So here I am on the other side of the first round of book launch events. How do I feel? A trifle overwhelmed, fighting a cold that’s turned into bronchitis, and deeply touched by the honest and positive responses to my memoir. Always before, I’ve hidden behind my characters when voicing my feelings. Read More…
The Big Ask
Dear Friends and Fellow Readers, For months now, I’ve been entertaining you with stories from my upcoming memoir, Daughter of Spies. I’m hoping these have whetted your appetite for the book itself due out on October 25th, one week from today. That’s THE PUBLICATION DAY, the moment when the memoir finally becomes widely available in bookstores and online. I know many Read More…
Why I love to Talk to Book Clubs
I once took the Meyers Briggs personality test and although I can’t recall the exact results, I do remember that I landed right on the line between introvert and extrovert. I treasure my quiet creative time, but I also love to introduce my books to readers and hear their responses to the worlds I’ve created. In the Read More…
Book Clubs
Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies
The author’s mother never talked about her past when her children were growing up. Do you think this is usual for parents in general or is it particularly typical for people who have lived through a war? Have you experienced this with your own parents?
My Mother and the Queen
Although of course, it was expected, I was especially sad to learn of Queen Elizabeth’s death. She and my mother were born three weeks apart. My mother, a British war bride raised in Gibraltar, the child of a “crown colony,” revered the queen and the monarchy in general. In 1936, the whole family turned Read More…
A Wicked Child
Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the wild child of President Theodore Roosevelt and because we are distantly related and she loved a good gossip, I was often invited to have tea with her on Thursday afternoons. As a budding writer, I was an incurable eavesdropper.
What I Learned from My Father
In the early days of writing Daughter of Spies, my memoir that will be published in the fall, I was convinced that I could write equally about both my parents, but as I detailed in another blog post, the writer William Zinsser proved me wrong. When he told me that I had to choose Read More…
Naming My Brand
My publicist suggested to me recently that I identify my brand. The suggestion stumped me. Frankly, I associate the word “brand” with pet food or soup or cigarettes rather than with a person who writes books for a living. But I am catching up with all the lingo and with what it takes Read More…
When Your Characters Take Charge
I’m working on the Prequel to my fantasy series which started with The Castle in the Attic, a book I published in 1985 about a ten-year-old boy named William and his trip back in time to rescue his beloved nanny, Mrs. Phillips.
Original Hardcover illustration by Trina Schart Hyman
Although almost finished with Read More…
Lessons of a Storyteller
For years, like many children’s book writers, I toured around the country speaking to students and teachers.
Although I welcomed the opportunity to meet my readers, these appearances were not always easy ones. Imagine facing a middle school assembly of 500 restless students when you don’t know one name. Imagine trying to hold Read More…
Q & A with Elizabeth Winthrop
Where did you get the idea for these books?
I have two children and when they were small, I hired a lady named Mrs. Miller to take care of them so that I could go down the street to a little office and write my books. When Mrs. Miller left us, we were all sad. So I wrote a book about William and how he wanted to make Mrs. Phillips small so that she could not leave him.
HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh
Every reader can look back and remember the special books they read as children. I’m the same. For me, it was the books my British mother introduced into our home library. They ranged from Enid Blyton’s Castle of Adventure (and the other seven in that series) down to Dr. Doolittle, The Borrowers in all their settings, Winnie the Read More…
This Writer’s SELECTED SHORTS Dream Comes True
Ever since I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’ve had one very specific writer’s dream. I wanted one of my short stories to be read by an actor from the stage at Symphony Space in their well-known series, Selected Shorts, created and hosted by the artistic director, Isaiah Sheffer. I was shameless in Read More…
The art of book covers: Recreating the jacket for IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE
That old saying, “you can’t tell a book by its cover,” hits home especially with authors who have little or no control over the images that the marketing department in a publishing house chooses to sell your book.
When I decided to make In My Mother’s House available as an e-book, I had Read More…
Lewis Hine’s Children
Read about the work Joe Manning has done to find the descendants of the children in Lewis Hine’s child labor photographs here.
I’ve found my inner rabble-rouser…
I’ve never been a confrontational person., but suddenly I can’t stand it anymore. I grew up in Washington, D.C. surrounded by politicians and newsmakers, but fled the city the moment I came of age because I wanted to write fiction. Inside the Beltway, truth is more often stranger than fiction so I felt Read More…
Familiarity Breeds Acceptance
Waiting to Vote on Election Day
This week more than any other time since 9/11, I’m so grateful that I live in New York where I am forced to rub up against people who are not like me. On the subway, I sit next to people of all ages and Read More…
Following in My Mother’s Footsteps: A Trip to England
As many of my readers know, I’ve been researching my mother’s childhood in Gibraltar and England for a number of years. While she was still alive I traveled to Gib, as she always called it, to see firsthand what it was like to grow up on the Rock on the Read More…
Harriet The Spy Turns 50
I was thrilled when Random House asked me to contribute to the 50th anniversary edition of Harriet the Spy.
Harriet M. Welsch is a girl who says what she wants (in her spy book) and defies all the dictums of her time. She wears black, high topped sneakers and speaks the truth. Read More…
We need the Authors Guild now more than ever….
