novel

Excerpt from “Seasons in Purdah–A Novel”

Leave a Comment / ... anjuellefloyd ..., Seasons in Purdah /

What happens when your best friends are two men and you marry one of them?

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This is the case for 35-year-old Sahel Ohin.

As a child Sahel, spent the afternoons of spring and summer making mud cakes. Titus brought the water, Carl the dirt from his mother’s flower garden. All three lived on the same street in Oakland, California. After mixing the dirt and water Sahel poured the mud into tin pie pans her mother had discarded. Titus and Carl would then place the pans filled with mud in the sun to dry.

This was their work.

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Radio Show | Mingmei Yip

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Mingmei Yip returns to discuss her recent novel, Song of the Silk Road, a love adventure story with a three million dollar award, set in the famous Silk Road and its Go-In-But-Never-Come-Out Taklamakan desert .

Her first novel, Peach Blossom Pavilion, explored the life of the last Chinese geisha who is a qin player.
Petals from the Sky, her second work, presented a Buddhist love story set in Hong Kong, Manhattan, Paris and China.

Song of the Silk Road turns readers attentions to the trading routes between East and West in a romantic setting.

Please tune in.

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Of Supply, Demand, and The Woeful Truth About Publishing and Authors…

Leave a Comment / ... anjuellefloyd ..., Articles & Essays /

Author and publisher, Zetta Brown’s recent blog, “Authors! Can’t find your book in a bookstore? You may be luckier than you think!”, got me to thinking–no pun intended–about the old law of economics, that of supply and demand.

With bookstores and sellers tightly adhering to what seems to me, an outdated mode of purchasing books from publishers, and authors who choose to self-publish–that of retaining, if not demanding, the opportunity to return unsold books they have received from us–I wonder what would happen if publishers and authors began to print less books.

A blog post, “A Woeful Truth About Publishing,” at Champagne Books explains this paradoxical phenomenon in detail.

In short what I’m really saying is, “How would economic market respond if publishers did not make books so readily accessible?”

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Of Grinding Pepper, Banalities, and Seeking That Which We Yet Understand…

4 Comments / ... anjuellefloyd ..., ...married life ..., ...the writing life..., Articles & Essays /

Working as both a wife of nearly 29 years, and mother of 3, has prepared me in various ways to accomplish the work of a fiction writer.

Working as a wife and mother requires a lot of what an Islamic Imam described as grinding pepper.

Grinding pepper, from the perspective of the imam encompasses those activities that we here in the west describe as comprising the bane of our existence–mindless tasks, that we view as disrespectful of our intelligence and that devalue our worth as a person.

The world banal implies a lack of uniqueness.

Something that is banal possesses no originality.

It is like the wheel that begs for no reinvention, rather more unique and original ways of bringing a deeper level of presence and attention to the task(s) at hand–tasks that when practiced with a presence of mind and heart sharpen our skills and artistry in all areas of life, yield an original creation, and transform us as individuals.

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Of Revelation, Illusions and the Parallel Processes of Writing and Discovery…

2 Comments / ... anjuellefloyd ..., Articles & Essays /

Revelation plays an important role in constructing and/or assembling the middle section of a novel.

Revelation also encompasses the uncovering of truth of what has always stood present, but remained hidden by strong held illusions and beliefs.

Stories and novels stand upon revelations, ones that sustain the cause-and-effect events that comprise, most particularly, the plot of a novel and that lead towards crisis and onto climax.

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Of 1st Novels, Eagerness to Publish, and the Need for Cooling Off Periods…

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For anyone who has been eager to push their novel onto the world without taking a cooling off period read this blog post, an interview Meg Waite Clayton of SheWrites.com conducted with Eleanor Brown, author of Weird Sisters.

The lines that really touched me were, “…I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been. I knew it had inconsistencies and plot holes big enough to drive a bus through and was in desperate need of a few months of lying fallow while I worked on something else and then came back to it with fresh eyes and an honest heart. But I had set some ridiculous deadline for myself, and I think I knew, deep down, that it was going to be hard, hard work to whip that baby into shape, and I just couldn’t face it. …” –Eleanor Brown

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