Book News!

Jane G. Meyer, author of The Woman and the Wheat and The Man and the Vine, has reviewed Letters to Saint Lydia on “Speaking of Books” for Ancient Faith Radio!
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Letters to Saint Lydia, released November 2010! Photo courtesy of Stephanie A. Platis.

It’s published!
The book can be purchased on Conciliar Press and on Amazon.com.
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The book has gone to press!!
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The book’s cover is finished, front and back. It’s beautiful, and it makes me happy! You can see it yourself by buying the book! It’s available for preorder right now at Conciliar Press, and it will be released in less than two months, on November 1, 2010.
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The beautiful book trailer, generously created for me by four talented friends, is now up on YouTube and will be posted to this blog shortly. You can also see it on the book’s Facebook page. Presvytera Pat Tsagalakis composed and performed the music, and she also put all the elements together. The voice belongs to Arianna Vokos. The photographs were taken either by Stephanie Platis, who took the book’s cover photo, or by Pat, and the “Lydia” model for the trailer, as for the book cover, was Alexandra. Thank you to each one of you for sharing your gifts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQJCHTMOt5Q

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The first (to my knowledge) Letters to Saint Lydia book group is being planned in the Seattle area, with a scheduled launch right after the book’s release! More information about this group will be posted as it becomes available.
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We’re in the Catalog! But that was so exciting that I put it on the front page as a Post–Letters to Saint Lydia is in the Catalog! Check it out at http://www.conciliarpress.com/media/assets/2010_CP_Catalog.pdf on page 9!

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The book has a Facebook fan page now!  You can find it by searching the book’s title, “Letters to Saint Lydia.”

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Here’s where I get to journal about the amazing adventure of writing a novel. My literary debut, Letters to Saint Lydia, will be released by Conciliar Press in the fall of this year (November 2010).

When I was an English major, many years ago in a galaxy far, far away, I thought writing a book was something you did all by yourself, and when you were finished, I thought you said goodbye to your book, mailed it to the publisher, and went on your merry way. None of this was true. Not even close.

Writing a book is something you do with as many friends as you can persuade to join you. You need someone to read it and poke holes in it so you can reshape it over and over again. You need someone to edit what you thought was the final version, through about ten more final versions to the actual final version. You need someone to make the book, the physical paper-and-ink object that will be sold to your readers. You need the people who help you tell your readers that the book exists and was written especially for them. More than anything else, you need your readers to bring the book to life.

And you need the people who make your book pretty! One of the first adventures I have to report here is the photo shoot for the cover of my book. My photographer was Stephanie A. Platis, and you can check out her portfolio on her website.  Watching her work taught me how completely artistry and technology are integrated in good photography. We were also blessed with Alexandra, the beautiful and good-natured model who will be gracing the cover of the book and appearing as the main character in the book trailer, which I will be posting here shortly. She taught me that modeling is like theater in miniature. She managed to tell a story while sitting perfectly still. I’m thankful to both of them, the photographer and the model, for the incredible magic of watching the character in my imagination achieve a living human face.