Last night’s Face Books Tour event at Orinda Books went off splendidly. The room was packed and many people left with raffle tickets, having purchased the wonderful books our readers wrote.
The theme of the reading was The Power of Story, addressed from many angles by the fiction and non-fiction writers who presented.
Next event is the Clayton Books Authors Festival on April 26, and then we’ll be at Bookshop West Portal on May 7 and May 14, 7 p.m., with two entirely different and wonderful line-ups. Check out my events link and the Face Books Tour link for much more information.
In other news: The wonderful Ellen Sussman is holding a special Master Class in Mystery Writing at her gorgeous home in Los Altos. Here’s the write-up from Ellen, and there is still room left. Tell her I sent you:
Master Class on Writing the Mystery Novel
Three acclaimed mystery writers, Cornelia Read, Keith Raffel and John Billheimer, will join me in a panel discussion about their craft. I’ll ask them about plotting the mystery novel, about character development, about conventions of the genre, about breaking those conventions. I’d like to find out what we non-mystery writers can learn from these masters of plot, character, voice. And for those of you who are writing mysteries, we can find out how these three have succeeded in a very competitive field.
About the guest speakers:
Cornelia Read is the acclaimed author of A Field of Darkness and The Crazy School. The Drood Review voted John Billheimer’s first book, The Contrary Blues, one of the ten best mysteries of 1998. Four subsequent novels explore various scams and scandals in the coal fields of his native state of West Virginia. Bookreporter.com called Keith Raffel’s Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley Mystery “without question the most impressive mystery debut of the year.”
Date: Wednesay, May 13, 6:30 – 9:30
Place: at my house in Los Altos Hills.
Cost: $60
Contact Ellen by email: ellen (at) ellensussman (dot) com
I (Elizabeth) just read a draft of Cornelia’s next book and I LOVED it. This is sure to
be a wonderful evening, and I’m hoping to be there myself if the babies and partner allow it .
. .
Orinda Books! I used to go there all the time when I was at JFKU. Wish I could have been there.
Kimberely