The Great Blog Experiment

By
Diane Chamberlain
on August 26th, 2009 | | Comments (4)

BlogMy webmaster has changed my blog to a WordPress blog, so I have a bit of a learning curve going on here! Let’s see how it works out. For those of you who comment frequently, let me know if you run into any snags. I hope not. Change is always a challenge, but I hope it will ultimately be for the better. I have a feeling you won’t notice much difference on your end, but if you could see the “dashboard” on my computer screen right now, you’d feel as overwhelmed as I do. Lots of little buttons and other doohickies, and I don’t know what most of them are.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new header. Remember when I was trying to come up with a name for my newsletter? I was brainstorming with John and came up with “The Secret Life of Diane Chamberlain” as a play on “The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes.” John said it wouldn’t work for the newsletter but was perfect for the blog, and I agreed. Of course, now I’d better think up some secrets to share.

I was going to add a picture to this blog post and have encountered my first major problem: I can’t upload any pictures. Bear with me! Hopefully I’ll have this all figured out in a few days.

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In the Beginning

By
Diane Chamberlain
on March 2nd, 2009 | | Comments (14)

 
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I hope all you parents are making readers out of your children. When I think back to my own childhood, it’s full of books. My Dad was a school principal, and nearly every day after work he’d stop in each of our bedrooms and toss two things on our beds: candy and books. We may all have bad teeth, but we love to read. For two of us, that led to a love of writing as well. In my case, that writing started very early.

I’m pulling together pictures to be used in a video presentation at a May event celebrating my twenty years as an author. While doing so, I stumbled across the cover for Witchville (or–ahem–Whitchville), the first book I wrote. What really cracks me up about this book is the synopsis on the flyleaf. Except for the spelling and sentence structure, the plot sounds like it could be from one of my current novels, doesn’t it? I may have grown as a writer, but my imagination appears to be stuck in 1961 (as is my typing ability, I’m afraid).

So are you nurturing some excellent readers? Perhaps some future authors? I wonder what form your kids’ books will take? Will we be able to hold them in our hands and store them on our bookshelves, or will they all be on Kindle-like devices or on little chips we have implanted in our ears? No matter how anxious I feel about the future of publishing, I have no anxiety whatsoever about the future of storytelling. We’ll always need stories, and I hope you’re sharing plenty of them with your children.

 

 

 

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Audio Books in Bed

By
Diane Chamberlain
on October 5th, 2008 | | Comments (10)

wife2.jpgI bought my first iPod about a year ago and I’m an addict. I love listening to my favorite soundtracks as I write, so I’ve loaded all of them on the iPod, along with some Springsteen, some meditation music, and chants by Krishna Das. But most of all, I love listening to books. The iPod is a little dicey when listening to books, because if you accidentally hit the scroll thingy in the wrong spot, you may be propelled five or ten or one hundred pages forward or backward with no real way of knowing exactly where you’ve landed. That’s the only snag I’ve found. . . except for the problem of reading in bed.

Like many readers, I enjoy reading before sleep. You know how it is: you open the book, read a few pages or a few chapters, grow sleepy, close the book and turn out the light. With an audio book, though, I find that I fall asleep with the book still running. It’s so frustrating to wake up and have no idea where I am in the story. So I’ve decided to cool it on listening to audio books in bed. I think it ruins the book for me.

The thing I love best about an audio book is the performance, which can absolutely make or break the book. My all-time favorite audio book performance is the unabridged version of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Now I have a close second: The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff. I’m eating this book up. It’s so hard to know if I’d love it as much if I were actually reading it, but the four actors performing the various voices in the story are phenomenal. For those of you who don’t know, The 19th Wife is a sweeping (fictional) look at the early days of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints and its contemporary spin-off, the “Firsts”. From Publishers Weekly “This exquisite tour de force explores the dark roots of polygamy and its modern-day fruit in a renegade cult…” It’s yummy! But I don’t dare read it in bed.

Do any of you successfully listen to audio books before sleep?

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The Happy Bookers Club Chat

By
Diane Chamberlain
on August 2nd, 2008 | | Comments (10)
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I’ll be doing a live chat at The Happy Bookers Club Monday evening at 8:30 pm, EDT. You need to register at their site, but then just click on “chat” in the menu and we can talk books!

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