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Boy, let me tell you, sending queries and receiving responses (or, more often than not, not receiving responses) is wearying work. The scoreboard is up-to-date (and in the hockey version the empty void of the agents’ penalty box is filling up) and, yes, that is an even, round number of 50 between agent rejections and just…
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Listen, you win some and you lose some. Sometimes you’re the least popular, but at least you can console yourself that you’re super highly rated (because no one else has read it to give it a worse review). You, too, can check out your year in books on Goodreads, if you track what you read…
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Thanks to @GaryDzen we have this clip of Jack Edwards singing a Christmas Carol during the Tyler Randell/Ryan Reaves fight during the Bruins game the other night. Relevant, of course, because William Murphy, protagonist of Trip to the Quiet Room, was a pugilist on the ice, and probably would have appreciated Jack Edwards singing a little bit during…
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There was a great article on the front page of the New York Times Sports section about the rise of concussions in the women’s game as its professional league begins to take off, “Women’s Hockey Grows Bigger, Faster and Dire”. Which would have been a great time to plug my book, which deals with an…
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Well, it wasn’t meant to be this time (like last time). The Little Red Publishing Hen, despite all of your votes, did not make the semi-finals of the Goodreads Choice Awards 2015. I appreciate all of your efforts and hope you enjoyed the story. But, for the meantime, it’s back to scoreboard-watching and hoping our author…
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Listen. What I’m about to tell you may shock and upset you. For a great many people it won’t be surprising, in the least. But I feel it needs to be said. For too long, Big Picture has run the picture book business. You know who I mean. Mo Willems. Oliver Jeffers. Drew Daywalt. Maurice…
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This is going to remind people, people who have long memories, of another time and another place. So I’ve been told I’m not allowed to go around people’s houses, sign them up for Goodreads accounts, visit the Best Picture Book page, write in The Little Red Publishing Hen and vote for it for best picture…
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Because precisely no one asked, I’m about to tell you the story of the odd little non-children’s story called The Little Red Publishing Hen. So grab a cup of tea and settle in, folks. I woke up a few weekends ago to the urgent call of nature — I had the ghost of a story lodged…
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Trip to the Quiet Room (also known as Butterfly, or William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room) started as an in-betweener project (I’ve talked about this before). I had finished the first draft of a novel called, tentatively, Rudyard Kipling’s Chair. It was a tangle of stories about a vast underground black market of goods operating in plain…
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While you’re waiting for my book, William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room (you may be waiting a while) to come out, you might want to go grab a copy of The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt. It’s got the sort of sensibility I love and the cast of characters are flawed and fantastic. Once you’re done…