Tag: author responsibility

Children’s Books Featuring Children With Disabilities Say “You Belong”

author Jo Meserve MachGuest Post
by Jo Meserve Mach

The books in everyone’s homes give out powerful messages. These messages can be scary, confusing, exciting, or hopeful.

My job as an Occupational Therapist providing infant-toddler services brought me into many homes where my role was to teach the parents of a child with a developmental delay how to help their child use their abilities. The parents were often reading books about their child’s disabilities. These books were scary and confusing. Continue reading “Children’s Books Featuring Children With Disabilities Say “You Belong””

My Editing Compulsion

Author Brenda PerlinGuest Post
by Brenda Perlin

There was a time when I read for the pleasure of it. Back when I couldn’t wait to sneak away to the coolest coffee house in the city where I could find a comfy couch to relax with a fresh cup of sizzling hot coffee. I read for hours at a time. Excited about escaping into someone else’s life and visiting an unfamiliar city. Those days are long gone. I am still passionate about books and get goose bumps over beautiful writing but I can’t enjoy them the way I used to because I am too busy looking for typos and repetitive words. It’s almost become an obsessive compulsive disorder. Seriously. Continue reading “My Editing Compulsion”

Book Fact Checking: Who is Responsible?

magnifyingglassI used to assume that the books I read, especially nonfiction, especially those from big-name publishers in New York, had been fact-checked down to the type of boots the hikers were wearing, what brand of vodka the Serbian operative ordered at the bar, and the hotel where the narrator met the contact who broke the story open. But several sources indicate that most publishers do NOT routinely fact-check authors’ manuscripts. And that it has NEVER been a standard practice of book publishing, the way it has been in magazines and newspapers. Continue reading “Book Fact Checking: Who is Responsible?”

The Power We Hold as Authors

Christian Brown Author PhotoGuest Post
by Christian A. Brown

Artists are the soul of our society. The ones that influence as well as reflect — in language or other mediums — the morality, beauty and ugliness of our world. Writers, specifically, hold great power. Look to Stalin, Steinem, Nietzsche, Woolf and countless other literary exemplars to see that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. Writers hold influence, whether we accept this responsibility or not. Now, assuming that we do embrace it, bearing in mind that not everyone needs to, we then need to look at the finer points, the invisible moral signals behind our writing. What messages do our characters convey? How are we influencing our readers? Continue reading “The Power We Hold as Authors”