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Ksenia Anske

October 2, 2015

How do you find out about new writing?

by Ksenia Anske


Illustration by Daniel Stolle

Illustration by Daniel Stolle

Illustration by Daniel Stolle

Illustration by Daniel Stolle

For the longest time I had trouble finding out what was happening in the literary world. It seemed everyone knew about some new book or some new author or some new prize winner before me. Not that it bothered me much—I have such a long lists of classics to chew through that I didn't really care. But I'm now going through that list at a fair lick, reading about 100-110 books a year, and it's gotten to the point where: 

  1. I got tired of the oldish-sounding English and wanted to read something contemporary and not having to wade through the weirdly composed sentences and the archaic turns of phrases and having to put up with occasional misogyny and some puritanism here and there and constant references to religion or God.
  2. I got sick of reading mostly white males as literature seems to stand on the bones of white males and I've had about enough of that—I still love you, white males, my partner Royce including, but I wanted more women voices and black voices and gay voices and all kinds of voices.
  3. I have found authors whose voices I loved and I wanted to read more of their recent writing.
  4. I felt a new hunger, a hunger for more than just novels. I wanted to expand, to read poetry and essays and non-fiction.
  5. I was plain jealous of hearing all these news about new books from other people and I wanted to be at the source of the news too, to be the first to find out about this new book or that new book and to form my own opinion about it before reading someone else's opinion about it.
  6. I was feeling increasingly sad because I still haven't found a good source for news on great new indie books and I'm still upset that I don't know where and how to find them. 
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TAGS: reading, indie, indie writers, indie books, self-publishing, discoverability


July 16, 2014

MAD TUTU Writing Competition Winner!

by Ksenia Anske


Photo by Kyle Thompson

Photo by Kyle Thompson

Photo by Kyle Thompson

Photo by Kyle Thompson

I know you've been waiting breathlessly for this. I've been waiting too, because the entries were so good, so unbelievably good, it was very hard to choose the winner. Nonetheless, one stood out from the crowd. Namely, it made me laugh so hard, that I tinkled in my pants a little. But you all already know I do this anyway, daily. No surprise there. To refresh your memory what this madness was about, last week one of my readers had this wild idea that I should do a writing competition, when I whined how hard it is to find great indie authors and indie books, and how I want to help people discover amazing new voices. I thought, okay, why not? And so Mad Tutu Writing Competition was born. I got 20 submissions, and I think I will do it again, because reading them was a delight. The terms were:

  • Write a 1,000 words max short story with magic in it. And make sure it's funny.
  • Mention an elephant, a tutu, a breathalyzer, beer-flavored lollipops, a brick and a purse.
  • Send a picture of yourself in character (I scratched that, the quality of pics was bad).
  • The winner gets to be featured on my blog and gets 1 of my signed paperbacks.

Below you will find the winning entry (get ready, you will pee your pants, I guarantee it) and there rest of the entries underneath, in the order they were submitted (so don't think the one on the top is because it's somehow better than the one on the bottom), with author names and links to their entries as PDF files (you can click on them to upload them). And underneath ALL THAT you will find a PDF file with ALL the entires combined, if you wanted to just read them all. 

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TAGS: writing competition, flash fiction, short story, competition, indie writers


July 2, 2014

Let's find and read great indie books

by Ksenia Anske


Photo by Noukka Signe

Photo by Noukka Signe

Photo by Noukka Signe

Photo by Noukka Signe

I’m going to start something crazy. I want to discover great indie books. I've been wanting to do this for a long long time now, and I've been frustrated at the lack of a mechanism to find them. So. The lesson I learned in life is, if I'm frustrated about something, if there is something missing in the world, instead of bitching about it on every corner, I need to roll up the sleeves and do it myself. Because somebody has to. Another lesson I learned is, people don't like starting things. They like shouting and being upset, but starting things is messy and uncomfortable and takes a lot of work and to hell with it, for sure somebody out there has already started it and I'm busy with my own life anyway and yada yada yada. Yeah, we heard all that. Also, perhaps I am completely blind. Perhaps right now you think me ignorant because I don't know about some wonderful place that talks about great indie books. In fact, I know of one. I'm guilty of struggling to find time to go read through all of it. I'm talking about KBoards. There are tons of indie authors there and if you're an indie and not on it yet, GET ON IT. They have various forum posts with writers suggesting great books to other writers. I will get to it. I WILL. It's just while I'm in the middle of writing, I hardly have the brain capacity to do anything else outside my writing.

Anyway.

Back to the topic.

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TAGS: indie authors, indie books, indie writers, indie, reading, great books, great authors