 Red Room Writer Profile
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Ivory Madison's Blog
August 27, 2009
- Last year, my husband and I were in Washington, DC, on inauguration day. As we were driving to a friend’s house, out of the car window, I saw Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners, walking down the street in the opposite direction, wearing a huge white winter coat and pearls. Her advice column used to run with an illustration of a Victorian lady at her typewriter. And that day in ...
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August 23, 2009
- While most spam—the kind you get via email, not at the Piggly Wiggly—is a horrendous and offensive waste of human endeavor (for both the spammer and the recipient), some is so obtuse and indelicately mined from the collective human cultural archive that the reader may regard it in the same way you might regard outsider art.What I’m saying is that I sometimes get the most interesting spam, ...
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August 23, 2009
- [Like my earlier blog post, "Democrats Eat Babies on Christmas, Institute Says," this is a satire I wrote out of frustration at how absurd and "even-handedly" the mainstream press handles propaganda offered by the Religious Right. My earlier blog was picked up and reposted by the "Parenting Intelligence Report," showing that the results one gets from referral ...
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August 17, 2009
- Here is a link to a really amusing and original short story I just read on Guernica, an online literary and cultural magazine you may not have heard of: http://tinyurl.com/r2xja9. The story, by Elizabeth Crane, who has written several collections of short stories, is about a group of "geniuses" who get together to validate each other each week. No gay men, although they do know of one ...
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August 14, 2009
- [I'm joining the entire Red Room community in writing a short blog post on this week's topic: “Heroes.” The form and the content of the blog entry are up to you. Our editors will choose at least one of these blogs to be featured on Red Room's homepage next week, and three blog writers will receive free books from Red Room Authors that relate to the topic. Submit your blog entry by Friday at ...
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August 11, 2009
- [This story originally ran in a major news outlet that shall remain nameless. Okay, I made it up in response to a story that ran in a major news outlet, which followed the same logic and put forward the same politics. I just found it in a drawer and thought it might be appreciated here more than in the drawer.]Timmy is a cute little baby. With Aryan blonde hair and trusting blue eyes, he sits ...
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August 5, 2009
- Last week, Joyce Maynard and I were both keynote speakers at the Stanford Writers Conference. I feel like a bestselling multiple-book author by osmosis. Joyce mentioned that she suggests writers make a quick list of their obsessions, so they can see what the next book will be about (or something to that effect). This reminded me of how I used to tell the writers I would teach that there is no ...
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July 30, 2009
- [First of all, I’m really excited about the new Red Room-wide blog topics we’ll be announcing each week! The first one is: “What was a misstep that you or your publisher made with publishing your first book--and how would you do things differently if you could?” If you want to be considered by our editors to have yours featured on the homepage the following week, be sure to tag your blog ...
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June 15, 2009
- I am Jewish and (ahem) some of my best friends are Jews. A remarkable number of those friends are, well, high up in the news and publishing business. If there were, say, a “Jewish Conspiracy”to control the news to advance a particular agenda, my friends would be the ones having the secret meetings to make it happen. I remember many years ago watching a grainy, videotaped speech by Louis ...
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May 25, 2009
- I love pulp fiction book titles and vintage paperback book covers, and I just found on a website that, because of my own personal taste, I assume everyone will enjoy: http://www.bookscans.com. The navigation is a bit difficult, but there are over 30,000 paperback covers (as well as a huge collection of colophons, also known as printers marks, which is what I was looking for in the first ...
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May 9, 2009
- I get the a-word-a-day newsletter from http://www.wordsmith.org. This week their theme was "forgotten positives," which sounds like it could have a whole other meaning besides a grammatical one. The words featured were evitable (as in inevitable), wieldy (as in unwieldy), exorable (as in inexorable), gainly (as in ungainly), and corrigible (as in incorrigible). Some of them surprised me ...
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May 5, 2009
- I received an email this morning from a friend letting me know her father had passed away, suddenly. Liz and I worked together closely for a year, enough time to hear all the sordid details of each other’s childhoods. We had a bond: Louisiana. She was from there and I lived there for eight years. We understood the context of each other's stories, we recognized the family names, knew what the ...
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April 28, 2009
- "Author" was the 868th most popular baby name in 1880. There were forty-nine families who named their baby son "Author" during that decade, according to the Social Security Administration. No one named their baby girl Author. The 1880s are as far back as these things are tracked on the Social Security website. It's fascinating. You can see the progression of history ...
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April 22, 2009
- This morning I found this photo of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez giving United States President Barack Obama a copy of Huntress: Year One, on http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/. For those of you not in the comic book world, Heidi MacDonald is the comics czarina of Publishers Weekly and writes a very entertaining and educational column that isn't just for comics wonks...for example, ...
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April 13, 2009
- Well, humbled and impressed by the traction the boys at Twitter have achieved, I finally joined just now, and tried to find all my favorite Red Room authors and members. Please leave a comment here if you're on Twitter so I can follow you, and for god's sake, send people you meet over there over here too, to read the wonderful content on Red Room. I tweeted about someone comparing me to John ...
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