Author: Cynthia MacGregor

We live in the “land of the free,” as our national anthem tells us, and that includes freedom to read whatever we please. While there are still groups that successfully petition to have certain books removed from library shelves or schools, there is no overarching governmental entity decreeing that certain books may not be read...

Can books lead to world peace, or simply peace in our country? Can they put an end to school shootings, Pittsburgh-style atrocities, 9/11s, and overseas genocide? Well, they can’t put a total end to war or domestic violence. The world will always have troublemakers, agitators, and those who are, to put it nicely, off balance....

Today is Halloween. You know what REALLY scares me? It’s not the ghosties and ghoulies afoot today and tonight, nor the fake cobwebs draped in my chiropractor’s office, nor the spectre of running out of candy early in the evening–actually we don’t get ANY trick-or-treaters in this 55-and-older community. What really scares me is the...

“We interrupt this program…” or this blog. Or as the Python folks used to say, “And now for something completely different.” This week’s post isn’t about books, reading, or writing. Instead, I want to urge all our American readers to get out and VOTE. This is NOT a partisan rant. We are not siding with...

I’ve written in this space before about the problem of having too many books, when storage becomes an issue, and good ways to find new homes for them. Today I’ll discuss an idea for a related problem: How to dispose of books you no longer want, not because you have no room for them but...

We just celebrated Banned Books Week last week—if “celebrated” is the appropriate word to use when discussing books that have been removed, or requested to be removed, from libraries, schools, bookstores, and other venues.

Not everyone who writes is an author. You don’t have to be an author, a graduate of journalism school, or have other “authentication” conferred on you to validate your writing…and your “writing” doesn’t necessarily have to be written. Surely you have heard of “the oral tradition”—TELLING stories.

So it looks like I’m starting two new ghostwriting projects. One is pure ghosting. It’s nonfiction, motivational, and I’m to structure the book from notes to be provided to me by the nominal author. The other is more of a co-writing gig, but I’m to be uncredited, so therefore it’s still ghosting. This book is...

Very few book authors write nothing but books all day every day. Leaving aside the necessity of submissions of unpublished manuscripts, publicizing published books, and all the other requisite miscellany in an author’s professional life, most book authors do other types of writing as well.

As you may already know, the title of this week’s blpgpost, “Noms de Plume,” is the French for “pen names,” not so often used now as the English term, but once very common, as was the practice of using pen names. They are also called “pseudonyms”: false names. You may wonder, quite understandably, why any...