Author Thaisa Frank at Vromans Bookstore Tonight

The author of our current writing book club selection will be at Vromans Bookstore tonight! Go meet and support her! Thank her for providing us with our discussion points for our upcoming book club meeting.

Thaisa Frank discusses and signs Heidegger's Glasses

Location: Vroman's Bookstore

695 E. Colorado Blvd

City: Pasadena,

Province:California

Postal Code: 91101

April 12th, 2011, 7:00 pm

During the end of World War II, The Third Reich's obsession with the occult has led to an underground compound of translators responsible for answering letters written to those eventually killed in the concentration camps. Into this covert compound comes a letter written by eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger to his optometrist, a man now lost in the dying thralls of Auschwitz. How will the scribes answer this letter? Part love story, part thriller, part meditation on how the dead are remembered and history is presented, this novel evocatively illustrates the Holocaust from an entirely new vantage point. Heidegger's Glasses was sold to ten foreign countries before publication and got a starred review in Publisher's weekly.

Heidegger's Glasses is a tour de force whose imagery haunts the reader long after the final page is turned...

.Jim Moret,

-The Huffington Post

This is stunning work, full of mysetry and strange tenderness. Thaisa Frank has written one of the most compelling stories of the Nazi regime since D.M. Thomas's Pictures at an Exhibition. It is a book that will haunt you.

-Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

Thaisa Frank works "by a tantalizing sense of indirection...."

-The New York Times

West Los Angeles Writing and Critique Workshop starts Thursday!

Our West Los Angeles Writing and Critique Workshop begins on Thursday!

LAwritersgroup.com has been running writers groups and creative writing workshops throughout the greater Los Angeles area since 2003. We hire moderators to run these groups who have years of experience giving writers feedback on their novels, screenplays, essays, children's books, short fiction stories, memoirs and even on poetry. Our moderators are chosen because they have experience working directly with creative writers and they understand how to give supportive cross-genre feedback that will leave you excited by the possibilities of your story and hungry to go home and rewrite your project, if it needs rewriting.

We also create new stories / writing in our groups through improvisational writing exercises given as writing prompts by our group moderators that are hand-picked by that moderator based on the needs of individual writers in the group to help elevate your prose, theme, dialogue, character development and much more. Because of this, no two groups are the same, which is why we have so many people who repeat group after group (plus returning writers get the returning member discount!). Our rules for the critique process have been developed over years of working in this group setting in order to keep the critique process constructive and positive.

Critique is not only good for the person receiving critique. It also benefits the critiquer. Listening to our moderators and other members give feedback on various writing styles, stories, and genres, helps those listening elevate their level of critique and their ability to critique their own stories as they write them. While our groups are not writing classes per se, and we have no lecture portion of the evening, a great deal of experiential learning, often customized for the individual group, takes place during our workshops. Even if a writer never brings in a story for feedback, they grow from a craft perspective just by listening and participating in the process.

Please visit http://www.lawritersgroup.com or email lawritersgroup@gmail.com for information or questions about our writers groups.

Hansel and Gretel

Based on my last post, I reread Grimm's Hansel and Gretel and I'm now traumatized. The Dad lets his wife dump his kids in the forrest to starve to death and when the kids survive and outsmart the child-eating witch then find their way back home with riches, mom is dead and codependent wimpy-ass dad gets to be rich??? How the did I have fond feelings for that story? Humpf.

Photo is in Public Domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/

wiki/File:DBP_1961_369_Wohlfahrt_H%C3%A4nsel_und_Gretel.jpg

Grimm's Fairy Tales

Huge list of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Great Sunday Reading.

Ten Elements of the Intellectual Thriller

Here's a fabulous list that describes the ten important elements of writing an intellectual thriller.

Our Current Writing Craft Book Club Book Selection

Read along with us and participate in person or in our online discussion on our Writing Craft Book Club Meetup page

Who or what influenced you to be a writer?

Someone on one of my LinkedIn groups posed the question, "Who or what influenced you to be a writer?" and it elicted some fantastic answers so I thought I'd pose the question here.

For me (Nicole), here is a slightly longer version of my answer:

My writing influence stemmed from desperation and the love of a good friend. Thanks to a series emotionally blindsiding tragedies, I found myself needing to retreat and process what was happening around me. My abused friends enjoyed the brunt of my venting via email and instant message, and one valuable friend in particular changed my life when he complimented my writing and told me I should be a writer. That was the first time I'd ever considered becoming a writer. He encouraged me to take writing classes at a local university extension program. At that point, not only had I never been exposed to writing classes, I didn't even know they'd existed. When we parked in the campus parking structure, and got out of the car, I had what I now understand was a panic attack. I'd had negative scholastic experiences and just being on a campus elicted a great deal of anxiety. Still does, actually. He took my hand anyway and walked me there, steadfastly reassuring me that it would be okay. He was right. It was. If he hadn't been the Gayle to my Oprah, I wouldn't be a writer today. Thanks Geo!