Tag Archive for ‘Christina Baker Kline’
Watchung Bookstore – 01/28/11
Who Writing Matters: A Dialog on the Craft & Business of Words When Friday, January 28, 2011 8:00pm – All Ages Where Watchung Bookstore (map) Watchung Plaza Montclair, NJ, USA 07042 Other InfoA panel discussion « Back to the calendar
Moving Day
Welcome to the new home for my blog, next door to my website. After today, I won’t post to my old ‘wordpress.com’ site anymore. I know this site looks a little different. I’d love to hear what you think. I have an exciting line-up of guest writers in the next month, including literary agent Molly Lyons on how to have the best relationship possible with your agent, Martin Kihn on writing “yet another non-fiction book proposal for a memoir about (yawn) a [...]
Looking Back — and Stepping Forward
When I began this blog, ten months ago, I had recently finished a novel that was several months from publication, Bird in Hand, and was beginning a new one (working title Orphan Train). I envisioned this site as a place to talk about the writing life and the process of writing my new novel-in-progress. I thought it might be a useful tool for the graduate students I teach and advise at Fordham, students embarking on creative-writing M.A. theses (mostly novels-in-progress) — [...]
Quick Link: The Picture that Inspired 80,000 Words
“The newspaper clipping is in tatters. Folded, yellowed, curling at the edges and mended in places with clear tape, it was tacked to the bulletin board in my office for eight years….” So begins a guest post I wrote this week for In This Light, a blog about the influence of images on writers and writing. Instinctively I knew that this image would help me access the core motivations of my characters in Bird in Hand, who act in comparably [...]
Quick Link: "Women on Writing" Q&A
Women on Writing – or WOW! – is a buzzing hive of activity for, by, and about women writers and readers. In a freewheeling interview with Margo Dill, a WOW columnist and contributing editor, I talk about why I keep a blog, why I write first drafts on a legal pad with an old-fashioned micro-point Uniball pen, why I get bored when authors simply read their work aloud, why I don’t feel guilty about not being a morning person, and [...]
Five Life Lessons I Learned Writing my New Novel
1. I am not a supermodel. Or a professional soccer player. At times, over the eight long years it took to finish Bird in Hand, I was seized with panic. Look at all those fresh-faced young writers madly producing books, while I grow wrinkled and gray! But then I realized: it doesn’t matter how damn old I am. Unlike some professions, writing does not require that you have dewy skin or the speed of an antelope. All that matters are [...]
My Ten-Year Overnight Success
I wrote this piece several weeks ago for SheWrites, a social networking site for women writers, and it was picked up a few days later by More.com. I’m reprinting it here because I’ve gotten more feedback on it than on any other essay I’ve written. People called it “brutally honest” and “courageously candid”; one writer said she could never imagine being so self-revealing. Another wrote that she burst into tears reading it because my experience was so close to her [...]
What If: The Fear that Inspired My Novel, Bird in Hand
Writing and blogging and talking in interviews about my new novel this week, I keep encountering the same question: What inspired it? There are many answers to this, of course, and I’ve talked in different places about various sources for the story. But the deepest reasons are hard to articulate. So I decided to write about them here. At first it looked like every mother’s worst nightmare: Several weeks ago a 36-year-old mother of two, driving her own kids and [...]
Quick Link: Lessons Learned Writing Bird in Hand
This week I did a guest post for Lisa Romeo Writes, a terrific blog about writing and the writing biz. (One of my favorite features on the blog is Lisa’s Friday Fridge Clean-Out, a weekly roundup of interesting and newsworthy links.) I wrote about what I learned in the process of writing Bird in Hand — not about writing, but about life. You can read the post here. An extra incentive to click through: Lisa is giving away a copy [...]
Quick Link: My Q&A with Novelist Lori A. May
The poet and novelist Lori A. May interviewed me for her blog — Musings, Reviews, News — this week. In the interview Lori pushed me to reveal what Bird in Hand is really about, why I’m not a hermit, why I think achieving balance is an impossible goal, and the fluky way I got started as a writer. You can read all about it here.
