EJ Ruek’s The Grimace and The Giggle

Scott Heim reads from We Disappear at last reading at Chelsea
Part 1

Part 3

Part 5

Part 7 (Conclusion)

Today in the New York Times:
In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html
World hunger is getting [...]

A critter and a beta reader’s job is to honestly tell the author the problems they find in a manuscript, including:

what they like and do not like in a story or its writing,
where they lost interest, if they lost interest at all,
what they think does and doesn’t work.

Their job is NOT to dictate to the [...]

I’m pleased to announce that my short story, A Gift for Eternity, was accepted by editor Barbara Quinn for publication in The Rose and Thorn literary ezine’s winter issue. This is a great honor for me, because, not only is The Rose and Thorn one of the oldest and most respected of online magazines, [...]

I was doing a Google search and came across this in the results…which, of course, had nothing at all to do with the subject of my search, but, hey, you know search engines!
[A self-employed person has] “no guarantee of either a steady income or work, no company-provided life insurance and health benefits, no company stock [...]

Today I ran across two situations which are the flip-sides of the same coin — a depressed author who writes marvelous middle grade YA stories (Yes, I’ve read her work) and a despairing literary agent who represents YA books. The author is seeking a literary agent and the literary agent is seeking clients — [...]

This today in Publisher’s Lunch which got it from http://www.businesswire.com/ :
You can also read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN0835916320080408
Poll Asks, Name Your Favorite Book
Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out “What is your favorite book of all time?” The answers:
1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the [...]

Anyone who practices a self-defense art and/or wields a weapon (gun, knife, sword, club/cane/staff) knows “ludicrous” when they read it. I just speed read a book with so many absolutely naive “fight scenes,” that the genre should have been slap stick comedy, rather than a supposedly serious commercial read. I won’t give out [...]

IN HER POST of March 30, 2008, Lori Perkins of L. Perkins Agency suggests that to get a major New York publisher interested, authors need to be able to guarantee at least 25,000 copies of their book will sell.
“…every book has to be perfect (not too long or short and well crafted) and come with [...]

From today’s Publishers Lunch:
Bob Miller’s new experimental start-up with HarperCollins took shape quickly after a casual discussion over drinks with Harper ceo Jane Friedman at the end of February. Miller says that he was “feeling restless and didn’t know what next mountain to climb” and was “talking about my frustration with the paradigms in this [...]