Dear Friends and Fellow Writers:
Please read this letter from Richard Russo.
If you’re a working writer, you need to join the Authors Guild. The support they have given me over the years in reviewing my children’s book contracts and answering my royalty questions has made an enormous difference. They taught me what I needed Read More…
Me and the NSA
I’m amused by the way everybody is freaked out about the NSA watching when we send an email and who we’re writing. I grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s, the child of a political journalist.
We always assumed we were being watched, our phones tapped, our conversations recorded, our mail opened. Read More…
How I wrote an essay and lived to tell the tale…
I’ve never been very good at essays. I prefer to write stories with characters in them instead of essays where I feel I ought to come to some important conclusion. Even blog posts like this throw me. They don’t come easily. Perhaps it’s because my father, Stewart Alsop, was a columnist who wrote Read More…
The First of Three Mothers
I am losing three mothers this year.
My own mother died in November. One of my best “book mothers”, Nina Ignatowicz, the editor I’d worked with for forty years, died in January. And my other “book mother,” Margery Cuyler, a friend from college days and my other primary editor (The Castle in Read More…
Waiting to Hear #2
I heard.
I received an intelligent, thoughtful, incisive first read on my new book, a memoir about my mother’s early life and her meeting my father in England during World War II.
Here’s what my first reader said.
I read this with great pleasure.
Hooray.
I would like more of you in the book, more Read More…
Blog Tour # 2
The blog tour continues. What’s a blog tour? A blog tour gives those on the tour a chance to meet different authors by way of their blogs. The Next Big Thing began in Australia. Each week a different author answers specific questions about his or her upcoming book. The answers are posted on author’s blogs. Read More…
Waiting to hear…
So I’m waiting for my first reader to get back to me about my new manuscript. This is the book I’ve been working on for years. I didn’t weigh it when I turned it in to her, but it’s 312 pages, about 90,000 words. That’s a lot of words. Does anybody care as much as Read More…
A Blog Tour!
The Next Big Thing Blog Tour
The Next Big Thing is an author blog tour. What’s a blog tour? A blog tour gives those on the tour a chance to meet different authors by way of their blogs. The Next Big Thing began in Australia. Each week a different author answers specific questions about his Read More…
Do You Love the Story or the Physical Book? Or both?
Here’s a provocative article by Joe Queenan about his 6,128 favorite books.
As for me, I love books in all forms. Even though my bookshelves hold some memorabilia and knick knacks, in general, they are filled with books and for a relatively small apartment, I have many bookshelves. I fought the idea of a Read More…
A Wonderful Interview
I love it when interviewers ask me fun and silly and serious questions. Brittney Breakey has made herself a name on the web with her author interviews at Author Turf.
Here are some highlights:
What is your worst personality characteristic?
Impatience.
How did you learn to ride a bicycle?
With two of my Read More…
Where I Work
This morning, when I arrive at my “office”, which is a particular desk facing the windows in my favorite public library, Milne Public Library, someone else is sitting in my chair. (I sound like the baby bear in Goldilocks.) He’s wearing spotted jeans, grey sneakers and glasses. I try not to glare. He Read More…
I Put Up An Ebook!
Trust me, this is a big deal for me. If technology is a train, I’m running along the tracks trying to catch hold of the caboose. But I was sad when my novel ISLAND JUSTICE went out of print, and much as I love used bookstores, it is galling to see my books Read More…
Putting Together The Jigsaw Puzzle
Sometimes in assembling a history, be it fiction or memoir, you stumble upon delightful details that can enliven and enrich your story whether you use them in the manuscript or not.
Research On The Web
Sometimes I bemoan how much time the Web and the Internet seem to steal from my real work which is putting one sentence down after another. Other times, I’m grateful. Today I’m grateful.
I knew that even though my mother had qualified to take the exams for Oxford University in 1942, because it Read More…
What Keeps Us Writing?
How does a writer keep writing especially considering all the dire news these days about the publishing world?
Monday Morning Blues
Getting the writer brain moving on a Monday morning.
Do Writers Go On Vacation?
When is a writer really on vacation or simply avoiding the tough moment of the empty screen?
Setting and Character
As a fiction writer, I’ve always like to visit the setting where my story takes place. For example, in my recent novel, Counting on Grace, the book really came to life when I found the site of the mill where my character had doffed bobbins in 1910. Many times I went back there Read More…
Digging Deeper
I’ve just finished a section of my new book. It tells the story of my father’s experience at the Groton School and I’m calling it SLACK AND WITHOUT FORM, a phrase lifted from one of the Headmaster’s reports to my grandparents about their son’s lackluster academic performance. Most of this essay is based Read More…
The Perfect Readers
The blessings of a trusted reader
Looking Over a Writer’s Shoulder
I’m deep into a new long project this time, a personal history for adult readers. Although I’ve published two novels for adults (ISLAND JUSTICE, IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE), this is the first time I’ve attempted a non-fiction memoir form. It tells the story of my parents’ love affair during WWII which includes sailing Read More…
