Not if it's Bud Light, I guess. Blech.

I’ve only ever seen non-fiction authors on the Daily Show, but should you ever get lucky enough, here are some tips that might come in handy.

You know how I love my apocalyptic novels! There’s a new one for your list: The Things That Keep Us Here.

About the book
A couple on the brink of divorce struggles to keep their family alive as a deadly pandemic sweeps across the world, food grows scarce, and neighbor turns against neighbor in grocery stores and at gas pumps. Orion in the UK and Wunderlich in Germany pre-empted rights to The Things That Keep Us Here and Buckley's next book, and Random House has purchased audio rights.

What the critics are saying
"A very credible premise . . . operating both as a psychological profile of a family under duress and as a scary, gripping look at the effects of a pandemic."
—Booklist

"With crisp writing and taut pacing, Buckley spins a convincing apocalyptic vision that's both frightening and claustrophobic."
—Library Journal

"Utterly engrossing."
—New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

"A brilliant debut."
—New York Times bestselling author James Rollins

About the author
Carla Buckley was born in Washington, D.C. and has worked in a variety of jobs, including a stint as an assistant press secretary for a U.S. senator, an analyst with the Smithsonian Institution, and a technical writer for a defense contractor. Carla is the Chair of the International Thriller Writers Debut Program and currently lives in Ohio with her husband and children.

I asked, Carla answered
A. What's the scariest thing that's ever happened to you? Bonus question: have you ever used it in a book?

C. When my youngest child was a toddler, she and I accompanied my older daughter to a pool party. One of the girls offered to take my little one into the pool, which was surrounded by a big iron fence, so that I could join the adults on the patio. I agreed. As I was standing there, chatting with the other mothers, I glanced toward the pool and saw the older girl in the deep end, playing with her friends. I didn’t see my daughter. I glanced toward the shallow end and there she was, fully immersed, her arms raised and just the tips of her fingers poking through the surface of the water. Seeing her frozen and helpless like that, and knowing I had to get around the fence in order to save her, was the most paralyzing moment of my life. She was easily rescued and has no lingering phobias, but I did not stop trembling for twenty-four hours.

I have not yet written about this event but the helplessness of a mother unable to save her child is a theme in my work.

A. Mystery writers often give their characters an unreasoning fear - and then make them face it. Do you have any phobias, like fear of spiders or enclosed spaces?
C. Although I’m not physically fearless, my biggest fear has more to do with being unable to take care of my children. I constantly dream about forgetting one of them somewhere, or letting one of them wander off into danger. My main character in The Things That Keep Us Here is driven by this fear, and forced to face it as society crumbles around her. Having lost a baby early in her marriage, she’s terrified she’ll lose one of her daughters, and that panic propels her through the story.

A. Do you have a favorite mystery book, author, or movie? 
C. How many may I list? I began with Nancy Drew, progressed through Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, moved on to Sue Grafton and Tony Hillerman when they were just starting out. I pore through awards nominations for new writers, which is how I discovered CJ Box and Marcus Sakey. I’m a huge fan of William Kent Krueger, and stalk Laura Lippman and Jan Burke, at conferences. Please don’t get me started on movies!

A. At its heart, every story is a mystery. It asks why someone acts the way they did - or maybe what will happen next. What question does your book ask?
C. My publisher summed it up this way: how far would you go to protect your family? As a pandemic rages around them, my characters are forced to confront their own humanity in order to save themselves. Really, the heart of my novel is about what a mother will do in order to keep her children safe.

A. Is there a mystery in life that you are still trying to figure out?
C. The one mystery that truly confounds and haunts me is how a parent can break the sacred trust they have with their child.

My name was called! Saying the elevator was slow, they encouraged us to take the stairs to the fifth floor courtroom. My heart was pounding, and it didn't help that once inside we each had to answer a set of questions from a laminated sheet. Name, occupation, where we lived, who we lived with and what they did, whether we had been a victim of crime, had friends/relatives in law enforcement, or had been involved in court proceedings before. The defendant, dressed in two-piece blue prison garb that didn't really hide his tattooed arms or butt crack, seemed a bit checked out.

