X-Rated Bloodsuckers, J.R. Ward & More
X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS: Congratulations to Mario for having two novels on bookshelves! Booklist said, "Raymond Chandler could never have imagined an L.A. like this, where hard-boiled, private-eye vampires fight crime, as well as commit a few during lunch breaks." You can read
Michael Sedano's review of
X-Rated Bloodsuckers at
La Bloga.
Mario's coming to California next week and visiting bookstores, so
check out his website for times and places.
BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD:
Katya Cengel interviews J.R. Ward on her
Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Yep, Ward was a corporate attorney with a closetful of dark suits when she wrote her first novel. What is it about lawyers and writing? Well, many of them studied literature in college, and writing is an important part of legal work.
Ward says, "Stephen King has a wonderful saying about writers, and I'm paraphrasing it: He says that writers are kind of like sieves in a drain, you catch whatever … you write about what you write about, and I was always sort of hardwired to write about happy endings. … But I'd always been sort of a horror fan and I'd always been interested in vampires and spooky things and ghosts, the paranormal thing … paranormal romances were just sort of coming out on the market and it astounded me because I thought, wait a minute, wait a minute, the hero can be a vampire. How fantastic can that be. "
Ward's latest vampire novel,
Lover Revealed, will be released on Tuesday.
OCTAVIA BUTLER FUNDRAISER: I'll be reading on Sunday as part of a fundraiser for a scholarship in honor of Octavia Butler. Here's the info.
Sunday, March 4, 2007, 5 to 7 PM
Featuring: Nalo Hopkinson, Susie Bright, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer de Guzman, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Marta Acosta
The Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA, 510-841-2082,
http://www.starryploughpub.com/Admission: $5 to $20 sliding scale
The
Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. It is meant to cement Octavia's legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan, giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.