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The 10 Most Read Books in the World
Happy 2013!!! Today is the first day of Lucky 13. Are you excited? I can’t hardly wait! I thought this would be a good time to start out the new year with a super fun infographic from Business...
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Libba Bray’s Gorgeous Characterization
Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty How is it that Libba Bray makes her characters so achingly real? I’ve talked a bit about character motives and character quirks in the past, and there are...
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Book Forests, Commandments, and Voracious Readers
This past week, I’ve run across a few pretty cool things, and I wanted to let you all in on these catches: Have you heard about the ridiculously awesome Book Forest book swap in Berlin? The Book...
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What Makes Cross-Genre Fiction Work?
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, via Google Images We’ve all read a little cross-genre fiction, whether we called it that or not. Cross-genre fiction, if you haven’t heard that term before, is fiction...
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The Booker Award & the Versatile Blogger Award
Hey y’all, it’s award time! The lyrically lovely writer Asha Seth over at Amidst Books presented me with the Booker Award last month. Asha has a beautiful writing style; definitely stop by her site...
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What Makes Love Triangles So Compelling?
Gianciotto Discovers Paolo and Francesca (Dante’s Inferno) – via Wikimedia Commons I’ve been pretty absent from the blogosphere recently as I’ve been down for the count with that cold/flu thing that’s...
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The Art of Naming Your Characters
Katniss via Google Images What are the most important things to remember when naming your characters? Recently, io9 talked about character names that should be banned, and and it got me thinking about...
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DRM or Do I Really Own My E-Books?
via Google Images Yes, it’s easy to download e-books lickety-split, and yes, they’re great to read on trains, planes, and big ol’ public transit (although I still get car sick reading anything in the...
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The Humor(ist) in Equal Rights
Aunt Erma’s Cope Book courtesy of Amazon “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’”...
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Punching Up That Theme
Louis Sachar’s Holes via Google Images So you’ve gotten past the first draft, perhaps past the fifth draft, and you’re starting to hone in on bigger picture ideas like theme. But what are the themes...
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How a Book is Born
Today is the day for a short post. Galley Cat over at mediabistro.com recently shared this oh-so-fantastic infographic that absolutely deserves more blog love. You can find the origin of the...
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How Can I Help Debut Authors? And Why Would I Want To?
Transparent via nataliewhipple.com Today is a very special day. Today is the day that debut author Natalie Whipple’s book Transparent comes out. Transparent is about a girl with the power to become...
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Authenticity in YA Fiction
Child Soldier in the Ivory Coast, Africa, by Gilbert G. Groud via Wikimedia Commons Orson Scott Card definitely caused a stir when he published Ender’s Game in 1977 with a young child being trained as...
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Books vs. e-Books
Books or e-books? First of all, I don’t think this is a zero-sum game – that is to say, there’s definitely room for both real books and e-books in the world. Although I definitely read way, way more...
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Glorious Summer Reading
Sun-bathing Girls in Brittany by Moric Goth via Wikimedia Commons What makes summer such a great time for reading? Leading up to summer, even the most trivial magazines and talk shows have a column or...
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Getting Reluctant Readers Reading: the Grown-Up Edition
An Interesting Story by Leon Perrault via Wikimedia Commons If you Google “reluctant readers,” you’ll find quite a bit of material on very young and middle grade readers. These ideas are absolutely...
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Grammar Pet Peeves: Annoying Writing Mistakes Infographic
Perhaps it’s a side effect of reading so voraciously when I was a child, but I’ve never had major issues with grammar. Although my grammar isn’t perfect (no one’s is, really), grammar comes pretty...
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5 Things I Learned in My First Year of Blogging
Birthday Candle by Ardfern via Wikimedia Commons This week marks an entire year of blogging – October 23rd will be my one-year blog anniversary! Happy Blog Birthday to Novel Conclusions! In honor of...
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Character Tags in Fiction and Why They’re Fantastic
Sean Bean as Ned Stark via Google Images In most memorable books you read, the characters hold distinct places in your memory. Why is this? Outside of the overarching plot, what makes characters...
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Make it Real: Building Diversity in Fiction
Colourful Army by Maistora via Flickr Traveling over the holidays has gotten me thinking a lot about diversity. Everywhere you go, the people are different and diverse and represent different parts of...
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