Photos from the Burroughs Birthday Bash at Cornelia Street
11 MarThree Room Press’ annual William S. Burroughs birthday bash at Cornelia Street Café is one of my favorite literary events of the year. I’ve been going for three years straight—since they started it!—with one of my very best friends, Sue. It’s intimate and snarky and creative. It feels like a bunch of intellectual but down-to-earth friends sitting together in a living room and taking turn sharing their favorite works of Burroughs’.
I won! I won!
The delicious food from Cornelia Street Cafe.
A William S. Burroughs reading is the perfect place to promote his friend Jack Kerouac! Here are the postcards for Burning Furiously Beautiful (on sale at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Lulu).
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Cheese Is My Love Language
8 Mar
“I have gotten six different kinds of cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup,” my friend texted me, excited about my upcoming visit. Then she corrected herself: “Actually 7.”
“Cheese is my love language,” I said.
This is the same friend who introduced me to the cheese section of Stew Leonard’s.
You might also like these other starving-artist grilled cheese recipes:::
- Apple cheddar grilled cheese
- Greek grilled cheese
Happy National Women’s History Month
7 Mar
March is National Women’s History Month. I’ll be posting quotes by women writers each Monday of the month.
You might also like:::
- NY chapter of Scripps (the women’s college) book club reads Burning Furiously Beautiful
- How to murder a woman’s sense of worth
- VIDA does a great job tracking women writers
- Vice’s suicide poet: Elise Cowen
Trying to Get My Footing
3 Mar
“Are you wearing my socks?” he asked. Upon closer inspection, he laughed: “You’re wearing two different socks.”
Book Marketing in Train Stations
2 Mar
I had a nightmarish situation at the train station the other night. I went out to Connecticut to visit a dear friend, and we got so wrapped up in conversation that I almost missed the last train of the night. She rushed me to the train station, where there were several others also waiting for the train.
Sigh of relief. I made it.
I ran to the ticket kiosk and purchased my ticket back to Grand Central. I thought I was just in the nick of time. The train would be pulling into the station any second.
But it didn’t.
Conversations with the several other confused bystanders led to various theories: the train had left early, the train was delayed. An app and the MTA website both said the train was delayed. We waited.
And waited.
No train. Some dude tried to get us to take an uber with him to Stamford. “It’ll get you a little closer,” he said. Not close enough, I thought. He left.
We waited some more.
Still, no train. A couple finally had enough of the waiting and also called an uber. They were going to Washington Heights and offered to split it with us. It was only going to be $80. Between 4 people that would be a bargain–especially considering the fact that I’d spent $22 purchasing the wrong ticket on the way out to Connecticut. My ever-hopeful friend believed that the train was just delayed, though, so we said we’d just wait.
And wait we did.
We waited over an hour for the train. We tried calling several numbers listed, but no one was working those late hours. There were no employees in the station. Was the train delayed over an hour? Was it canceled? Finally, an employee came by. She told us the train had come early and left without us. It was 1:45 in the morning, and the next train would come til 5am.
We tried to find an uber, but suddenly the prices had been raised to close to double of the original amount. That, and we no longer had anyone to split the cost with. The friend we were visiting told us we could crash at her place, but we hadn’t brought toothbrushes and new contacts and makeup. We endeavored to get home. We ubered back to the city, and I took a scary 3am subway ride home. I was the only woman in a train full of men. Not my wisest decisions, but I felt like I’d been leaking money and didn’t want to pay for a taxi home. I finally got in around 3:30am. I watched an episode of Frasier to unwind.
The good news in all of this is that I did a bit of free book marketing. The train station in Connecticut had a kiosk of free books, where straphangers were encouraged to take a book to read on the train. The selection was curious and random and lovely. Something for everyone. Maimonides. Edgar Cayce. Allison Pearson.
I’d heard of this take-a-book and leave-a-book trend before. And I’d experienced it years ago at hostels when I’d gone backpacking through Europe. It’s such a great way to meet new books.
I didn’t have a copy of Burning Furiously Beautiful on me, so I did the next best thing I could think of: I put a few postcards on the kiosk. What better author to read about on the train than Jack Kerouac, who was known for his intrepid travels?
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- Have you heard about the Amtrak residency?
