Category Archives: holidays

November 23, 2011   Miriam   fun, holidays, Miriam  
4

Meowsings

I’m not a cat person.  I’ve had hamsters, ducks, rabbits, geckos and other reptiles, parrots, and several dogs, but I’ve never had a cat as a pet.  Oh, I’ve known some delightful cats who managed to combine elegance and aloofness with winning moments of affection.   I’ve also known some CFH (cats from hell).  One in particular terrorized me in my first post-college apartment.  The furball in question was my roommate’s and we shared a small place in a questionable block on the upper, upper west side of Manhattan.  It was the kind of block that, back in the day, you were scared to walk through alone at night, especially if you were young and female.  And yet, I felt safer among the drug dealers and pimps who owned the neighborhood than in my apartment with the homicidal cat.  My roommate, who loved the beast, thought her kitty was adorable—even when he flew at you with claws fully extended and spittle flying from his open mouth (seriously, he was possessed by Satan).  Happily, our association ended without harm to animal or human, but it could have gone badly for both.  After that episode, I considered pot-bellied pigs, skunks, spider monkeys and miniature horses as pets (actually, I considered them for my husband who is crazy about animals) but never a cat.

So, yeah, I’m not a cat person.  And yet, I love pictures of cats doing silly, stupid, adorable things.  I’m the audience for all those websites that show cats with Post-it notes on them or dangling from chandeliers or typing away at a computer keyboard.  ‘Cause, really, who can resist cute kitties and how much better is it when you don’t have to vacuum cat hair off all your clothes and furnishings to get your feline fix.

Because it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow and any of you reading this blog are preoccupied with thoughts of stuffing and how to avoid great-aunt Greta at dinner, instead of e-book pricing and effective query letters, I thought I’d treat you to this site, where every time you hit the 100-word mark you are rewarded with a picture of a pretty puss.

Enjoy!  And happy Thanksgiving to all!

November 22, 2011   John   favorites, great books, holidays, John, opinion, reading  
2

What a year!

Well, I’d hoped to stave off the holiday season for just a few more days—at least until Santa lumbers down Broadway on Thursday morning at the end of the Macy’s Parade. But the Times just released their 100 Notable Books for 2011, so I guess there’s no escaping now…

Of all the year-end best-of lists, I find the Times list the most instructive. Perhaps it comes with being the Paper of Record, but typically they go for the popular, consensus picks of the best in a given year, and so it provides a good picture of what worked, both artistically and commercially. For me as an agent, it’s especially useful to look at the nonfiction list and review the categories that got them excited—lotsa history, lotsa memoir this time out. And, of course, it’s always fun to grouse about the omissions—ahem, cough, Steve Jobs, ahem?

But this year more than any other, the list make me realize just how loooong this year felt. Didn’t Swamplandia! come out a zillion years ago? The Tiger’s Wife? I could swear I was talking about Malcom X with the editor back in 2010…

For sure, having a newborn at home has certainly dragged out the days (and nights). On the other hand, coming to the end of my first full calendar year as an agent, I’ve handled a lot more projects than I did as an editor, and with a much faster rate of turnover, too—so in that respect, news quickly becomes old news, and old news seems that much older.

Hence, for once, I’m actually grateful to the Times for reminding me of books that are way off my radar at this point—and that I won’t be hopelessly out of date if I tackle some of them over the holidays!

Any thoughts on the list? Other glaring omissions? Anyone else feel like 2011 went on forever?

November 21, 2011   Jane   fun, holidays, Jane, Thanksgiving  
3

Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks!

I know it sounds hokey, but every year at Thanksgiving, I really do think about all that I have to be thankful for.  This year is no different.

I am thankful for, first and foremost, my family: my wonderfully supportive husband, my two incredible children Jessica and Zachary and my granddaughter Elena.  All of you bring so much love and laughter into my life.

I am thankful for my smart, energetic and ever curious staff who keep their sense of humor and continue to contribute so much to our company during challenging times.  I am especially thankful for my superb business partner, Miriam, who offers her wisdom and good counsel every single day.

