Blatant self-promotion

Update: My essay is now up!

The movie "Sins of the Mother" on LMN THIS SUNDAY, Feb. 21st (8 pm EST, 7 pm CST, 6 pm MST, and 5 pm PST) is based on my first novel Orange Mint and Honey. Months ago I visited the set and met some of the cast, including Jill Scott and Nicole Beharie. I wrote an essay for The Defenders Online describing that experience. Here's an excerpt:

"While I wait for my husband, I turn on my iPod, select Jill Scott, and press shuffle. “Try” comes on and I begin to sob. Time loops in on itself. I remember all those days I cried, fretted, worried and prayed over my first novel. I remember Jill’s mama’s advice to her buoying me too, encouraging me to keep trying. And now Jill is playing the role of Nona, the mother, in my story."

If you go on The Defenders Online to read it, check out the rave review they gave Zetta Elliott's A Wish After Midnight, which pubs today. Happy Pub Day Zetta! Also, Happy Pub Day to Heidi Durrow, whose The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is also out today!

On this blog I encourage you to support authors. Now I'm asking for your support for my work. If you have cable (or know someone who does), please tune in to the movie. If you're planning to watch, consider joining in my watch party contest. You could win signed books from so many cool authors!

I'm also asking you to read my book, Orange Mint and Honey, if you haven't. If you like it, please check out this list I created on Indiebound of other books you might also enjoy.

Thanks for allowing me this commercial time! Next week, we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming with a guest blog post from Virginia Deberry and Donna Grant!



“…With great acting all around, including Mimi Rogers as Nona’s sponsor, this adaptation of Carleen Brice’s novel, Orange Mint and Honey is one dramatic powerhouse of a TV movie. It’d be a sin to miss it!“—NATIONAL ENQUIRER, Best Bets on TV

"As a reformed alcoholic mother trying to reconnect with her tightly wound, emotionally stunted daughter, Jill Scott (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) delivers a performance that makes you forget you knew her as a singer first." — ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“The magnificent Jill Scott shines as a former mess of a mother struggling to make amends to the daughter she abused…“—TV GUIDE, Hot List

News and links

Getting Ready for the Holidays

Have you noticed the countdown clock at the bottom of the page? It counts down to National Buy a Book By a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month. Just over a month before it's here! Poets & Writers has some suggestions. Readers, got tips on good books we should be giving folks this December? Let's get the buzz started.

Bernice McFadden is about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of her novel Sugar! She has an interesting idea about how to celebrate. Sugar would also make a great NBABBABAAGITSNBM gift.

New or Upcoming Releases

Rebel Yell by Alice Randall. Shelf Awareness ran an interesting Q&A with her recently. Randall is part of an interesting and acclaimed group of writers called The Finish Party.

Feminista by Erica Kennedy, which I learned about on Twitter. I loved her novel Bling so I am very much looking forward to this one. Check out Publisher's Weekly rave review of this "bitch lit" book and ask yourselves WHY HAVEN'T WE HEARD ABOUT THIS BOOK? (Drives me batty!): "This crazed black romantic comedy from journalist and author Kennedy (Bling) charts the rocky course of Sydney Zamora, a very angry single. The Cachet magazine writer decides, at 33, that she's got to get married before her eggs sour. So her rich sister hires Mitzi Berman, a successful Manhattan matchmaker, to

find Sydney's Mr. Right. Mitzi's challenge, as she sees it, is transforming fierce feminista Sydney into a dress-wearing girly girl (says Mitzi: If you don't make some radical changes in your behavior, you will die alone). Catching Sydney's eye is the fabulous Max Cooper, the spoiled playboy heir of a department store fortune, but can her politics mix with his background? Truly, their path to connubial bliss is barbed with obstacles, charted with sarcastic glee by Kennedy, a pioneer of chick lit's naughty stepsister—bitc

h lit."

Wench by Dolen-Perkins Valdez due in January. Here's the Publisher's Weekly review: "In her debut, Perkins-Valdez eloquently plunges into a dark period of American history, chronicling the lives of four slave women—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters’ mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio. There, they see free blacks for the first time and hear rumors of abolition, sparking their own desires to be free. For everyone but Lizzie, that is, who believes she is really in love with her master, and he with her. An extended flashback in the middle of the novel delves into Lizzie’s life and vividly explores the complicated psychological dynamic between master and slave. Jumping back to the final summer in Ohio, the women all have a decision to make—will they run? Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful, this novel showcases Perkins-Valdez’s ability to bring the unfortunate past to life."

Attention Book Clubs

In the November issue of Essence a black book club is pictured reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. (I don't have any problems with them reading a white author, btw.) Anybody know of any white clubs reading a black author? If so, send me pictures! I will post them here.

And is there such a thing as interracial book clubs?

The Writer's Life

Junot Diaz talks about the moment he really became a writer (giving hope to every writer I know).

I recently experienced a dream that many writers have: seeing a book turned into a movie. I just got back from Vancouver where I visited the set of "Sins of the Mother" (based on Orange Mint and Honey), which will air on the Lifetime Movie Network, and met the cast (Jill Scott and Nicole Beharie) and crew. Pictures are here. I'll post a link to an essay I'm writing about my adventure soon.