- Walt Whitman understood selfies as a marketing tool
- Social-media lessons from SXSW
- How to get more “likes” on Facebook
A Greek Cure for the Common Cold
1 Mar
“A little more, Antonkai,” my yiayia used to say to my father when she was feeling sick and wanted some homemade tsipouro, a Greek liquor made from the leftover skins of grapes. She only drank a little at a time but would keep having my father refill her glass with just a little more.
I followed Greek wisdom the other evening when I wasn’t feeling well: I had a little warmed up rakomelo, which is like tsipouro but with honey in it. I woke up feeling the best I’d felt in a long time.
My father later told me his mother drank Metaxa, similarly a Greek brandy-like drink.
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Celebrate National Haiku Writing Month with Kerouac
27 Feb
Most writers know about NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month in November. But did you know that February is National Haiku Writing Month?
To celebrate NaHaikWriMo, I’ve been reading haikus by Jack Kerouac and writing a few of my own.
Interestingly, Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus was published in Persian before On the Road was translated.
Here are a few articles from around the blog on Kerouac and haiku:
- Read some of Kerouac’s haikus here
- Listen to Kerouac reading his haikus here
- American haiku by Kerouac
- What can we learn about haiku from Jack Kerouac?
- Megan Klein on Kerouac’s haiku
- Bridget McNulty on how Kerouac’s haiku changed her life
A Chance Encounter Leads to a New Book to Read
26 Feb
I felt a tug on my shoulder. Startled out of my morning fog, I turned around. There was a woman I hadn’t seen in quite some time. We had graduated from the same women’s college but in different years. “How are you?” she asked. Then she asked if I’d read a certain book. I hadn’t and she suggested we read it together and discuss over a meal. It felt serendipitous. It’s moments like this that make me love New York City even more.
11 Ways to Create Tension
24 Feb
I’m trying to build more tension into my memoir and turned to the internet for advice on how to build tension. Here are eleven tips for creating tension in your book:
- Now Novel’s How to Create Tension in a Story: “Keep raising the stakes: Your story needs several points where tension reaches a peak.”
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Writer’s Digest’s How to Build Tension and Heighten the Stakes: “Do the flashbacks contain tension, or do they meander backward in time?”
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Grammarly’s Suspense: 4 Tips for Putting More Tension into Your Writing: “Talking the reader through the characters’ worrying thoughts, doubts, and feelings reinforces suspense because it becomes clear that the characters don’t know how they might make it out of the situations they are in. The element of unknowing keeps the audience hooked.”
- Ingrid Sundberg’s 12 Ways to Create Suspense: “We all wonder if we can we live up to the expectations around us. Build tension through what others expect of your main character. How do those expectations stress the character out? Self expectations can also be used as well.”
- The Creative Penn’s Writing Fiction: Creating Friction With Clashing Personalities: “Conflicting personalities rub against one another, allowing writers to maximize moments when characters come together. After all, if everyone in the scene “plays nice,” the story gets boring quickly. With a bit of character planning, matching up clashing personality traits offers a quick road to friction.”
- The Literary Lab’s How to Create Tension: “Basically, I think a skilled writer can somehow convince a reader to trust them enough to follow them anywhere. Then, they can present material that might seem random or disconnected, and it creates tension because a devoted fan will wonder how it’s all going to come together. They’ll read on to find out.”
- Be a Better Writer’s Writing Dialogue with Tension: “Readers should have no trouble distinguishing one character from another according to what each character says and how he or she says it, just as we can recognize our friends by their attitudes and speech mannerisms.”
- Margaret Moore’s Tension: “Foreshadowing — the author hints or implies future developments”
- Writers in the Storm’s Using A Crowd To Create Tension In Your Story: “A Crowd is a great tool to create tension, good and bad. It can also be used to highlight character personality quirks.”
- Terri Giuliano Long’s Setting and Atmosphere, Part 2: 3 Ways to Use Setting and Atmosphere to Create Narrative Tension: “Darkness, turbulent weather and other forces of nature put people on edge.”
- WikiHow’s How to Write Tension: “Don’t be scared, experiment with your writing, if you don’t like it, re-write.”Writer’s Digest’s How to Build Tension and Heighten the Stakes: “Do the flashbacks contain tension, or do they meander backward in time?”
Do you feel tense now???
You might be interested in these other #WritingWednesday posts:
- Oxford comma for the win!
- Is greatness sabotaging your writing?
- When two words become one
- 10 reasons memoirists should keep a diary
- Sneaking Netflix categorizations into your writing
Yiasou!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
Stephanie Nikolopoulos 