Author name: Booksquare

Dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism.

No, Really, Your Mother Does It

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What with one thing and the other, we ended up in a situation where we were joking about the mother’s (non-existent) blog with a nurse. What was supposed to be facetious became uncomfortable when the nurse asked how often the mother updated her blog. See, it wasn’t that the ICU nurse was curious about the blog — it was that she assumed the mother was posting hourly*. Talk about lowering expectations. If anything, blogs are proof that the written word is alive and well. Also that our most profound desire to express our deepest thoughts also coincides with such events […]

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Career Opportunities

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We’ve probably mentioned (once or twice) that we’re not much for the non-fiction side of writing. Our first reaction when faced with a crisis of facts is “make it up.” Who’s to say for sure that humans can’t adapt to temperatures on Saturn? It’s not like we’ve tried, and until we have proof of failure, it’s okay to go forth with the possibility of success. Hmm, that was an odd digression. What we really wanted to say is that if you’re doing the non-fiction thing and/or you’re looking into the ghostwriting business, Madeleine Morel may be the agent for you.

Agents

The Essence of Character

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It is rare that we look to Roger Ebert for insight on character development, but perhaps that is just our shortsightedness at work. After all, he did write one of the husband’s favorite movies of all time. Characters (as we all know) march to their own little drummers. How often do we find something happening on the page that isn’t what we’d do in real life*? It is this unexpected quality that makes characters fascinating. In fact, when a character’s actions challenges an author’s belief system, we think it adds unexpected depth to the story. Ebert looks further to point

Tools and Craft

On Life’s Simple Pleasures

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This is necessary because the man [Dean Koontz]doesn’t just write at a breakneck clip. He edits each page at least 20 to 30 times immediately after writing it. When the chapter is finished, he prints it out and starts editing those same pages all over again. “It’s fun,” he says. Sit, stay, succeed – Bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz has a shockingly vivid imagination, a sedate Newport Coast lifestyle and, oh yes, a dog who writes a little too. (Note: Unless a miracle has happened, getting to this article is rough going due to registration and the Times’s strange belief

Quote of the Week

Uh, What Decade Is This?

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Far be it for us to question the press, but have to wonder when the author of the article linked below last looked over the range of Harlequin titles. Because we’re fairly they stopped “tastefully” implying sex and started getting pretty detailed about the act a long time ago. Now if the scale was sliding from softcore (in a manner of speaking) to graphic, she’d have something. Since we suspect we won’t have time to cover this story in any depth, we’ll just hit the highlights here: erotica is the new black and Harlequin is getting them some of that.

Books/Mags/Blogs

Again, Not Feeling The Love

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Is it us, or do a lot of this week’s new ideas seem off? Normally, we can get excited about something over the course of seven days. Nothing’s grabbing us. See, we like the idea of making book awards more of an event, more prominent, more…well, popular, but somehow using the People’s Choice Awards as a model doesn’t quite work for us. Maybe this is one of those concepts that needs to gestate in our brain for a few days. However, we are working with our new positive attitude this week (hmm, coincidence? Possibly not.), and will say that we

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Ari Fleischer Is No Longer Our Hero

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Let us just say that we have made not answering direct questions an art. We can, without breaking a sweat, dissemble until everyone present has forgotten the topic. Mostly this happens because we, uh, weren’t paying attention to the question, and find ourselves scrambling to make up stuff until a real answer comes to mind. We discovered this technique in the 8th grade, when the definition of “grassroots” came up on a U.S. history test. If we’d ever heard the word before, it wasn’t in this lifetime. However, writers write, and we wrote. At least two pages. And got the

Publishers and Editors

Because Recreating the Spark Always Works So Well

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We know that the publishing industry moves slowly. While we’ve never actually seen molasses moving uphill in a snowstorm, we understand the book world resembles the process. So it is always surprising to us when houses leap on an almost-brand-new idea. Almost, because they’re leaping onto something that worked because it was so different, so perfectly timed, so right…well, you get the picture. So this guy who hosts a (fake) news talk show on a cable channel gets his staff together and writes a book that, hard to believe, is as close to perfect satire as we’ve seen in our

Books/Mags/Blogs

So Far Off Topic, We’re (Almost) Embarrassed

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We love science — especially when it tries to explain art. And only a man would come up with a cockamamie (ha!) reason for why a statue seems to be less-than-endowed. Yeah, he was scared. Sure. And the moon is made of blue cheese. Anyone ever heard of anatomically correct? Was David scared stiff of Goliath?

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Ode to A (Old) Library

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Okay, so we don’t have a poetic mind. Sue us. We know we can’t do this article on the London Library justice, and we’re not going to try. You can read it for yourself. It will do your heart some good. Literary culture as we have known it and understood it since scribes were writing on papyrus is not the bonus of civilisation but intrinsic to civilisation itself, and the printed book, mysteriously, is the form that turns out to be irreplaceable. In the great libraries or the bookshelf at home, knowledge roots itself and imagination flowers. The availability of

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