My Blog: In Case You Missed It

Updated on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:04AM by Catherine

Recently I've had two long trips plowing through my older blog posts. One was in search of travel posts to pin on Pinterest. (Yes! I'm on Pinterest now! And if I may be allowed to say so, I think my boards are starting to look somewhat cool.) The other was to add share buttons on the posts that still feel relevant.

Here's what I discovered: there are quite a number of posts that have fallen back into the archives, where they are unlikely to be found by any but the most diligent and non-busy surfer. And they might be relevant, and might interest more recent readers/followers of this blog.

And so I thought, There must be a way to organize these older blog posts to make them easier to find.

Then, for the eleventy-millionth time, I discovered I can make this website do lots of things I never knew it could do.

Too late for long story short, but I've added both a blog index widget on the right sidebar of my blog, and an actual Blog Index page. The widget allows you to access older blog

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Author Friday: Anne R. Allen

Suffice it to say that Anne and I go way back.

No, I take it back. That’s hardly saying enough.

Anne and I live about 40 minutes apart on the Central Coast of California. I recently figured out that we’ve been fast friends for at least 14 years. Because that’s how long I’ve had my only tattoo, a sword from the Ryder Tarot deck wrapped around my right wrist. I got it when I was…well, let’s not get into too many age specifics. Let’s just say I remember when I got it. And it was 14 years ago. And Anne was hugely supportive and encouraging. And not everybody was. 

It was a treat (for me—perhaps less so for Anne) to be her friend during the times she

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Show Your Face as Part of "The Pay It Forward Movement"

I may have mentioned it briefly on this blog before, but my next reader slideshow is all Pay It Forward. It's a way of showing the world the faces behind the (growing by leaps and bounds!) Pay It Forward Movement. This year is looking to be a "tipping point" for Pay It Forward, so the time to do this is now. The Movement is about people, so let's get a look at them. See how varied and wonderful they really are.

I made the video I'm embedding below as a "call for submissions." I wanted you to hear the Pay It Forward song I'll be using (by permission, of course). It's by Mark David Miller

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Author Friday: Brian Farrey

Brian Farrey is one of my “Tweeps” (translation: Twitter pals). He’s also one of the four people who participated in (and, irritatingly, won) The Bet. Yet, bizarrely, these are not his main claims to fame. Some actually find it more important that he is the debut author of the terrific YA novel WITH OR WITHOUT YOU (which…I just have to say…please let me know if that book doesn’t pull in most of the major LGBT awards in its category so I can go hurt someone for being on the take) or that he is an editor at Flux books. Or that he has a middle grade novel tentatively titled THE VENGEKEEP PROPHECIES due out this year. People and their priorities, huh Brian?

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My Fabulous Readers #3 is Here

It's officially here, folks. If you sent me a photo of yourself for my third reader slideshow, check yourself out. Music is courtesy of my good friend Jude Johnstone...and it's a song about a writer. What could be better than that?

I have an announcement about reader slideshow #4: it's going to be all Pay It Forward. This doesn't mean I don't want photos of you with my other books. It just means that I'm going to put together one whole slideshow devoted to Pay It Forward, and then go on to another mixed slideshow. I'll also reuse several good Pay It Forward photos that were sent to me for previous shows.

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Author Friday: Jacquelyn Mitchard

I’m really not a book reviewer. I’ve never pursued reviewing, probably because I’m not comfortable being critical with another author’s work. I’ve only ever been asked to do one review, once—by Ron Charles of the Washington Post. I have no idea why he asked me. He stated as his reason remembering my novel Electric God, which he reviewed kindly when he was with the Christian Science Monitor. (He armed me with that wonderful retort for Simon & Schuster’s positioning disaster: “The book jacket says this is a modern retelling of the Book of Job, but I hardly think that’s a selling point.” It was enough to help me leverage that ridiculous and untrue log line off the paperback edition.) I’m getting off track. The book he asked me to review was Jackie’s wonderful CAGE OF STARS.

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