Combining creativity with business can be challenging. Author/blogger Shabnam Curtis is one heck of an organized writer! Here she generously shares her detailed and well-researched gameplan for self-publishing success of her book, "My Persian Paradox: Memories of an Iranian Girl"...
How does an author get their book published by a big company, as opposed to doing it on their own? Hard work and good fortune figured into how a big-time publisher of how-to books reached out to Lance Akiyama. Together, they’ve put out four books (including a revised version of one) by him about how… Continue reading How I Got Published (Big Time) by Lance Akiyama→
Want to write and publish a book? Blogger Rhiannon Brunner (who has also contributed to HBT here) has written and self-published many of them! A resident of Vienna, Austria, she writes about whatever interests her. Her books are in German. Soon she'll translate them into English. Here she encourages us all... 7 Tips for Authors by Rhiannon… Continue reading 7 Tips for Authors by Rhiannon→
Do you have an elevator speech? Book writers are told that they need an 'elevator speech' -- a one-minute pitch for when they inadvertently meet their star-maker. It's also useful for talking about one's book with everyone else. Theoretically, that is. My elevator speech rarely gets past the first floor. But I love my books,… Continue reading Hope for Novelists and Other Writers by da-AL→
Holidays and New Year celebrations are when messages about what family should and shouldn’t make me want to gag. They generalize everyone into one big homogenous lump.
That’s when I step back and take stock of the people I know. It does my heart good to see that we’re individuals — and that includes our families, the ones we make, or our lack thereof.
Being adopted has shaped the way I view who is family and who is not. When I found out I was adopted over thirty years ago, I saw the people around me in a different light. I saw them as strangers, yet I still accepted them as family because they had taught me to do so. I instantly realized that any combination of people could make a family.
In this way, I accepted my mother and father as my family unit. These were the people who’d decided to raise me from infancy as their own. They loved me, and I them. But when my mother died and my father gave up his parental rights, I began to question the definition. Was my adopted father not my father anymore simply because the Court said he wasn’t? I mean the Court deemed him my father in 1974, and so he was. Was…
In this way, I accepted my mother and father as my family unit. These were the people who’d decided to raise me from infancy as their own. They loved me, and I them. But when my mother died and my father gave up his parental rights, I began to question the definition. Was my adopted father not my father anymore simply because the Court said he wasn’t? I mean the Court deemed him my father in 1974, and so he was. Was…
