Christopher Meeks's Blog
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May.12.2012
I'm surprised, I'm delighted, and I don't know how else to explain this, so I'm giving you the press release:
Los Angeles, May 12, 2012
Call him as focused as his physicist. Deep into his next novel, Christopher Meeks didn’t realize his book Love At Absolute Zero was a finalist in ForeWord Reviews...
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May.05.2012
I awoke this morning to NPR’s Scott Simon offering a scream—and saying that one of four versions of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold for $120 million on Wednesday in a Sotheby’s auction. He then went onto report something else that gets people screaming: the fact tonight is a supermoon. There are...
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Apr.29.2012
I saw Bruce Springsteen and his larger-than-ever E Street Band on Friday, and to say it was a religious experience is not much of an exaggeration. His concerts over the years have evolved into something akin to a secular humanist revival meeting. How “secular” they are can be argued as some...
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Apr.25.2012
The U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in 2010, there were 145,900 writers and authors in America, and that the median income was $55,420 per year, or almost $27 per hour. The bureau predicted that in the next decade 9,500 new writers and authors will be added to the list.
Just...
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Apr.11.2012
To authors: why is "free" a great marketing strategy? Last year, I wrote about why setting your eBook at a 99-cent price may not be a great move unless it's the first in a series. However, with Amazon's new KDP Select program, where your book is exclusive to Kindle for 90 days and you get...
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Mar.12.2012
I recently attended the AWP Conference in Chicago where 10,000 writers, educators, and graduate and undergraduate creative writing students met. With all the panels, the chance meetings in the hallways and lobby bars, the massive Bookfair, the readings, the awards, and the parties, the air crackled...
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Mar.11.2012
Last week in Chicago, I attended the AWP Conference, which is a gathering of writers, creative writing professors, and students. While the event included some great speakers and readers such as Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, and Darin Strauss, I also found a number of panels involving.
In fact on...
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Mar.07.2012
To be an author in the 21st Century is much like being Itchie or Scratchy, those cat-and-mouse characters on The Simpsons who are forever being thrown around and otherwise smashed and tortured. In short, it's hard being an indie author. There are no clear...
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Feb.18.2012
The big premise of my comic novel Love At Absolute Zero is that a 32-year-old physicist, in tune with his inner salmon, can find his soul mate in three days using the Scientific Method. Ah, what folly, you might be thinking. That was my feeling when I started the book. Love isn’t neat and...
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Feb.11.2012
My romance-and-science novel, Love At Absolute Zero, just started a blog tour, and one site asked if I'd write a guest blog. My new college class in children's literature also just started, and I decided to write how the first Harry Potter book helps my students understand how to write....
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Jan.10.2012
I have to preface this story about the awards I’ve just won. I once worked in the public affairs department of the California Institute of the Arts. It’d been a dream job. I was immersed in the arts and interviewed such fascinating people as directors Tim Burton and Werner Herzog, theatre...
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Jan.09.2012
An eye-opening eBook I just finished is How a Book Is Born by Keith Gessen with an introduction by Graydon Carter. It first appeared in shorter form in Vanity Fair magazine and shows how the novel The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach came to be written, agented, sold, published, and turned...
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Jan.07.2012
In As You Like It, Shakespeare said man has seven ages. The first four are each expressed in a single word: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier. The last three needed explanation. There's a stage where everything comes together, and the man becomes a judge. It's the stage with "Fair round belly, with...
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Jan.01.2012
Many authors and people in the publishing business are using the words “monopolistic” when it comes to Amazon for a few reasons. One is that traditional publishers were slow to understand digital publishing the way the music industry was slow. The music industry shot off its feet with two barrels....
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Dec.19.2011
I just saw a documentary, To Write and Keep Kind, a PBS documentary on the life and writing of Raymond Carver. It's part of the two-disc Criterion Collection version of Robert Altman's movie Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver's short stories. I couldn't help but think at the end of the documentary...
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About Christopher
Christopher Meeks writes short fiction and novels. His book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea earned great reviews including the Los Angeles Times ("poignant and wise") and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said, "A...
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