I am thankful for my clients because we’re able to work together to bring out the best in each other.  Without each and every one of you, we wouldn’t and couldn’t continue to thrive.

I am thankful for all the people I work with on the other side—those colleagues at the publishing houses who are so devoted to helping writers be the best they can be.  Many of us came into this business because of the people who participate in it—we all care so much about good books and spreading the message about the importance of reading.

And finally, I am thankful for you, our readers—without you we wouldn’t be in business today.  You are the creative backbone of what we do.

What are you thankful for?

October 28, 2011   Rachel   fun, holidays, Rachel S., short stories  
2

And then her head fell off.

Ghost stories and other scary tales have been a part of Halloween long before candy and fake blood were necessary. You don’t need sugar and theatrics to be properly scared if the mood is right and the words themselves are eerie enough to raise your hair without any help. The classic spooky story is short and told in a voice just above a whisper (except when a shout to surprise is necessary, of course). They don’t need to be complicated or detailed in any way—in fact, the simpler they are, the scarier with lots of room for the imagination to run wild and fill up all the left over space.

I remember being petrified of “The Girl with the Green Ribbon,” though for what reason, I couldn’t say. Locally, the tale of the Jersey Devil haunted me far longer than I care to admit, and thinking about it for too long too late at night still gives me chills.

Classic ghost stories stick through the generations and eventually, everyone knows what the outcome of a particular tale will be right from the very first “It was a dark and stormy night.” The scare comes then from the atmosphere, excitement and anticipation rather than from the story itself. Over at The Morning News, readers were asked recently to submit alternate endings to “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs, which is a story I am sure I read in every English class every year until I graduated high school. It’s not just scary—it’s grotesque. Some of the new endings are equally (if not more) horrifying, while others take a different, more humorous route.

Whatever the change may be, it got me thinking about how difficult it is to write something that’s actually scary as opposed to campy and overdone. While Halloween often is all about camp, there’s nothing scarier than the quiet, creeping suspense that a good ghost story can offer. Goosebumps, bated breath and a look over the shoulder are the hallmarks of a true spooky tale. What are your favorites? What is it about them that makes them so scary?

October 26, 2011   Stacey   children's books, fun, great books, holidays, Stacey  
6

Halloween reading treats for kids

In my house right now, let’s just say there is a lot of prepping and planning going on for Halloween. Samantha, my first grader, has brought home Halloween-themed library books the last 3 weeks. They must have a section dedicated to the holiday! I’ll take it, as will our dentist. Reading books about Halloween is definitely preferable to eating all the candy associated with it, although we’re working through our fair share of that too.

So in anticipation of the big day, I thought I’d share this piece from The Seattle Times about some new books for this scary and fun time of year. It’s amazing that these are all new titles; they just keep coming. It seems this time of year brings a lot more than just tricks and treats (can’t help the puns, it’s that kind of thing). Last year, we really enjoyed Scaredy-Cat Splat! by Rob Scotton, who visited the school and signed a copy for my daughter.

I’d love to know which are your favorite spooky, scary, or funny Halloween books for kids, ones that you loved growing up or newer ones that you enjoy reading to your kids now. Because I suspect that Halloween in our house is going to continue long past October 31st, and that next year we’ll start getting ready even sooner, like right around Labor Day.

October 21, 2011   Rachel   characters, fun, holidays, Rachel S.  
8

Who should I be for Halloween?

With Halloween right around the corner, small talk has changed from discussing the weather to inquiries from friends to total strangers on the subject of costumes. I, for one, am terrible, absolutely terrible at coming up with Halloween costume ideas and often just resort to throwing something predictable together out of the clothes that I already own about five minutes before I’m supposed to be anywhere a costume is required. One year recently, I just threw on some black leggings, a turtleneck and cut a misshapen strip of fabric with eyeholes and declared myself a burglar. I’m that kind of imaginative.

