“Caught Between Worlds is a fantastic story set in Iraq in 1980 about a kidnapping—except instead of a kid, it’s his father who is taken hostage when war breaks out with Iran. Tom O’Hara’s father is taken by armed militants shortly after they move to Baghdad. Grieving the loss of his mother a year ago, Tom relies on his memories of her, an anthropology professor, and their mutual interest in Alexander the Great who appears to Tom as a guide. With the help of his new friend Mikhail and a dog named Ursa, Tom rescues his father and learns the power of friendship which transcends religious or cultural differences. A page-turner with a terrific plot twist.” – Jill Swenson Therese has been a voracious reader since early childhood. Heaven, as she saw it, was discovering the Carnegie Library in walking distance of her Springfield, Illinois, home. Her father’s sisters and her mother were readers and tale-tellers. Her two grandfathers were instrumental in forming her core value that everyone can hold their own beliefs and still get along, a central theme of her writing. Therese’s connection to the Arab culture came from her Iraqi husband, whom she met in college, and his family. As soon as they met, she started reading everything she could on Iraq. When she opened a conversation with him based on her reading, he often said: “Really? How do you know that?” He spent his youth dreaming of America. She dove into Iraqi culture and cooking as if…
Authors and Publishers and Agents mash it up in new ways as the book business gets remade. The reallocation of risks and rewards happens as self-publishing, e-books, and the current economies of scale with new digital technologies encroaches on the crumbling financial houses of traditional publishing. Agents without advances these days from trade publishers now retool to manage and administrate the self-publishing initiatives of authors…. [Read More]
Filed Under: agents, Authors, book prospectus, business plan, Capital investment, copyright royalties, Economic Risk, production expenses, profit margins, Publishers, return on investment, self-publishing, Writers, writing
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If you are an author who wants to get published, you need a website, blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Publishers expect the author to play the primary role in social media marketing. You can hem and haw, but most book professionals are going to insist you build your author brand online. Luckily, Swenson Book Development, LLC assists authors with their… [Read More]
Dodie Smith’s novel is just like any other charming British novel set in the countryside in the 1930s: the landscape is glorious, the cupboard is bare, and the characters eccentric. I Capture the Castle opens with the wonderful line “I am sitting in the kitchen sink as I write this.” The “I” is Cassandra Mortmain, the 17-year old narrator of the novel (which is, in… [Read More]
Filed Under: British, Cassandra, castle, countryside, English, family, funny, imagination, inspiration, London, romance, sad, voice, witty, writer
When Jill Swenson asked me to write a 500 word post for Swenson Book Development LLC book blog, I was apprehensive. For one, writing creatively has never been one of my strengths. But writing critiques, doing research, and procrastinating are. Helping others write is why I want to work in book publishing. Even if the publishing industry is struggling. I refuse to say publishing is… [Read More]
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The collaborative effort of Victoria Boynton (poet) and Marney Lieberman (artist), entitled “Contraptions,” reminds me of a game that the Surrealists used to play at dinner parties. In this game, one person would write a word or draw a portion of a picture on a sheet of paper. The paper would then be folded over, so no one else could see its contents, and passed to the next guest. This person would write a word or draw another part of a picture on the blank space below the paper’s fold. After all the dinner guests had made their contributions, the paper would be unfolded, and there it was: a microcosm of the creative power of the unconscious mind.
Perhaps this book is itself a “contraption” for accessing the untapped resources of the heart. Using the delicate balance of poetry and art, Boynton and Lieberman hold a séance to call forth “our dark hearts and our light hearts,” and decide to “welcome whatever comes.” Beyond this, though, I am fascinated by the fact that it seems Boynton was playing a Surrealist party game all by herself. Sometimes even Boynton has no idea what is coming next in her poem, nor what has come before. Thus, the poet and the reader unfold the paper together.
Boynton is uninterested in giving a guided tour of the emotions, objects, ideas and imaginings which she catalogues so thoroughly and so irregularly throughout the book. The reader feels much the same as the narrator of “Contraption: missing part,” who spends the entire poem wandering through aisles of parts and pieces, searching for the right one. The mistake, for the narrator and the…