A few people got nervous or confused and instead of saying whether they had been a victim of a crime, they answered whether they had been convicted of a crime.

So many people had their cars broken into, and not one had had any resolution to it. Ditto to our burglary, or even the time the scary guy broke in while I was in a shower but left after I ran out the front door.

In a weird twist of fate, one of the folks called up also works in publishing, for Oregon State Press.

Just hearing the attorney's questions was enough to figure out the case. Some guy damaged some other guy's car, but he has a mental illness that made him think there was a good reason for doing it. The only witnesses were going to be the two guys. The prosecutor reminded that we could not be influenced by bias or prejudice or sympathy.

They only needed six folks (not sure why it wasn't more), so they dismissed most of us.

I await another call. Or lunch.

Blogging to you live from the Multnomah County jury room.

Author Solutions offers lots of “packages” to people who want to self-publish their books. Author Shiloh Walker offers a clear look at why it’s such a bad idea. She says:
======
“His company also offers fantastic packages like ‘a social media package’ that includes…
facebook profiles, myspace profiles
facebook page for your book, myspace page for your book
flickr
feedburner
Shelfari, Goodreads, Librarything
Twitter
The cost? $949.
I’ve got most of those… don’t use flickr-don’t see the point, but I vaguely recall the cost. Free.”
======
Read her entire post here.

My jury duty is still on for tomorrow. For some reason I have been called in twice since I started working at home, after years of wishing (and never having it happen) I would get called in because I wanted a break from my job.

We began this morning in Hood River, watching some baby sheep that had been born the day before. Spouse had met the owners in a bar, and they invited him over. It was amazing. Less then 24 hours old, the baby sheep were just running around with the herd, keeping up. What would humans be like if they did that?

The man who owns them had just returned from a two-week volunteer gig in Haiti. He is a former EMT, former trauma nurse, now an anesthesiologist. He reminded me a lot of the ER docs I used to know. They are decisive, smart, high-energy folks who don't look back. All the ER docs I knew did things like kiteboard, ski, surf, or fly planes in their off hours. When the s**t hits the fan, you want them with you. He talked about how it was a mistake to let it get to you, how it would ruin your effectiveness.

Even he was still feeling the effects of being in Haiti. They were working in the DR, right on the border with Haiti. The space was filled with people on mattresses, uncomplaining, many with open fractures. On a trip to Port au Prince to get surgical screws, he saw two men murdered in front of him. He kept saying to us, "There was nothing I could do." At the hospital, they worked 16 hour days. Unfortunately, they had to amputate a lot of crushed hands, legs, feet, arms - many of them belonging to children. He showed us photos of how, because they had no charts, they would write on people's foreheads or on their casts in case they ended up someplace else for follow up care.

Another person on the trip kept a blog. You have to watch the video of the people singing. They had abandoned the makeshift hospital in a panic after a 5.8 aftershock. They ran with pins in their legs, they tore out IV bags of blood and saline, and one man jumped from the upper floor and was paralyzed.

Yet a short while later they began to sing.

I love this blog about awful library books librarians have found on the shelves, submitted (and hopefully recycled). And here’s another blog about book covers. But my favorite part of that blog is when they look at mystery books.

And when it comes to a smart look at YA covers, there's always Jacket Whys.

Sometimes that it seems like authors should blog and Tweet and have book signings and self-finance tours and go to writing conferences. Agent - and now author as well - Nathan Bransford has some common sense advice.

And on Writers’ First Aid, Kristi Holl says, “James Scott Bell in his new book The Art of War for Writers is closer to the mark.  In talking about self-promotion, he said, “The more anxious you are about forcing success through self-promotional effort, the less creative energy you have for the writing itself.” Why? “Because,” Bell says, “the most important promotional tool you have is your best book. Period.””

Read the rest of her reassuring advice here.

We know her. We love her. And now everyone else gets to know her, too. I’m talking about carriejones. You can read an interview with Carrie Jones here.

