A disturbing but well done holiday story by Jennifer Ruth Jackson. (shudder)
Pete stood at the foot of his little brother’s bed, clenching and unclenching his fists. Bits of wrapping paper still clung to his pajamas and sweat rolled into his narrowed eyes.
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Looks like a great day of readings. Can’t wait!
The Friends of the Orange County Public Library present the Hillsborough Local Authors Book Fair on Saturday, November 24, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., hosted in the Main Branch of the Orange County Public Library. Shop “Small Business” Saturday and support our great local authors and bookstore. For more information, visit our Facebook Event page.
Here is the full list of readings that will be presented upstairs in the Library:
10 a.m. – 11 a.m. Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green will give the keynote address.
11 a.m. – 12 p.m. Barbara Claypole White, Morrow Dowdle, Carol Strickland, Samantha Bryant, Emily Beuhler, and Anne Anthony will read for 10 minutes each.
12 p.m. – 1 p.m. Lee Smith will read for one hour.
1 p.m. – 2 p.m. Anna Jean Mayhew will read for one hour.
2 p.m. – 3 p.m. …
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So happy to have a chance to be a part of this local event. Hillsborough has such a rich writing and reading community!
On November 24, the Friends of the Orange County Public Library will host its first ever Hillsborough Local Author Book Fair! You can read more about the event here. Leading up, we’ll be posting short interviews with some of our author guests. Today we’ll hear from Samantha Bryant!
Who did you dedicate your first book to and why?
Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel was dedicated: For any woman who has ever felt betrayed by her own body.
Part of why I write is to process life. As E.M. Forster famously said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” So, I end up, at least at some level, writing about things that worry, upset, or scare me. In that way, writing is my therapy: the safe space where I figure out how I feel.
I went through a medical scare in…
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If you’re local to Hillsborough, and a movie buff like me, you might want to check this out!
The Hillsborough Classic Film Society presents:
ON THE WATERFRONT, Columbia Pictures, 1954
Starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning, and Eva Marie Saint, directed by Elia Kazan, with music by Leonard Bernstein
3pm Sunday, September 30, 2018, Orange County Public Library, Hillsborough
Free to the public, but please RSVP: hillsboroughclassicfilms.com
There will be a short talk after the film by David Zonderman, Labor Historian, Head of History Department, NCSU, followed by discussion.
This is the Criterion Collection restored edition of the film.
#2 is the one I always have to exercise self control about. I can get lost polishing things at sentence level, ignoring the fact that some of those beautiful sentences might not even make the final draft!
For some writers, editing is the most loathsome part of the process. For others, it’s their favourite. Yet undoubtedly it’s the most important, and given the rise in popularity of self-publishing, it’s more crucial than ever to know how to edit your work.
A good story is grown. It takes weeks, months, of careful tending and nurturing, uncovering the meanings hidden within, fixing things so characters leap off the page, refining to make the plot and prose gripping and immersive. Just like a seed, a story requires patience and dedication. Look after it well and you’ll end up with a blossoming flower.
“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
Stephen King
Some write their first draft and think whatever pours out of them in the first instance is Man Booker-worthy. If you can nail a first draft like that then I doff…
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Too true!
The gem of a piece of writing advice has been floating around since stylus was first put to clay tablet: write what you know.
So, if you’re a psychologist, write about psychology. If you’re a filmmaker, write about filmmaking. If you’re a teacher, write about teaching.
The problem with writing what you know is the ease with which you can get caught up in writing about the minutia of your subject matter. I wrote a three-hundred-plus page novel about a teacher that was so detailed on the subject of teaching that it bored the pants off of anyone who made the mistake of agreeing to beta read it. It was terrible. I had to abandon the manuscript. Out of all those pages, I managed to salvage one chapter and publish it as a short story. Not a great showing for a year’s work.
Here’s the link to that story, if…
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Humphrey Bogart is quite possibly my favorite actor of all time, and this is a favorite among his work for me.
Humphrey Bogart’s character epitomizes what can befall us all: the complete perversion of our sensibilities by unchecked avarice.
Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), and Howard (Walter Huston).
American Film Institute Ranking: #30/100
Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Jim Huston and Walter Huston — a father-son combo.
My Rating: 
It was obvious early on what this movie was going to be about: Greed = Bad.
By showing the cards early, I didn’t know if I would be interested, especially if the moral teaching was going to be heavy-handed. My concerns were ungrounded and the movie addressed them with a counterintuitive solution. Instead of using fast-pace or subtlety, Jim Houston takes the approach of a staggered walk, slowly allowing Fred C. Dobbs (played by Humphrey Bogart) descend into is madness over the course of a couple hours.
What this…
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