Anna Staniszewski

Categories: Books

• The Writer’s Battle

  On the recommendation of the wise Karen Strong, I’ve been reading The Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell. It’s a brilliant little book inspired by Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Bell is honest about the difficulties of writing and publishing, but he’s also full of helpful advice.
  Here are a couple

• Recent Reading Highlights

  Thanks to my agent and my writing group, I now have a bit more direction with my fairy tale revision. Happily, this means I’ve finally started to emerge from my reading slump. I’m currently in the middle of a couple of books, but here are some of my recent reading highlights:
  Neil Armstrong Is My Uncle

• Can You Read While You’re Revising?

  I’ve been working on revisions for the past few weeks, and in that time my reading pile has been pretty much untouched. Even though I have a stack of books I’ve been waiting to read, I’ve been having a hard time getting past the first chapter of any of them. I’m wondering if maybe my

• Should Characters Be Like Us?

  In his wonderful craft book Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card says: “While we tend to like characters that are like us, we also tend to be a little bored with them. It’s strangeness, not familiarity, that excites our curiosity.” This got me thinking about the kinds of characters that appeal to me. I realized

• Creating Tension on Every Page

  As I’ve been reading an ARC of Carrie Ryan’s The Dead-Tossed Waves, sequel to The Forest of  Hands and Teeth, it’s been making me think a lot about what Donald Maass stresses in Writing the Breakout Novel: the need to create tension on every page.
  In Ryan’s book, we know from the very first page that

• Online Book Browsing

  As I was looking for an excerpt from a book the other day, I found something pretty interesting. HarperCollins has a new “Book Browse” feature on its website that allows you to read several chapters of certain books online.
  Being able to browse inside books is nothing new, of course, but this was the first time

• Recent Great Reads

  The New Year Book Giveaway has officially come to an end! Thank you to everyone who entered. I plan on crunching the numbers later today and posting the winners tomorrow, so make sure to check back!
  In other news, I’ve been making some progress with my enormous reading list recently, and I wanted to highlight a

• ALA Midwinter Recap

  First, just a reminder that today is your last chance to enter my New Year Book Giveaway! If you want to win some free books, you only have until midnight tonight to enter!
  Also, check out the fancy new search feature on the right-hand side of the page. A big thank you to my husband for

• Help a Librarian!

  Since I managed to crash two computers yesterday, I’m going to take a hint and stay away from technology as much as I can today. But before I go, I want to send you over to the Enchanted Inkpot, where I interviewed a middle school librarian on the fantasy reading trends in her school. As

• Free Books Galore!

  It’s looking like the start of a good year for books. Not only are there lots of great reads in store for 2010, there are also plenty of chances to get them for free! In addition to my book giveaway (shameless plug) here are some other contests going on in the blogosphere:
  Shooting Stars is offering