Two years ago was my first full-time day as a writer.

I was terrified.

The only reason I had been able to quit was I had a biggish chunk of advance, and I knew I would never get an opportunity like that again. I also had a husband who had regular paychecks and could put us on his health plan. Did we have eight months of emergency savings, the way Susie Orman advocates for even people who still have day jobs? No. No way.

But still I jumped. And then tried to figure out how to make it work.

“The world was without form and void,” as the Bible says. How would I structure my days? Would I be able to meet my deadline? I needed to write most of a book in a month. Would I go broke? Would I end up napping, watching TV, overeating?

I did meet my deadline. And we haven't gone broke, although it is tough to budget when you get paid only a couple of times a year. I don't nap, I don't watch TV, and hm, I'm not going to say too much about overeating.

Here’s what helped me:
-Getting the bulk of my writing done in the morning.
-If working on more than one project, doing the hardest one first.
-Learning to never ever buy food from the tempting displays located by the cash registers at Winco. Chocolate covered almonds? Big cans of cashews? You will eat them mindlessly in front of your computer.
-Listening to Pandora.com for background music. I also get CDs from the library now.
-Setting goals: for words or hours.
-Exercising. My gym started offering free classes so I take Butts & Guts, kung fu, and weight lifting. I now have a killer vertical punch. Possibly literally.
-Occasionally going to the library or other place where there are fewer distractions.

In two years, I’ve learned that I can make seemingly impossible deadlines. I had two books come out in 2009, and two more will come out this year and another two in 2011.

If you work at home, what are your tips for making it work?

Powells is Portland's well-known, well-loved independent bookstore. A lot of sites link to Powells for book-buying, esp. folks who would rather send business to an independent than a chain or Amazon. So I get daily review emails from them, reviews that originally ran in other places, like Harpers or the New York Review of Books. And today the review they chose to feature was the one I did for the Oregonian of The Unnamed.

I don't know why, but seeing it there makes me feel anxious. I'm afraid to read it, sure it contains glaring errors.

Rupert Murdoch, a conservative, owns pretty much everything in the world:
-The Wall St. Journal
-The New York Post
-The FOX network
-HarperCollins
-MySpace
-Zondervan (Christian publisher)
-20th Century Fox
-Etc.

[Side note: When I was published by HarperCollins, their travel agent once accidentally faxed me the itinerary for one of Murdoch’s son. The hotel he was staying at in London cost $1,000 a night, and that was 10 years ago.]

A recent article says, “"We don't like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99," Murdoch said when asked about electronic books during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. "They pay us the wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge," he said. "But I think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books."”

So it sounds like Harper and Zondervan will join Macmillan in standing up to Amazon. And I think that’s a good thing.

Read more about what Murdoch said here.

Judging by what I've seen posted by folks on the B&N LiveJournal community, they would agree.

Right now, I'm hearing a lot about mermaid books. lkmadigan has one coming out this fall. And there's a new mermaid book out for adults, called Catch of a Lifetime.

About the book
She’s on a mission to save the planet…  
Mermaid Angel Tritone has been researching humans from afar, hoping to find a way to convince them to stop polluting. When she jumps into a boat to escape a shark attack, it’s her chance to pursue her mission, but she has to keep her identity a total secret…  
 
When he finds out what she really is, they’re both in mortal danger…  
For Logan Hardington, finding a beautiful woman on his boat is surely not a problem—until he discovers she’s a mermaid, and suddenly his life is on the line…

ABout the author
Judi Fennell has had her nose in a book and her head in some celestial realm all her life, including those early years when her mom would exhort her to “get outside!” instead of watching Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on television. So she did--right into Dad’s hammock with her Nancy Drew books.
 
These days she’s more likely to have her nose in her laptop and her head (and the rest of her body) at her favorite bookstore, but she’s still reading, whether it be her latest manuscript or friends’ books.
 
A three-time finalist in online contests, Judi has enjoyed the reader feedback she’s received and would love to hear what you think about her Mer series. Check out her website at www.JudiFennell.com for excerpts, reviews and fun pictures from reader and writer conferences, and the chance to “dive in” to her stories.