It all usually ends up being okay, but there are so many other with such excellent and creative ideas for costumes, that it makes me a little jealous. I’m most envious, not of the extremely elaborate or complicated get-ups that transform people into humorous caricatures or frightening beasts, but of those who simply turn themselves into another human—a character from a book (little or well-known) or play. These characters many know only from description and often have mental images of specific to the individual reader, but they are somehow instantly recognizable with the rights array of vestments and props.

There are the obvious, the Harry Potters and Alices (in Wonderland!). A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with one half of the face kindly and the other twisted and evil would be great, if not a little work-intensive. A particularly distinctive author—Mark Twain, perhaps—would be a little more difficult, but certainly recognizable. Or you could go even more obscure, with something like this, a perfect replica of the cover for one of my favorites, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. The possibilities are endless, and everyone loves guessing the identity of a really great, creative character costume.

I haven’t quite settled on my boring costume of the year, so if you can come up with any ways to make a great literary figure into a costume, let me know! Have you ever dressed up as a character from a book before?

July 05, 2011   John   children's books, fun, holidays, John  
3

You’re a grand old picture book!

Happy (belated) 4th of July, everyone! Hope you’re all feeling rested and refreshed after a weekend of all-American activities. The 4th has always been my favorite non-gift-giving holiday, mostly for the food and fireworks—guess I never really outgrew being a pyro. In fact, this 4th, I was thrilled to discover that Connecticut has relaxed their fireworks laws—picked up some great Roman candles and other assorted goodies at Stop & Shop. No M-80s, but still, it’s a start!

Visiting my folks in CT, who are in driving distance of the beach, I’ll admit that books weren’t at the forefront of my thoughts (gasp). But as I watched Henry prance around the yard waving a little American flag, I did start to wonder a little about how to explain the holiday to him. So, back in the City last night, I combed through his bookshelves and discovered to my chagrin that we really didn’t have much for him—a copy of Lynne Cheney’s AMERICA: A PATRIOTIC PRIMER (which, no joke, is a really good book, but way too old for Henry), but that’s about it.

Thinking about my own reading, though, most of the books I remember from childhood, like Jean Fritz’s Revolutionary-era stories on Patrick Henry and John Hancock, would be too old for Henry. And doing a little Amazon surfing this morning, it seems like the bulk of Americana for kids is either in the early reader format or aimed more for the 5-10 picture book readers than the younger end.

But maybe I’m just not finding them… so, I turn to you, dear readers. Anyone got any recommendations for young picture books on America? Think of it as your patriotic duty…

May 13, 2011   Lauren   fun, holidays, Lauren, reading  
8

Spooky times

So, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but did you guys realize what today is?  It’s Friday the 13th.  And in case you haven’t heard, the world is also ending next weekend.  I had assumed the Mayan calendar/2012 stuff was nonsense, but I didn’t realize it was because we’re actually not making it out of 2011.

Still, you’ve got a week left for reading, and you might as well get yourself in the spirit of things with something really creepy and unsettling.  For me, I can go for a good horror schlockfest now and again, but don’t tend to find them genuinely frightening.  More campy, nauseating fun.  I usually find psychological horror and real life situations most intensely disturbing, but they tend to keep me up at night contemplating rather than willing sleep to come while refusing to close my eyes.

I wasn’t always that way, though.  The scariest book moments I can recall are all from my childhood.  I grew up in a somewhat creaky 100-year-old house, so hauntings were a particular source of terror.

I once made the mistake of starting to read Robert Bloch’s Psycho, on which the film was based, while idly flipping through bookshelves when I was reasonably young.  I didn’t make it very far, if I remember correctly, because I was too creeped out—I think mostly by the idea of reading something I knew was scary—and not kid’s stuff scary.  Real adult scary.  I had dreams for a while after that that related somehow to Psycho, even though I’m reasonably certain that I still had no idea what happened in the story.  The dreams made no sense, as dreams are wont to do, but I distinctly remember that Psycho was the name of the bad guy I was afraid of and at one point he morphed into a sneaker.  Sounds funny and non-threatening now, but does it help to know he was a man-sized sneaker?  A man-sized sneaker who was chasing me around a really old house?  No, probably not.  At any rate, I still have never seen the film (I know!) or read the book, because I’m a tad traumatized.  I suspect sneakers are not a part of it.

