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BOOKMARKS INSPIRED BY BOOK -- WAKING UP IN THE LAND OF GLITTER



Last night was the Comadres, Compadres & Friends May Bookclub meeting in NYC.  Our book this month was Kathy Cano-Murillo's WAKING UP IN THE LAND OF GLITTER.  As I've mentioned before, it's a fun, fast read that inspires "craftiness."  And, the group spent the night chatting about Star, Offie and Chloe, AND making our own bookmarks.

Check them out! 




Oh, and here are our Bookclub Questions for WAKING UP IN THE LAND OF GLITTER:

1)  How does the title relate to each of the women:  Star, Offie and Chloe?
2)  Use one word to describe each woman?  Who was the most needy of the three?
3)  How do the women grow by the end of the book?
4)  Why was Star so scatterbrain? why do you think she never finished a project of her own?
5)   How and why did Offie hide behind her craft projects?
6)   How could "Crafty Chloe" deceive so many people?  how did she hide behind her crafts?
7)   Family is very important to Latinas.  Describe each woman's family environment and how it helped or hindered them.
8)   Chloe was a real piece of work, but did she deserve what Francis did to her?  And does Francis get her own since she is now stuck with the loser boyfriend?
9)  Theo or Harrison?   Which do you like best?  How did each complement Star?
10)  What band do you think inspired Gustavo's Reggae Soul band?

Happy Reading! --mcf

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Admin said…
I thought this article might be of interest to this audience:

Authors using Internet to get their books out

Regan McMahon, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Authors using Internet to get their books out. Francine Howard's book is published by AmazonEncore. Seth Harwood posted podcasts of his work to generate inte... Ransom Stephens offered his first novel as an e-book.

In the old days - which, in this case, you might define as "two years ago" - getting your book published would entail finding an agent, sending it off to publishing houses like Random House or, when that failed, paying a vanity press to put the thing in print.

All of that has changed, thanks to radical shifts in the publishing industry and, oh yeah, the Internet.

Here are some examples of how a few Bay Area authors recently got into print:

Retired occupational therapist turned writer Francine Howard of El Cerrito had a short stack of unpublished manuscripts collecting dust while agents kept rejecting her queries. Then in January 2009, she entered her novel of interracial love in the Jim Crow South, "Page From a Tennessee Journal," in Amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel Award contest, whose top prize was a contract with Penguin Books.

She didn't win, but for making it to the second round, in a field of 6,500 hopefuls, her prize was two Amazon Vine (customer) reviews of a 5,000-word excerpt of her book. They were both raves, and that May, an editor from the Web site's then-week-old imprint called AmazonEncore called with an offer to publish her book. It came out last month.

Berkeley author Seth Harwood, who teaches writing and literature at Stanford University and City College of San Francisco, wrote his first book, the gritty crime novel "Jack Wakes Up," in 2005. He began posting 50-minute podcast episodes from it on Podiobooks.com in 2006, establishing a marketing platform for his work. He made a print-on-demand deal with Breakneck Books in March 2008, and then Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House, scooped him up and published the book in May 2009.

Petaluma author Ransom Stephens offered his first novel, a mix of particle physics, metaphysics and single parenthood titled "The God Patent," as an e-novel on the Web site Scribd, known as the YouTube of documents. It spent 15 weeks in the site's Top 10, and got picked up by boutique publisher Numina Press of San Rafael, which published the book in December. On his Web site, Ransom's Notes (www.ran somstephens.com), Stephens declares his book "the first debut bestseller to emerge from the new paradigm of publishing."

Read the rest at:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/25/DDTJ1DIJ95.DTL