stacey ewing

I ran across this great old quote from Sandra Cisneros this afternoon while helping someone research a paper topic:

“Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can’t see.”

I’m so flippin’ excited! Our National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) Write-in Event for next week in the InfoCommons is shaping up quite nicely!!

Christy approached local mystery author, M.D. Abrams, and asked her if she would come in and speak and offer encouragement to our Nanowrimo Event participants. Marjorie agreed and will be coming out to speak at 6:30pm!

Then I contacted three of my fave authors to see if they would be interested in participating in a live chat with our participants and they were both game!! Jeaniene Frost, paranormal writer and author of the Night Huntress Series will be chatting with us at 5:30pm. Ilona & Gordon Andrews, urban fantasy writers and authors of the Kate Daniels Series (ACE Fantasy) will be chatting with our group around 7:30pm. Then at 9pm, Ann Aguirre, sci-fi writer and author of the Jax series (ACE Sci-Fi) will also pop on and do a Q & A round with our group.

I’m holding 30 minute “word war” contests throughout the evening and giving away “Murder on the Prairie” (signed!), “Halfway to the Grave,” “Magic Bites,” and “Grimspace” to the participants who write the most words during that time. Ann Aguirre contacted me and said that she would even mail a signed copy of “Wanderlust” to one of the winners as well! So, my childrens, prizes galore next Wednesday, prizes galore!!

Anyway, I CANNOT wait! These writers have been SO awesome and VERY giving of their time. Approx. 75-80% of last year’s participants were working on some kind of sci-fi, paranormal, urban fantasy story and the rest were working on novels & mysteries so I think our Nano participants will be ab. thrilled to find out who is on the docket for next Wednesday!

TOO funny!!! :D

I’ve been in a horrible funk all week and tonight was feeling especially bad. Tim is out on a gig, playing with a jazz group downtown, so kinda bored, I dialed up ye olde google reader to flip through my blog subscriptions and catch up on my reading. That’s when I saw Ann Aguirre’s reminder that she was having an online chat tonight for her readers. Looking at the clock, I saw I’d missed it by an hour but visited the link anyway on the off-chance that things had run over and they had!

So I got the pleasure of spending an hour and a half totally geeking out over scifi books and shows with Ann, Michelle, and Has. It was great talking with other folks who love those things as much as I do (kinda helps me feel like I’m not totally alone in my nerdiness! haha).

I loved Grimspace so much that I tore through it, finished it the same day and then picked it back up the next morning and read it all over again (gotta love a three day weekend! haha). So it was especially interesting to hear how she envisions her characters (Claudia Black as Jax and David Boreanzas as March) and to hear about the process of fighting to get published- with the bottom line being: Never. Give. Up. :)

I cannot wait until the new projects she’s finished up come through the publisher!! So, C’MON! hurry up Penguin!! stop the torture and publish us some more Aguirre and oh yeah… bring us some chicken wings… extra spice-eh…

Ran across an interesting article at lunch today called The Future of Reading by Mark Pilgrim. Actually it’s more of a play, in six acts, commenting on DRM and eBooks. It’s essentially a mashup of Jeff Bezos’ Open Letter to the Authors Guild, the Amazon Kindle Terms of Service, Steven Levy’s Newsweek article on the Kindle, Orwell’s 1984, and Richard Stallman’s ‘The Right to Read.’ Well done sir.

What a bummer, Madeleine L’Engle passed away. A Wrinkle in Time was my very first sci-fi book. I probably read it in 3rd or 4th grade and then I reread it about 10 or 15 more times after that- I liked it that much. The other two books in the series were great too. Geeky science stuff with a strong female lead character…pretty awesome!