Actually, as a child, I was both a total chicken and completely unwilling to accept that.  I used to read and re-read and re-read this big non-fiction picture book of notorious crimes, even though it gave me nightmares.  If I caught a glimpse of it on the shelf in the living room, I sort of had to look at it, because I was worried there was something I might not know I should be worried about yet.  (Knowing is half the battle?)  This meant, of course, that I grew up afraid not of being murdered, but of specific dead murderers.  I recall my mother explaining that I had no reason to be afraid of Jack the Ripper, even though they hadn’t caught him, because he’d have died in the meantime.  I don’t think it helped—what if he’d lived to be really, really, really old?  People can live to be 100, you know.  And some people are still very spry at that age.  I’m pretty sure I thought that fleeing to America and hiding out in the suburbs would have been a very good way to avoid getting caught.  I think I was still too young for my mother to also explain that I would have been fine anyway, seeing as I wasn’t a hooker.  I was also afraid of Lizzie Borden, Burke & Hare, and just the general possibility that I might own something that was secretly made out of human skin.  Sometimes I’d read the part about the Great Train Robbery last, as a sort of freak-out palate cleanser, because it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the prospect that famous historical murderers were actually secretly still alive and coming to get me.

But the book that hands down wins the prize for terrifying me so much that I couldn’t cope with sleeping with the lights out and contemplated moving all my dolls so I couldn’t see them from my bed was a short story collection called Thirteen.  It featured the big name kiddie horror novelists (Christopher Pike, RL Stine, Caroline B. Cooney) and a bunch of others, and some of the stories still would probably creep me out if I read them today.  I read a lot of the works by the major authors in the collection, generally.  I was a devoted Christopher Pike fan for years, though I remember being sort of unimpressed with the story in this collection.  “Lucinda” by Lael Littke and “The Doll” by Carol Ellis were the two that really clinched the sleepless nights for me.

So what are your top scary moments in books?  And do the most terrifying still make a lasting impression on you if you read them today, or is that “cannot possibly sleep” feeling a remnant of your childhood?

December 23, 2010   DG&B   holidays, Michael, our blog  
4

Happy holidays and see you in 2011!

by Michael

All of us at DGLM wish you, our loyal blog readers, the happiest of holidays. We’re stepping away from the office till the new year and the blog until January 10th, so it’s going to be quiet around here until then. But we have some exciting things in store when we return, and I think it’s safe to say that 2011 is going to be our best year of blogging yet. Thanks so much for all your comments, questions and support, and we’ll see you again in the new year!

December 21, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, holidays, queries, Stephanie  
4

As these age things go….

by Stephanie

What can I say? With four days left until Christmas, my brain is admittedly floating somewhere near the ledge of the ninth floor window next to my desk. However! Before I escape to the land of fried desserts and chocolates more commonly known as my home, I wanted to pass along this great interview with Kody Keplinger. Her debut novel The Duff, is a contemporary young adult work that has received strong reviews since its release in September. But what is more notable about Keplinger’s career is that The Duff came out when she was only eighteen, an accomplishment that admittedly doesn’t happen too often. I guess the first thing that came to mind as I read this was the influence something like age can have on one’s writing. Certainly, being eighteen puts Keplinger in a unique position to write about common issues surrounding high school students. Which led me to wonder about the ways in which a person’s writing evolves over the years. Could you imagine yourselves being published, or completing a full novel for that matter, at age eighteen? Do you think your current work-in-progress would have the same feel had you written it during your teen years? Certainly I’m inclined to say no to the latter question, but I’m curious as to the nuances and evolutions you have found in your own writing styles and methods as time has passed. What do you feel is the same, different, etc?

So my parting gift to you this Christmas is the renewed mantra to continue writing, revising, and querying. It’s all an ongoing process that takes practice and dedication…but you already knew that. Wishing everyone a relaxing and productive holiday break, and I look forward to seeing your material in the New Year!

« Older posts
Newer posts »