What others are saying
"Fennell's got detailed worldbuilding, creative secondary characters and an impressive use of mythology in this great read. While this title is part of a series, it works well as a stand-alone. Angel and Logan are both incredibly textured characters.
-RT BookReview Magazine 4 Stars
 
"Judi Fennell has extraordinary imagination and has certainly used it in creating this exciting and colorful story. Her characters are wonderful."
Fresh Fiction
 
"The best blend of both worlds. I... love each and every character in Catch of A Lifetime (and) found (it) well worth diving into."
Long And Short Reviews, 4.5 Books

I sold my first book, Circles of Confusion in 1997 and it came out in 1999. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first in what was a four-book series. The rights to those four books and a stand-alone thriller have reverted to me, and I put them back on the Kindle and made them available for other readers through Smashwords.com.

To prepare the books for the Kindle, I proofread my old Word files, knowing that a few corrections had been made on the files at the publisher. Re-reading my old writing was eye opening:

- I sometimes made the rookie mistake of giving people names that began with the same initial, ie, James and John.
- Some of my chapters were too long. Now I think anything over 2,500 (for an adult book) is too long, and shorter is always better. People get tired, page ahead, think “I’ll stop at the end of the chapter,” and if it’s too far away, they just stop. Whereas if the chapters are all short and end of a cliff-hanger, they are more likely to think it’s a page-turner.
- Dialog was occasionally just that, words only, without the character doing anything at the same time. Elizabeth George has something she calls a THAD - talking head avoidance device - which you can read about here. I use more THADs now, and I think my books are stronger for it.

We finally went to see Avatar on Sunday. I am so glad we saw it in 3-D, because I don't think it would have been worth it otherwise (I know many people will probably disagree). Nothing in the story line surprised me. It was kind of a paint-by-numbers deal that at times defied its own internal logic.

- The Home Tree is vital to the people. Yet toward the end of the movie, we find out there are other tribes. Do they have Home Trees, too?

- To ride a dragon, it must choose you. Yet to ride the red dragon, I guess all you need to do is surprise it.

- The best they could do for that mineral was call it "Unobtanium"?

- When did Jake Sully have time to get all those beads put into his avatar hair? His hairstyle got ever more elaborate.

- To keep the PG-13 level, native women have little scraps of cloth or necklaces that miraculously cover their nipples at all times. Ditto the green vines that grow over Grace.

I loved the look of it. I just wished the story had been as good as the special effects.

I reviewed Joshua Ferris' new book, The Unnamed for the Oregonian. It was a hard review to write.

I adored his first book, And Then We Came to the End. One of my posts about And Then We Came to the End. And my post about how some were disappointed with sales.

For me, The Unnamed tried to do something difficult and failed. Is it better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all? I found it endlessly depressing. I tried to be balanced in my review, and since I turned it in I've been looking at many other reviews. Time and Newsweek seemed to like it. USA Today and the New York Times (twice!) did not. With varying degrees of not liking.

This is my review. Every reviewer seemed to struggle with the question: What was Tim's mysterious "walk until you drop" illness a metaphor for?

A new study found that nearly 1 in 10 seven- to eight-year-olds hears voices that aren't really there. Most aren’t bothered, and most don’t grow up to be schizophrenic.

Read more about the study here.

This video simulates what it’s like to be a person with schizophrenia. It starts off innocently, and then gets worse.

When I was a kid and ate certain cereals that crackled as the milk settled over them, I could hear tiny voices within the sound. I knew they weren't real, and I tried not to think about them. Did you hear voices when you were a kid?

A few months ago, I had a journal entry about finding my agent - and the long, long road I traveled to find her. One reader commented that she wished she could read more stories like that in the Writers Digest guide to literary agents.

Well, thanks to the power of Google Alerts, the person who runs the blog connected with that book contacted me and asked me to expand upon my experiences And you can read my piece right here.

So, let's see. What else should I post that could make it into Google Alerts?