Reading, wRiting, and Roaming with Author Valerie Biel

What Do You See?

April 18, 2014

The only thing that I like more than writing stories and reading books is traveling.

People have been asking me about the photos on my website.  Most of these photos are from our family   travels. Some of them are the work of my photographer daughter.  The header above on this blog includes the Rodin statue “The Thinker” on the left from Rodin Museum gardens in Paris and on the far right are the gargoyles from the top of Notre Dame in Paris.  The center picture is of the walkway along the old city wall in Rothenberg, Germany. (Aren’t those gargoyles fabulous??  If you get to Paris, take the climb to the top of Notre Dame. The view of the city is awesome and the gargoyles most definitely can’t be appreciated from the ground.)

Traveling (... Continue Reading

Judge a Book by its Cover!

April 15, 2014

I’ll admit it. I love a good book cover.  (Don’t we all?)

And while I understand the spirit of the adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” I think that boring book covers cause us to pass by what may be wonderful stories.

If a book has an interesting, eye-catching image that pops as compared to the other books sharing shelf space, it is that much more likely someone is going to pick it up and at least read the jacket copy.  Even in the e-book market when you are wading through a number of book summaries, that little thumbnail cover has to be powerful enough to draw the reader away from all of the other choices on the screen.

Right now, I’m lusting over the amazing book cover and really the entire book design of Nora Roberts’ Shadow Spell. (This is the... Continue Reading

Writers' Institute: Another Great Conference

April 9, 2014

The Writers’ Institute conference was a blast this past weekend. It always takes a couple of days to recover from having my brain filled with so much great information.  The conference was also awesome for catching up with other writers and forging new friendships and professional connections.

Particularly helpful to me were the sessions on Independent Publishing – a topic often ignored at other conferences where acknowledging this increasingly successful trend appears to be taboo.  Indie publication authors were also given the chance to be part of a book signing and sales event and not relegated to second-class status.  Indeed, many of these titles are... Continue Reading

Jumping

March 31, 2014

This morning as I write my first blog post, I am feeling like Veronica Roth’s character Tris in the Divergent book series (and now movie) as she survives a multi-story leap into a giant net.

I am not normally a jumper . . . I am an observer of jumpers, more likely to read their stories than be the story. That’s why I am such a huge reader. In a good year I can log 100 titles and rarely read less than 80. That can seem a little freaky to some people, but if you love books like I do, you completely understand this.

I love being transported into a different world an author has created for us. I can’t remember NOT loving this. As a kid, I... Continue Reading

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