Marla Cooper's Blog
April 18, 2016
For the Love of Books
The other day I was trolling some neighborhood thrift stores in the hopes of finding a taffeta bridesmaid dress, because, well, when you write a book with a name like Terror in Taffeta, you start to get some funny ideas in your head.
Anyway, St. Vincent De Paul’s had created an—I don’t know what you’d call it. Art installation? Wall collage? Fire hazard?—using a bunch of old books attached to a wall. I snapped a picture so I could add it to my list of projects that I totally mean to do but won’t ever get around to doing.
Then, the next day, I ran across a picture of a tunnel built out of books at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles—part of the upstairs labyrinth where you can pick up several thousand books for a dollar apiece. A book entitled Genius caught my eye, and I immediately started thinking, “What if you’re the dude who wrote that book and you see your book there, just another brick in the tunnel?” The hours he must have spent writing it! The hopes and dreams!
With my debut novel less than one month old, I can’t help but think about what will become of it a year from now, ten years, twenty. Will I see copies of it in a thrift store? Will it be part of a book tunnel somewhere? Will a copy be used to prop up furniture, like I discovered some poor book doing under the bed on my last vacation? (To make matters worse, they’d torn the cover off to make it just the right height.)
I took a class once called Altered Books, in which we took old books and turned them into—well, I was going to say works of art, but our attempts were more like feeble craft projects. Some people in the class felt squeamish about cutting, painting and bedazzling otherwise perfectly respectable books. But I loved the idea of turning an old, discarded book into something new and giving it a new purpose in life...
Visit Chicks on the Case to read more of this post and see awesome pictures of book art that I can't figure out how to post here on Goodreads!
https://chicksonthecase.com/2016/04/1...
Anyway, St. Vincent De Paul’s had created an—I don’t know what you’d call it. Art installation? Wall collage? Fire hazard?—using a bunch of old books attached to a wall. I snapped a picture so I could add it to my list of projects that I totally mean to do but won’t ever get around to doing.
Then, the next day, I ran across a picture of a tunnel built out of books at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles—part of the upstairs labyrinth where you can pick up several thousand books for a dollar apiece. A book entitled Genius caught my eye, and I immediately started thinking, “What if you’re the dude who wrote that book and you see your book there, just another brick in the tunnel?” The hours he must have spent writing it! The hopes and dreams!
With my debut novel less than one month old, I can’t help but think about what will become of it a year from now, ten years, twenty. Will I see copies of it in a thrift store? Will it be part of a book tunnel somewhere? Will a copy be used to prop up furniture, like I discovered some poor book doing under the bed on my last vacation? (To make matters worse, they’d torn the cover off to make it just the right height.)
I took a class once called Altered Books, in which we took old books and turned them into—well, I was going to say works of art, but our attempts were more like feeble craft projects. Some people in the class felt squeamish about cutting, painting and bedazzling otherwise perfectly respectable books. But I loved the idea of turning an old, discarded book into something new and giving it a new purpose in life...
Visit Chicks on the Case to read more of this post and see awesome pictures of book art that I can't figure out how to post here on Goodreads!
https://chicksonthecase.com/2016/04/1...
March 22, 2016
A Day in the Life of Kelsey McKenna
Dru Ann Love hosts a regular series on her blog called "A Day in the Life," and today's guest is my main character, Kelsey McKenna!
Here's a sneak preview:
A Day in the Life of Kelsey McKenna
“Destination wedding planner? What’s that?”
That’s one reaction I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Of course, I don’t hear it nearly as often as I used to, now that turning weddings into big group vacations is all the rage. Seems like everyone has a cousin who’s getting married in Hawaii or a best friend from college who’s planning an intimate little ceremony on the Amalfi Coast...
Read more at Dru's Book Musing
Here's a sneak preview:
A Day in the Life of Kelsey McKenna
“Destination wedding planner? What’s that?”
That’s one reaction I get when I tell people what I do for a living. Of course, I don’t hear it nearly as often as I used to, now that turning weddings into big group vacations is all the rage. Seems like everyone has a cousin who’s getting married in Hawaii or a best friend from college who’s planning an intimate little ceremony on the Amalfi Coast...
Read more at Dru's Book Musing
March 4, 2016
The Accidental Muse
It’s a question writers get asked a lot: "Where do you get your ideas?"
Really, they can come from anywhere—an overheard conversation, a memory from the past, an interesting story in the news. But the idea for my series about a destination wedding planner came to me like a gift from the universe—one that came wrapped in pretty, metallic paper with an expertly tied bow on top.
Continue reading at Jungle Red Writers...
Really, they can come from anywhere—an overheard conversation, a memory from the past, an interesting story in the news. But the idea for my series about a destination wedding planner came to me like a gift from the universe—one that came wrapped in pretty, metallic paper with an expertly tied bow on top.
Continue reading at Jungle Red Writers...
