Awards up the wazoo

Author/workshop leader Darlene Quinn was just named winner of the 2009 National Indie Excellence Awards for Fiction for her novel, Webs of Power, while author/workshop leader Maralys Wills’ Damn the Rejections and Full Speed Ahead nabbed Best Nonfiction award . . . Also, just this past weekend, the 15th annual San Diego Book Awards were announced. Look at all the SCWCers — both staffers and conferees over the years — who were honored:

• THEODOR S. GEISEL AWARD >> Laurel Corona
for The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice
• HISTORICAL FICTION >> Laurel Corona
for The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice
• MYSTERY/THRILLER >> Chet Cunningham
for The Mystery of Hamlin Springs
• BIOGRAPHY >> Laurel Corona and Michael Bart
for Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance
• HEALTH and WELLNESS >> Karen Ronney
for Proud Parents’ Guide to Raising Athletic, Balanced Kids
• SELF-HELP and INSPIRATIONAL >> Jill Badonsky
for The Awe-Maniac: A Daily Dose of Wonder
• UNPUBLISHED POETRY CHAPBOOK >> Claire Hsu Accomando
for Evaporation

Congratulations all!

–msg

Bringing “Celestine Prophecy” to the big screen

From the SCWC archives, here’s MSG chatting with NY Times bestselling author James Redfield about adapting his breakthrough novel, The Celestine Prophecy, into a movie.

DeAnna Cameron’s success is seductive

With the release of her dazzling debut novel only weeks away, praise for DeAnna Cameron’s The Belly Dancer (Berkley) continues to mount. Lynette Brasfield (Booksense pick Nature Lessons: A Novel) calls it, “A beautifully written page-turner… transports readers into an exotic and sensual world within a world.” Brenda Rickman Vantrease (Illuminator and The Mercy Seller) raves, “The characters in this novel will dance right off the page and into your imagination! Cameron’s representation of late nineteenth century Chicago is rich and evocative, and the whispered echoes of old New Orleans in Dora’s fragmented memory left me hoping this author goes there with her next novel.”

And from the author herself,

“I’m a former attendee of your Los Angeles & San Diego writers conferences, and the novel I was working on will be published by Berkley Books on July 7. I thought I would pass along the good news because I received some great help at both conferences, particularly from Drusilla Campbell, Bob Mayer, Laura Taylor and Mike Sirota on writing, and Gordon Kirkland on treating your writing like a business. The support and guidance I received helped keep me focused and motivated, and I’m happy to recommend your conferences to anyone who’s seriously pursing a writing career.”

Along with Teresa Burrell (The Advocate) and Gayle Carline (Freezer Burn), DeAnna’s release makes for the third successful SCWCer to get published this year. See more of The Belly Dancer at DeAnnaCameron.com.

–msg

USA Today likes America Libre

Originally self-published, now released by Grand Central, SCWCer Raul Ramos Y Sanchez’s International Latino Book Award winning novel America Libre, which describes a coming civil war where Hispanics and Anglos battle each other in the American Southwest, has been tagged for the USA Today Summer Read list.

Raul will, of course, be with us for the Irvine conference. If Lou Dobbs shows up, he’ll be promptly pencil-whipped and excused.

–msg

Percolating: It’s a novel, 40 years later

From the Washington Post, author Colm Toibin (The Master, Mothers and Sons, Brooklyn) offers insight on the sometimes very long labor a writer must sometimes endure when giving birth to a new novel…

The Origins of a Novel
By Colm Toibin
Wednesday, May 6, 2009

In the summer of 1967 when I was 12, my father died. For a month or more the house in the evening was filled with people, but by September, when I had gone back to school, things were quieter. People called in ones, in twos, to express their sympathy to my mother. They usually came in the evening, stayed for an hour or so, then left. My brother and I wanted this to stop because the television was in the room where they sat talking. I hardly ever went into that room while there were visitors. But one evening I did, and heard an interesting story being told.

A woman was talking to my mother, talking on and on, about Brooklyn where her daughter had been. I began to listen. She’d never been to our house before and was never, as far as I remember, a visitor again. I saw her on the street sometimes; she was a small, stout, dignified-looking woman who always wore a hat. It was almost 40 years later before I took what I had heard, just the bones of a story about her daughter who had gone to Brooklyn and then come home, and began making a novel from it.

Read entire The Origins of a Novel

–msg