Before I was 24, I had dined in the U. S. Senate Dining Room at a table next to John Kennedy’s, shaken hands with former Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, watched Bobby Kennedy interrogate witnesses in a Senate hearing room, crossed paths with Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson on a Capitol walkway,…
In this new novel from Herin (Absolution, 2007), enterprising graduate student Rachel Singer in 1997 decides to talk to disgraced North Carolina poet and former Duke University professor Henry Beam. She’s intent on learning what really happened 34 years earlier, when Beam published a group of poems that he claimed were written by a prisoner…
I first visited Paris on my honeymoon, a gift from my in-laws. The first days of the trip, however, were anything but romantic. One of those in-laws had suffered a serious heart attack the night before the wedding, putting the honeymoon in doubt until his wife insisted we go. The next night, our wedding night, was spent…
For writers, having a book published is a huge moment. Before that happens, we may spend years writing a book. I certainly have. The manuscript for A Stone for Bread was completed twenty years ago. Three New York agents turned it down. Then I turned it down, filing it away convinced it would never publish. Several years…
Getting a good review is always a heady moment for a writer. Usually these come from professional reviewers on the staffs of newspapers and other media, who are so important for getting the word out about our work. But getting a good review from a reader offers a different satisfaction, because we write for readers not critics.…
Chatting about A Stone for Bread. To hear the interview go to WUNC.
News & Record book reviewer Linda C. Brinson calls A Stone for Bread “a compelling story that’s hard to put down… By book’s end, Herin has led the reader to consider many questions, among them the essential role of literature and art, the elusive nature of truth, the complexity of the human spirit and the importance…
So I go check out my Amazon page in the run-up to my new novel’s release. To get to the page, I type in my name. And yes, I find my two novels at the top of the page, the two editions of A Stone for Bread and the Absolution hardback. And my author info. So far…
In Part 1, I talked about the editing and design of a new book. Now come the three “P’s” of book publishing: proofing, printing and publicity. Proofing is one of those tediously joyless tasks that requires a trained eye and a solid grasp of grammar and mechanics. It’s easy to want to just delegate the proofing to your publisher’s editorial staff. But it’s important for writers to proof…
The most exciting moment in a writer’s life is a publisher’s phone call. Your book or novel or collection of stories has been accepted for publication. For first-time authors, this may come after months, even years of submissions, not infrequently accompanied by intermittent bouts of despair. But then the phone call… The dream accomplished. You’ll soon be…