Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

R iding down to the Weymouth Center on Saturday, I heard two bits of news from Press 53 publisher Kevin Morgan Watson. One, that he was not going to publish any more novels or memoirs, so that he could focus on short story collections (his first love) and poetry. I'm happy he's making this move, even though it means I'll be back in the hunt for a publisher and/or agent for my next Southern/crime novel Backwater , now in the writing - because short fiction deserves its champion. The other bit of news is that Darlin' Neal, author of Rattlesnakes and the Moon from Press 53, will be back soon with another collection of short fiction. I love Rattlesnakes , an unflinching look into the lives of blue-collar woman that take us into the truck stops and trailer parks, but doesn't showing women at the hardscrabble end of things as simply victims. Her heartbreaking stories of the road and hard times are set in small places of the South and West. In “Lafayette,” a woman...

I ran into this "app" at the Books by Women site. It only took me a couple of hours to put it together, using photos that I had taken along with videos from the site and a public domain image. Pretty slick! I only did the free 30-second one, but you can upgrade to a longer paid video. For authors with small presses, this seems like a nice option. Check it out!

PERPETUAL FOLLY: The Year in Books — the Best of 2011 : Although I read a lot of books in 2011, I certainly didn’t read all that were published in 2011, and I didn’t read exclusively books tha...