Adam Blumer

A Chat with Novelist Deb Brammer (with Giveaway)

By Adam Blumer September 11, 2015 Book Giveaway, Interviews, Novel Writing, Publishing 5 Comments
A Chat with Novelist Deb Brammer (with Giveaway)

Welcome to a new dimension of my blog: interviews. I’d love to highlight friends of mine who’ve written some fantastic books, books I can wholeheartedly recommend to you and your friends. As you know, I believe in clean and meaningful Christian fiction, so I’m careful about who I endorse. My new guest is Deb Brammer, an author friend I’ve known for several years. Without further ado, join Deb and me as we sip our coffee and chat about Christian publishing. So, Deb, how long have you been writing for Christian publication? For about thirty-five years. I had my first article published by Regular Baptist Press in 1979. How many books have you written? I’ve had eight books published. Peanut Butter Friends in a Chop Suey World and Two Sides to Everything are written for preteens and involve cultural changes made by an American in Taiwan and New Zealand. Moose is fiction…

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Book Review: The Giver

By Adam Blumer July 17, 2015 Book Review, Books, What I'm Reading No Comments

I finally found time over vacation to read The Giver by Lois Lowry. She’s also the author of Number the Stars, one of my all-time favorite YA novels. The Giver also won the Newberry Award, and I was eager to read it (certainly no small amount of buzz over it, since the release of the movie, which I haven’t yet seen). But overall I’d have to admit that I wish I’d liked the novel more than I did. It didn’t live up to its hype for me. Though the novel is well written and offers a lot of interesting social commentary in the context of an imagined future world, I struggled to get through it. Jonas’s world is certainly not one where I would like to live, and perhaps that’s one reason why I didn’t enjoy the novel. It certainly isn’t a “happy” story. Here is Publisher’s Weekly summary: In the “ideal”…

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Where Am I on the Next Novel?

By Adam Blumer July 1, 2015 Drone, Novel Writing, Writing 2 Comments

The next novel is written. So where am I in the process of publishing it? For me, writing the novel is the easiest part, though finding writing time is always a challenge. Revising is the hardest part because I tend to be a perfectionist and sometimes work and rework a scene over and over again before I think I’ve got it right. Then even after I think I’ve got it right, I’m later not happy with it and want to do something else. Or I have an ending in mind, but then a new idea dawns. When new ideas spring forth, I write them all down and then give them time to simmer in my mind. Whether I choose to use them isn’t an easy process. A novel literally has thousands of moving parts. If you tend to be an indecisive person, novel writing may not be for you, because every chapter,…

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