Joëlle Anthony
J. M. Kelly
Welcome to My Blog
SWEETHEARTS by Sara Zarr
We have a house guest which makes me totally guilty of neglect. I blame it on Zarr's great writing! It is true that yesterday, I left the entertaining to my husband (and also made our guest fend for herself) while I read SWEETHEARTS straight through. I liked Zarr's...
CASSIE WAS HERE by Caroline Hickey
Wow! Another MG book that I love. Maybe I was just reading the wrong MGs before when I said I didn't like MG that much. This one is really good. I think Caroline Hickey does a great job of tackling a subject that I haven't come across before in a book (not that I'm...
Music and Writing – Part Two
More on music and writing...
Music and writing
I read a lot of writers' blogs and many of them create playlists for their characters and listen to them while they write. I cannot listen to music while I'm working, but music is a huge part of all my writing. Before I met my husband, I owned seventeen CDs and three...
Music and Writing
A post about music and my writing.
New Archives
I am in the process of compiling a complete archive of Need To Read that will include all the original posts starting way back when it was a Live Journal. Since it might take a while (because my arm is already falling off from all the mouse clicking), I am posting it...
Need To Read Archives
The Essays & Lists: Need To Read - The beginning Candy - an essay about reading Fave Fifteen of 2007 Driven to Insanity - an essay about coincidence The Question of Age The book reviews start here: SWEETHEARTS by Sara Zarr CASSIE WAS HERE by Caroline Hickey Dustin...
Friday Five – A Countdown
Half full? Half Empty? Five Reasons Why The Fact That I've Written Less This Year Than Ever Before Doesn't Bother Me 5. More time to listen to the Cubbies baseball games 4. I'm in a lot better shape than when I snack sit at my desk every day 3. When I do write, it...
A surreal conversation about characters in my books
Last night, I had a very surreal conversation.
A surreal conversation
I had the oddest conversation last night around the kitchen table. I have written two books that go together (not a series, just the two of them). I am hoping that after my agent sells my first book, they will eventually be published books #2 & #3. I am revising...
DUSTIN GRUBBS TAKE TWO by John J. Bonk
This is a sequel to DUSTIN GRUBBS ONE-MAN SHOW. I read it when it first came out, so it's been a while, but I remember that I loved it, so I was excited to get my hands on this one. I was not disappointed. It's fantastic. One of the reasons I like his writing so much...
Five Sites I like
Eileen Cook - You knew I'd start with the queen of weird stories (bats in your bra, snakes under the bed) Alix's funny take on...well, lots of stuff! - and because she likes Cadbury choclolate as much as I do (but Marmite? oooh...yuck!) Victor Anthony's myspace page -...
Beatrix Potter
I took my husband to England for the first time a few years ago and we took a day trip with my friend, Carole, up to Beatrix Potter's land. There's a lovely gift shop in what was her husband's office now and you can walk the gardens and then there's a wonderful hike...
It’s out! It’s out! Check it out!
Vacation? Holiday? Forget it. I'm back. Why? I'll tell you why...because my article is out in The Writer Magazine! Remember when I wrote the Red Hair article last year for SCBWI's bulletin? Well, an editor at The Writer saw it and asked me to update it and it is in...
GOOSE CHASE by Patrice Kindl
I just wrote a nice post about this and it disappeared, so just let me say quickly (since I'm supposedly on holiday) that I loved this book. Fun. Quirky. Adventurous. Spunky heroine. Same thing I just said but a lot more succinctly this time.
The Nearly complete Archives
Today, I spent way too much time some very productive hours archiving nearly all of my posts just to make it easy for you to entertain yourself on the days I'm too lazy to post. I also did this because my archives along the side of my blog don't work very well. You...
Teen, Inc. by Stefan Petrucha
It rained today for the first time in many, many weeks. Rainy days are perfect for writing, so what did I do all day? I read this wonderful book! It is laugh-out-loud funny, a great story with a unique hook. Full of all kinds of facts and cultural stuff that you...
Curb Your Enthusiasm – a lesson in writing
Even though I said last week in this post that despite my curiosity about what writers find interesting about TV, I would not succumb, I actually did! Read what I learned here.