Nora Roberts has the nuns to thank for her prolific career.
In today’s links you’ll learn Nora Roberts’ secrets to writing, watch some entertaining and weird book trailers, and learn about five spooky Britain spots starring in a new fantasy series. You can also vote for your favorite beach reads to shape NPR’s best of list. Have fun!
- All summer we’ve been linking to summer reading lists that claim to be the “best ever.” Now it’s your turn to get in on the action with NPR’s “100 Best Beach Books Ever,” voted on by NPR listeners and book lovers everywhere. NPR’s book editors whittled down the 600+ suggestions they received into a list of 200 titles, 10 of which you can cast your vote for. The winners will be announced July 29th, at which point you can head to the library with confidence, knowing which books are approved by those witty NPR listeners.
- With the Romance Writers of America conference beginning this week in Washington, Nora Roberts stopped by the Washington Post to sign her latest book, Black Hills, and discuss writing in general. Short Stack has a clip of Roberts’ talk, where she thanks the Catholic nuns of her childhood for instilling the “discipline, guilt, and guilt” needed to keep typing away and advises aspiring writers to “keep your butt in the chair” and not wait around for inspiration to strike. Even if romance isn’t your genre, the clip will make you smile.
- If watching the Nora Roberts clip made you hungry for more video, check out Bookninja‘s compilation of recent book trailers. From The Graveyard Book to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the trailers offer melodramatic action and might even tempt you to re-read Atmospheric Disturbances, as it did the post’s author.
- J.K. Rowling isn’t the only author turning Britain into a magical, sometimes dark place – Mark Chadbourn’s “Age of Misrule” series takes place in modern Britain, only with Celtic gods back in the picture. Omnivoracious discusses the series further and shares Chadbourn’s perspective. The author describes the series as “a magical mystery tour of Weird Britain,” and he lists five lesser-known, mysterious locations in Britain that play a part in the series. If only Hogwarts were real, too…
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