Susan Stoderl
- Aug 31, 2022
- 1 min
Late Bloomer, not once, but twice | Eugenia Lovett West
Eugenia Lovett West was born in February 1923. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College amidst WWII and took jobs with Harper’s Bazaar and the American Red Cross before marrying her dashing fighter pilot. Four children later, and after many small newspaper assignments which grew tired of, she turned her focus to novels. Doubleday and Ballantine published her first novel, “Ancestors Cry Out” in 1979, at fifty-six. Until almost thirty years later, no more published novels. “Wi
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 27, 2022
- 2 min
Saturday Series | Amy Tan
Saturday Series | Amy Tan
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 26, 2022
- 1 min
Meet Ivan, the Third Bad Guy
Mission 1: All in a Day's Work, is the first book in my Sophia of the Bright Red Sneakers Series. You'll find a narrated excerpt from my middle-grade book with graphics. #SophiaoftheBrightRedSneakersSeries, #MiddleGradeBooks, #MiddleGradeFiction
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 24, 2022
- 1 min
Fanny Fern Tales | Getting Up the Wrong Way, Part 2
Part two in my Fanny Fern Tales series is based on her humorist columns published in the New York Ledger in the 1850s-70s. The articles, written colloquially and using a 19th-century writing style, portray women's and children's lives during that time. Do not let the somewhat archaic use of language stop you from laughing. #FannyFern, #WomenWriters, #WritersLife
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 20, 2022
- 1 min
Saturday Series | Walter Mosley
“If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence. You don’t go to a well once but daily. You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning. Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse.” (July 2000) Walter Mosley (b. 1952) was the only child of a Jewish mother and African American father. On his website, he is described as "one of t
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 19, 2022
- 1 min
Bad Guys | Mikhail and Dimitri
Today, we're going to start meeting the Bad Guys in the first book of Sophia of the Bright Red Sneakers Series | Mission 1: All in a Day's Work. This will be in two parts, with the second part coming next Friday. #SophiaoftheBrightRedSneakers, #childrensbooks, #middlegradebooks, #indieauthor
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 17, 2022
- 1 min
Fanny Fern Tales | Getting Up the Wrong Way
This will be the first in a series of readings of Fanny Fern's columns which were published in The New York Ledger. Excerpt two will be coming soon.
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 13, 2022
- 1 min
Geraldine Brooks | Historical Fiction
I read Year of Wonders in 2020, right when Covid was in full swing. The book concerns how one English countryside village dealt with the 1666 plague. The book was published in 2001-02, but it depicted exactly what was going on with Covid in 2020. There were many similarities, such as all the virulent falsehoods freely floated. The following quote was written about the same time the book was published. Year of Wonders was on both the New York Times' and Washington Post’s Notab
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 12, 2022
- 0 min
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 10, 2022
- 0 min
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 5, 2022
- 1 min
Meet Sean O'Donohue (Mr. O’D)
Sean O'Donohue was Sophia’s grandmother, Elspeth MacGregor's soul mate and best friend. When Sophia came to live with Nana as an orphan baby, Mr. O’D became her surrogate grandfather. He understood Sophia because he had been an orphan in Ireland before coming to live with an Irish couple in Hell's Kitchen. Now in his late sixties, he is Sophia’s guardian but still maintains the same living arrangements as when Nana was alive. Mr. O’D and Sophia, as well as Pedro, eat most mea
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 3, 2022
- 1 min
Self-Publishing | A Merger of Two Biggest Publishers
As many of you may know, the U.S. Department of Justice is suing to block a merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. If the merger goes through, it is likely that the “Big Five Publishers” will become “Primo Behemoth Publisher” with three small “Fight-for-Their-Lives” publishers. The two potentially merging companies control fifty percent of the top 100 selling books. Most of the remaining fifty percent will go to the three remaining publishers, leaving littl
Susan Stoderl
- Aug 2, 2022
- 1 min
Late Bloomer | Erma Bombeck
Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) knew at age twenty that she would die from the same inherited polycystic kidney disease as her father did when she was nine. Perhaps this was her motivation to always look on the bright side. She is one of the most beloved humorists of all time. Erma published thousands of newspaper columns over forty years, besides fifteen books. At sixteen Erma was off to a tremendous start when she became a copywriter for the Dayton Herald. However, the next two de