Ruth Francisco's Blog
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May.23.2013
Geoffrey Canada, author of Fist Stick Knife Gun, who grew up in the Bronx in the fifties and sixties, explains that guns were never a part of his childhood. Violence, sure, fights, a rite-of-passage, but guns? No. So why is it children are now armed?
Ironically, he explains, the culprit was the...
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May.10.2013
It happened in my town. Last Saturday night. Prom night.
I am horrified by gun violence in America. Every time we have another Columbine, Aurora, or Newtown shooting, I feel sick. I feel the entire country is enslaved by the gun lobby and gun manufacturers. Nobody is willing to stand up and...
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May.06.2013
When you look at violence in human history, the hysteria about mass shootings and gun violence in America may seem overblown. The annual homicide rate in our most violence cities—53 per 100,000 in Detroit, 51 per 100,000 in New Orleans—pales in comparison to the murder rate during the Crusades,...
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May.04.2013
The LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle or Personnel), otherwise known as the Higgins, was instrumental in the storming of Normandy. While most of the amphibious assaults in the European and Mediterranean Theaters of Operation occurred on the coasts of Northern Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Southern France,...
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May.03.2013
When I first drove to the Florida Panhandle from Los Angeles five years ago, I was smitten by the unspoiled beauty of the place. Thousands of Monarch butterflies flitted around my car as I drove down to Alligator Point. The first morning I woke to mullet jumping in the canal and screeching great...
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Apr.22.2013
What's my favorite trick? I study photos. I study the clothes and hairstyles. I try to imagine what the people are thinking in the picture—what came before the picture was taken, what came after. When I wrote The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, I wrote almost exclusively...
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Apr.08.2013
I realized this weekend that I would not be the person I am without Roger Ebert. It was quite a revelation to me. Few have influenced me as much.
I remember seeing his reviews when I was a child. For the first time, I realized that film was something more than entertainment. That it was both...
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Apr.05.2013
I do a LOT of rewriting for my books, and spend more time rewriting than the initial draft. It always is difficult. So I've been trying to put together some notes to help myself and others. Hope this helps.
NOTES ON REWRITING
Before Rewriting
-Set it aside for six weeks or...
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Feb.03.2013
to read, that is.
Middle-aged women are the biggest readers, the largest group of book purchasers. Therefore, a writer, before setting aside a year to write a book, might want to ask, “What do middle-aged women want to read about?”
It's a question I always ask of readers when I meet...
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Jan.26.2013
"Sunshine Highway" has been out a year now. Publishing a book that actually means something to the local community has been an eye-opener to me. Fiction can make a difference? Who would've thought? Sure, Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair made a...
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Jan.19.2013
A glass of white wine at breakfast; midmorning scotch and soda; lunch, port, followed by Pol Roger champagne, a brandy or two, perhaps a beer; before dinner another whiskey (Johnnie Walker Red Label); dinner, more champagne, several brandies; before retiring, a port or two, and a final weak...
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Oct.28.2012
I've been trying to understand why there is so much push-back from conservative Republicans in this election cycle. Whether legal or illegal, they're doing anything they can to roll back any progressive ideas to the era of robber barons in the early 1920s. Taken together, their...
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Jul.15.2012
Romney isn't going to get out of this one—insisting he left Bain Capital in 1999 and that he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it since 1999 (apart from going to some board meetings, and yes, signing off on SEC filings and company sales and a host of other important documents). Either he...
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Apr.10.2012
Are you baffled? I'm baffled. The Blunt amendment and the recent attacks on a woman's right to contraception seem so out-of-place, so outrageous, completely surreal. Since when have Republicans become so sex-fearing, women-fearing, freedom-fearing? Wait—they always have been...
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Feb.28.2012
The Amazon Kindle Select program, which allows self-published authors to list their books for free for 5 days every 3 months, has been up for several months. Here are some tips on how to make the free promotion option work for you:
1. Wait until you have at least 6 good reviews...
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About Ruth
Ruth Francisco worked in the film industry for fifteen years before selling her first novel Confessions of a Deathmaiden to Warner Books in 2003, followed by Good Morning, Darkness, which was selected by Publishers' Weekly as one of the best mysteries of the...