by Jamie Chavez | May 30, 2016 | Your Editor Says …
Some years ago in a weak moment I fell victim to some mediocre book marketing—“follow-up to the international best-selling Pillars of the Earth!”—and purchased Ken Follett’s World Without End, a one thousand–page historical novel. I’d read and enjoyed his early...
by Jamie Chavez | May 16, 2016 | Books You Might Like, The Writing Craft
It’s nearly 500 pages long—and I flew through Helen Simonson’s second novel set in an English village. I never wanted to put it down. Also, it made me angry (on behalf of a character I loved), and it made me cry a couple times. This is a sign that I was fully...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 2, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
A few nights ago over dinner the Boy’s girlfriend told me she was “an original Harry Potter kid. I grew up with Harry.” Golly, that stopped me in my tracks. (The first book—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—released in the United Stated on 1 September 1998.) I...
by Jamie Chavez | Jul 9, 2015 | Miscellany
The true Regency lasted only nine years. It began on 5 February 1811 when George, Prince of Wales, was officially sworn in as Regent and ended on 31 January 1820 when he was proclaimed King George IV. Yet the term ‘Regency’ is frequently used to describe the period of...
by Jamie Chavez | Apr 11, 2015 | Miscellany
You know I love to talk about getting the details right in your novel, so when I read A. A. Gill’s lovely essay in Vanity Fair, I knew I had to share. “We are coming to the end of the age of the telephone call,” he says, “and that may be a good thing or a bad thing,...
