The IWWG Big Apple Workshop was amazing

Posted on April 26, 2010 by carrenstrock

The IWWG Big Apple Workshop was amazing. During the Meet the Authors section, I spoke about my writing. And afterward, it looked like a movie set with everyone wanting to buy my  Writer’s Journey books. Several people also bought  Married Women Who Love Women as well. Selling all that I’d brought was an exhilarating but also a very humbling experience.  So many women have important stories they need to put to paper and they are counting on my books to help them do this.

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Relinquishing Responsibility

Posted on April 20, 2010 by carrenstrock

INSIGHT:

I’ve realized that in order to give myself more time to follow my creative pursuits, I had to relinquish responsibility. That meant letting someone else do the laundry even if my white clothes came out tinged with pink, or the clothes were not folded as neatly as I myself would have fold them. Once I accepted that my writing was important, and once I started to take myself seriously, others did too.

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Insights

Posted on April 19, 2010 by carrenstrock

Insights come to me while I’m driving, lying in bed, playing a computer game – it doesn’t really matter where I am or what I’m doing. Sometimes they are profound and sometimes not so profound but they flit through my mind and then are forgotten. I had a brilliant one yesterday, while driving into Manhattan to attend the IWWG‘s Writers Conference. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived, I couldn’t remember it. Anyway, I made a conscious decision to jot these thoughts down as they came to me.

Then, at the conference, I spoke about my writing. The audience seemed to hang on my every word, and, as I was speaking, I had another insight. Maybe my thoughts, whether philosophical or superficial, would interest others and so I would share them on my website rather than stashing them away in a notebook. I hope to keep them coming.

INSIGHT: Selling all of the Writer’s Journey books I’d brought was exhilarating but my real high came from the realization that people actually were interested in everything I had to say.

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Writers Conference

Posted on April 18, 2010 by carrenstrock

I just spent a most enjoyable day yesterday at the International Women’s Writing Guild‘s NYC conference.

Susan Tiberghien, a marvelous workshop leader spoke on different types of memoir writing. By the time she finished about 130 enthusiastic women had come up with titles and styles for the memoirs they planned to write. What was interesting was that no two women had come up with the same title. Three other presenters spoke on marketing, contracts, and the business end of writing.

 Today thirteen authors, myself included, will discuss our books and how they came to be. I’ll be talking about A Writer’s Journey: What to Know Before, During, and After Writing a Book.

One woman who had read my Married Women Who Love Women told me that after reading that book, she went to my website where she learned of this writers conference. I guess this social networking stuff really works.

The conference was held at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. This 40 room mansion is considered among the most beautiful buildings in NYC. Built in the 1840s and declared a landmark building in the 1960s, it has been “victorianized, with its sandstone façade, bay windows and Gothic Ornamentation. The inside of the mansion boasts stained glass ceilings and hand carved fireplaces. If you’re anywhere near there I suggest you give it a look.

The International Women’s Writing Guild will be holding their one week summer conference at Brown University in Rhode Island from July 30-August 6. There will be 50 workshops to choose from and I can gaurentee that the energy will be high. You can check it out at www.iwwg.org.

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Having trouble finding my book on Amazon?

Posted on April 10, 2010 by carrenstrock

Several people have emailed me saying that they had difficulty finding the second edition paperback of Married Women Who Love Women on Amazon.com. It is very frustrating but Amazon seems to be an entity unto itself and no amount of talk from my publisher will get them to correct their post.

The hardcover version (more expensive) comes up whenever MWLW is entered, and sometimes the first edition comes up. But never the second edition paperback. To find that you have to click on “other editions” and then on “paperback”. And sometimes, when that doesn’t come up, you have to click on “see used items.” The new paperbacks will then come up. That’s just how it is.

You can also search by the ISBN.

Second Edition
Hardcover – Routledge (June 2008), ISBN: 978-1-56023-790-7
Trade Paperback – Routledge (June 2008), ISBN: 978-1-56023-791-4

First Edition
Hardcover – Doubleday (January 1998), ISBN: 0385488254
Trade Paperback – Alyson (April 2000), ISBN: 1555835554

For your convenience, I have given links to all editions of my book as are available on Amazon.com, BN.com, Borders.com, Powells.com, IndieBound.com, and Overstock.com here. You can also purchase copies directly from me here.

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A quote for today

Posted on March 30, 2010 by carrenstrock

How simple the world would be if people focused on love and not hate. As Golda Meir once said, “Until the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews, there will never be peace in the world.”

Then today, someone sent this to me by Columnist Burt Prelutsky:  “Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran.”

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