnny Keats's p@# a-bed poetry...There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, according to Henry James (1876)

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Check out the rest of the list HERE

I think my favorite is #27: William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway

Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one..

What's YOUR fave author put-down?