You have found the Starving Artist blog about books, writing, and publishing. Please follow the drop-down menus to navigate around the page (lots of reviews! some news) or just scroll down to read the blog. And why the moniker? See the first two blog posts from 2012.
This a continuation of the movies and shows I am watching during the writing of a YA trilogy. However, in the spirit of recent awards shows, I have decided to include my favorite movies and shows of 2022. By “of 2022,”, I mean I watched them in 2022. They may be 100 years old (they…
And another book that I added to my TBR because it came up under “NDE”s but has nothing to do with NDEs. Not its fault. It ended up being Printz-award-winning YA, so I can learn from this reading experience while writing YA myself. I could also have just enjoyed it. But did I? We Are…
And I started writing this post in November. I want to finish it now, but it contains some timely content. I am going to leave it as it is and put this little note of explanation at the top. It’s November, so Republican or Democrat, right? Wrong. Who cares! It’s Nanowrimo and writers are writing-in…
I’m going to commit to you that this is the last Pride and Prejudice retelling review I will do for a little while. I have been reading a few other things, but they are mostly series (which I finish before I do the review) and nonfiction (which takes me much longer than fiction). But I…
I was recently helping my daughter with one of her college application questions—okay, it wasn’t that recent; it was a few months ago. But when I was done helping her edit said question, I jotted down a note to blog about what I had learned from the experience. I haven’t needed that note until now…
Kinda yikes. Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev was a confusing read, for me. Sure I was actually confused sometimes (I’ll get to that in a sec), but what I mean is that I both enjoyed it and disliked it simultaneously, all the way through. Much like the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and…
Even since I decided to own that hikes and walks in nature help me unfurl story snags and otherwise come up with writing ideas, I have been spending one morning per week (usually Thursday) on a hike followed by the afternoon at a coffee shop (actually putting words on the page). I have a usual…
I was going to bunch some of these Pride and Prejudice retellings that I am plowing through lately together, but decided that was silly. I have the usual amount of stuff to say about each one, so here we go. First, I read and reviewed Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice recently and it coincided with…
It’s been a minute (more than a month) since I went to Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities for a week-long writing residency. If you’ve been around, you might recognize that place or even that sentence, because it was my fourth residency there (and my fifth residency (and one fellowship) total). What could I…
Here’s the thing: in the spirit of no spoilers, I fear the marketing and reviews of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James are so cautious that they don’t adequately warn a reader what they are getting into. This is not a romance. This is not a light-hearted coming-of-age story. The blips out…
The genius of Jane Austen aside, I have to admit that this story held very few surprises for me. Thanks to movies, cultural allusions, and adaptations, I read this book feeling very much like I had read it already. Several times. And yet… There is a reason Austen’s six novels (she died too early!) are…
Full disclosure: I read this book as part of a pre-release group. I had already pre-ordered a copy for the January 24 release date when I was rushed a copy in early January to participate in an online discussion with the author. There is more to disclose. I went to college with author Sara Billups.…
The idea behind “fast-drafting” is to prepare yourself ahead of time so that when you get to the point when you are ready to write your first draft, you can just buckle down and fly through it. You don’t work backwards, revise, edit, or get distracted. You don’t even worry all that much about quality.…
(There are some other books titled After. This should not come as a surprise. I’m not talking about those books.) After by Bruce Greyson, M.D. is nonfiction. It is a sort of recounting of Greyson’s decades studying NDEs (near-death experiences), from his first encounter and complete dubiousness to many serious studies, research, and affiliations to…
I know I read a lot. I still get intimidated by big books. Funnily enough, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is not even 500 pages (similar to the second book, Crooked Kingdom), but the book itself—perhaps because of paper type?—feels bigger than that. And, honestly, I wasn’t that into if for the first quarter…
I’ve run into K. M. Weiland several times on the internet and, I think, in Writer’s Digest. She has an award-winning website for writing help and I believe I have subscribed to her emails in the past. I think that some of this happened years ago when I was self-/indie-publishing, so I still associate her…
I really just do my own thing, don’t I? Let’s be direct: I begin every single book I read desiring to enjoy it (and eventually review it favorably). I would like every book to blow my socks off. Alas, reality. For a little while it seemed I rated every book I read highly. But lately?…
Note: I don’t know why I was holding this review, exactly, but here it is. Probably I was too busy writing the great American novel (or an awesome, best-selling YA fantasy trilogy). I knew that for this year’s National Novel Writing Month (November), I wanted to write a novel I had in my head which…
I know you probably didn’t come to The Starving Artist for movie reviews and, well, my expertise is in literature and not movies. But I am a very opinionated movie-viewer, and I often tie movies to books as an experience. However, none of the movies below are related to books or to the writing life.…
I have been handed books by my (now-eighteen-year-old) daughter a couple times (right after she read them), and she has handed me a couple that I loved (like We Were Liars). When I walked in her room several days ago she was balking at the final pages of The Silent Patient. When I said, “What?”,…
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