Tasty Snails vs. Espresso Books (and genre crossing)

My friend Louise introduced me to a VERY DANGEROUS website. It is called Food Gawker, and it seems to troll the internet for cool blogs about food.

Here's a photo that was bubbling at the top of the pic gallery today.



I ask you. Does food get cuter than that? Bless her little macaron-making heart.

So I have been stuck there, clicking over and looking at recipes for chocolate cake (which I'm going to make and enter in the county fair this weekend, good luck to me!) and all kinds of other beautiful, deliciousness.

Meanwhile, I have also been reading a MS for a friend. She is writing out of her genre, and it's amazing how versatile some writers can be. I'm really happy to see the different sides of writers' personalities emerge. Yes, I think the voice for most writers is pretty constant--I can hear her romance side sneaking through in this great YA dystopian story--which I think is what makes readers for the most part not mind when writers cross genre lines. There are some writers I'd read whatever they wrote, no matter the genre (almost. I mean, I do have some limitations on what I won't read.)

I also got a load of something really innovative and interesting today. It's called the Espresso Book Machine. From the writerswrite blog:

"The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Trachtenberg discusses the expansion of On Demand Books' Espresso Book Machine, a desk-sized device that quickly prints out black-and-white paperbacks with color covers. Jeffrey says he printed his own book in four minutes."

Click on the link to see the machine.

Huh. How would that be? It might change things. And book publishing would no longer be for the snails. Yummy snails. Mmm!

Speak to me, honey!

As I go through this novel, trying to get every detail to work together to tell the story, one of my big goals is to get the lines of each character to sound both unique and authentic. What I mean is, I'd like each of the speakers to have his/her own voice, and to be able to sound true in the reader's ear, so that the reader can really imagine the character as being a living human being.

It's kind of tough. In one of the stories I wrote, I loosely based a character on a friend of mine from another country. Even though she and I never spoke much English to one another, I knew her well enough to be able to imagine how she would speak if she were to say something in English. In feedback from readers, one of the compliments I got was on the authenticity of that particular character's voice. "She seems so real," they said. Even though my foreign pal never did anything I had my character do in the novel, her "voice" came in handy when I was looking for a speaking style for a character.

I have wondered if other authors have different tricks for hearing their characters "speak."

If so, speak up in the comment section!

I guess in honor of this topic, the candy I should probably go track down is Pop Rocks because they talk to me, right? And, it's so awesome that I found *this* flavor of Pop Rocks online, eh?