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Showing posts from February, 2006

My novelist counterpart. And so on.

So I've found my novelist counterpart, and she's Tess Gerritsen, a writer who probably could not seem any more different from me if she tried. She writes medical thrillers; I write nonfiction and children's picture books. But I've been following her blog for some time now, and looking for a good excuse to chat with her. I found it. A few weeks ago, the psychic editors at Writer's Digest wrote to ask me if I was interested in writing an article about the dangers of the Internet for published authors-- things like checking blogs and message boards to see what people are saying about your books, obsessively checking Amazon and BN.com to see your rank and new reviews, etc. Their timing was uncanny. I had just gone on a hiatus from my own message boards because I needed time to think about my mental health and how it relates to just those sorts of things. When you run a big site for writers, you leave yourself open to criticism and scrutiny. I had, once again, inadverten