What’s on my iPod: “Your Song” by Ellie Goulding
What I’m reading: A Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner
The last person I followed on Twitter: @HilaryDuff
1. Karen A. Chase and BONJOUR 40 on The Write Stuff
Fantastique author Karen A. Chase was a guest blogger on The Write Stuff to discuss how she turned her travel blog into e-book BONJOUR 40! The travel memoir just broke the Amazon bestseller list and is currently in the top 75 for travel-French-nonfiction downloads. Download your copy here and here is an exerpt from the Q&A where she tells you all how she did it:
1) Tell me how your trip to Paris went from an adventure blog to a book?
I kept the forty-day blog for friends and family so they could experience my trip, through one simple post and photograph each day. The short blog posts allowed me to get out and really experience Paris. Five or ten days into the trip I realized that the posts were helping me to see Paris through all of their eyes too. The impact the trip and blogging was having on me, made it clear that it had to be a book. My original blogs were short–something that could be read in about forty seconds–and some events and moments required more detail. So when I got home I added in longer “reflection” pieces that delve into travel, photography, writing, turning 40, and more. Once I had added those, it truly felt like a book I could share with others. I especially wanted other women to read it. I was turning forty, having an adventure, and hoped more women could feel so fabulous at forty.
The Write Stuff also posted a review of BONJOUR 40 here and will have a chance to win a 5×7 print of one of Karen’s professional pictures of Paris from her book!
More on BONOUR 40
If Karen A. Chase absolutely had to turn 40, she decided she could do it gracefully in Paris… for nearly 40 days. What began as a blog to communicate with friends and family, became a travel journal filled with over a months’ worth of daily humorous, insightful, and detailed glimpses into her Paris adventures, each of which could be read in about 40 seconds.Peppered with Chase’s own delightful photographs, she also weaves in longer stories that reflect upon her experiences with the French, food, travel,photography, writing and love in the City of Lights. A companion to the e-book,her Bonjour40 blog still contains images and some notes for readers who crave more from her Paris adventure.
2. Jon Reiner on I’m a Reader, Not a Writer
Jon Reiner – author of memoir THE MAN WHO COULDN’T EAT – visited I’m a Reader, Not a Writer and did a great Q&A where he tells readers what life is actually like as The Man Who Couldn’t Eat. Here is Jon’s response to one of the questions:
If you could meet one person who has died who would you choose?
My paternal grandfather, Jacob Reiner, who died 20 years before I was born. He immigrated from a speck-on-the-map in Galicia with no family in the U.S., no money, no education, no language skills, and by first walking across Europe to a steamer in Hamburg. He was a teenager and had the nerve to get himself halfway around the world. People like Jake had a courage that was astounding.
More about THE MAN WHO COULDN’T EAT
Imagine not being able to eat or drink a single thing. No lobster roll on the beach in Maine; no hot dog at the ballpark; no cool drink on a hot summer day; no birthday cake; nothing. In The Man Who Couldn’t Eat (S&S/Gallery Books: September 6, 2011), Jon Reiner – a James Beard Foundation Award-winning writer –chronicles his three-month struggle to live without food. Based on Reiner’s acclaimed 2009 Esquire magazine article by the same name, the book reinvents the foodoir, telling what happens when a man obsessed with food is denied the taste of it. A beautifully written chronicle of one man’s journey from plenty to deprivation and back again,The Man Who Couldn’t Eat will change the way you think about more than just your next meal.
3. Karen A. Chase on Women Travel Blog
Karen A. Chase -Author of Amazon bestseller list climber BONJOUR 40 – was a guest blogger on Women Travel Blog and wrote a fabulous blog post titled “The Deliberate Tourist”. Here is the a highlight from Karen’s post where she discusses BONJOUR 40 and more (read the rest here):
“I researched all the guidebooks and started making lists of what to see, and as I shared my plans with close friends, they began making comments about how amazing it was going to be. “This trip will change your life!” one friend said. Perhaps, I realized, but only if I boarded the plane with more intent. So, in a city commonly toured, what if I didn’t go as a common tourist? What if I went as a deliberate tourist instead?”
More on BONJOUR 40
If Karen A. Chase absolutely had to turn 40, she decided she could do it gracefully in Paris… for nearly 40 days. What began as a blog to communicate with friends and family, became a travel journal filled with over a months’ worth of daily humorous, insightful, and detailed glimpses into her Paris adventures, each of which could be read in about 40 seconds.Peppered with Chase’s own delightful photographs, she also weaves in longer stories that reflect upon her experiences with the French, food, travel,photography, writing and love in the City of Lights. A companion to the e-book,her Bonjour40 blog still contains images and some notes for readers who crave more from her Paris adventure.
Author of THE MAN WHO COULDN’T EAT Jon Reiner was mentioned in a USA Today article covering the mass protests against corporate greed and unemployment across the country. Jon has been loyal to the movement and has passionately protested at Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Seattle, Occupy Portland and more. The article describes Jon’s current situation as well as his widely popular memoir. Here is highlight of the article (read the rest here):
Downwardly mobile
Protestors emphasize how ordinary their experiences are. Jon Reiner, 49, a Manhattan marketing executive laid off three times since 2001, said he was looking at his wedding photo recently and realized every groomsman had been through long-term unemployment or taken a lower-paying job after a layoff.
Out of work since 2007, he has relied on his schoolteacher wife for health insurance and wrote an award-winning article in Esquire about his 20-year battle with Crohn’s disease, then turned it into a memoir, The Man Who Couldn’t Eat. He spends time with other stay-at-home dads in the school playground. He has more company now.
“None of us can afford to give up,” he said. “Statistically and anecdotally, my experience is representative. Fourteen million people are unemployed, and another 12 million are people like me who are considered to have given up because our unemployment benefits have expired. But we haven’t given up. Employers have given up on us.”
More about THE MAN WHO COULDN’T EAT
Game of Secrets weaves between multiple points of view,as a dark family mystery comes unraveled. In 1957, eleven-year-old Jane Weld’s father disappeared. No one in her small New England town knew for sure what happened until, four years later, his skull rolled out of a gravel bank by the river, an unmistakable bullet hole in its temple. Rumor had it he was murdered by the husband of his mistress, Ada Varick.
Now, half a century later, Jane is still searching for the truth of her father’s death, a mystery made more urgent by the unlikely romance that her daughter has struck up with one of Ada’s sons. Jane and Ada come together for casual Friday board games that soon transform into acat-and-mouse game of words long left unspoken. As the two women play out,across the board, the stories that bind their lives together, it becomes clear that more than a reckoning with the past—it is the future of both families that is ultimately at stake.
5. MARCO POLO on SheKnows
And in SparkPoint Studio news (yes, we have non-book clients!), we would like to introduce you to our new, European and fabulous client MARCO POLO! The Italian jewelry maker’s Strawberry Cream Jewelry line was featured on SheKnows in a post called “5 Fun Ways to Support a Friend With Breast Cancer“. A portion of sales goes toward breast cancer research – even more fabulous. Here is what the blog post said about our Italian friends:
“BE A GEM”
Why stop supporting the cause after October? We love the fact that Marco Polo Designs donates a portion of the proceeds from each sale of Strawberry Cream Jewelry to breast cancer research all year round! Whether you wear it yourself or give it to your friend, you’ll be showing you support the cause that’s so dear to so many women’s hearts.
Leave A Comment