When Joya Fields was a senior at the University of Maryland, she interned for Easter Seals and met many people with disabilities. It was an eye-opening experience that the book-loving English major drew on years later for her first novel, Beneath the Surface, which released this month from The Wild Rose Press.

“The heroine, Brooke, is a below-the-knee amputee. I wanted her to fight injustice to find inner strength. Since this is a romance, of course I wanted her to fall in love, too.”

Let’s start with the answer that everyone wants from Marni Mann: no, she’s not a heroin addict, and she’s never been a heroin addict. But she’s flattered when readers of her debut novel, Memoirs Aren’t Fairytales, ask to see the scars on her arms (there aren’t any of those, either). They assume that only someone who has lived the dark and tumultuous life of addiction would be able to tell the stories that Marni tells.

In fact, it was someone else, someone she describes as “very close to me,” who struggled with addiction, and Marni felt their pain. “I wanted to understand the addict’s side because I couldn’t understand why someone I love would continuously hurt me…. I couldn’t talk about their addiction anymore, so I took a pad of paper and a pen, and… about two hours later, the first chapter was written.”

To call Andy Gavin a “serial creator who doesn’t sleep much” is a bit of an understatement. He co-founded the video game development company Naughty Dog when he was just fifteen, and went on to oversee the creation of more than a dozen video games, including bestselling and award-winning titles like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, not to mention that he made some of them while studying for his PhD at MIT.

So when he turned his attention to writing fiction in 2008, his fans knew to expect an ambitious, breath-taking adventure.

With the holidays nearly here and a brand news website and blog for TED in development and ready to launch early next year, we're going on hiatus for a spell. We do want to wish all our readers, clients, and staff a very happy holiday season and raise a glass to happy, healthy, and prosperous 2012.

(Awesome reindeer photo courtesy of flikr user axle)

Sure, there are lots of great books on writing out there. But for those who don't have time to read them all (and who does, really?) we've put together some information about a handful of our very favorite books on writing craft and process here at The Editorial Department and what's most useful, informative, or inspiring about them.

Renni Browne

Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein. More than any other writer I know, Sol Stein teaches the invaluable art of writing to satisfy the reader. He does it with wit and panache, so that the lessons go down easily and won't be forgotten.

R.J. Cavender 

On Writing, by Stephen King. I know what you’re thinking—"Of course the horror editor would chose that book." But, truly it’s a fantastic collection of thoughts and reflections upon a career and life-long love affair with the written word. The lessons in the book are often cautionary and come from a place of learned experience, and it pulls no punches. It’s not a book that will teach you how to write, it’s a book that will make you want to write. 

In an earlier post for mystery writers, I talked a little bit about the value of resisting the urge to lecture your readers on what you might have learned in the course of researching your story or what you might know from your own in-the-trenches experiences.  The premise behind this advice is that readers--fans of mystery/suspense in particular--generally read in hopes of being entertained rather than educated. A little insider’s insight can be great, vital even, for credibility. But many writers make the mistake of giving their readers far more information than is needed or desirable. This is especially problematic when the information takes the shape of straight narration, which can grind the story to a screeching halt and leave readers feeling lectured to instead of entertained.

Is proofreading really necesary? After all, it&rquo;s the age of the Internet. Surely an author doesn’t need to spend time -- and money – nailing down every last detail. And there are so many free converting programs for e-books.    Why not just plug in that Microsoft Word document, let the program do it's magic, and upload it to the Kindle store? Is it just me, or is there something a little distracting about this paragraph?

(There are seven typos/formatting errors above.)

By Ross Browne

Unlike the loosely defined and often-overlapping genre classifications fiction writers struggle with in categorizing their novels, most works of nonfiction will fall into one concretely identifiable category thanks to topic and subject matter. Correct classification is important because there is a staggering amount of nonfiction published each year and in many cases a high degree of specialization among the publishers and literary agents who bring these manuscripts to market. So writers needs to fully understand where their manuscript or book proposal fits best and also to consider the full spectrum of what’s available in their respective genre when they put together marketing pages and competitive analyses for book proposals.

What you’ll find here is a short exploration of commonly confused terms relating to nonfiction classification followed by a comprehensive guide to nonfiction genre and subgenre based on the way bookstores are organized.