#peng shepherd

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP BPC || October 27 || Thriller: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

[quillnqueer]

✨Interesting New Releases | 9th July

All This And More: an inventive new novel about a woman who wins the chance to rewrite every mistake she’s ever made… and how far she’ll go to find her elusive “happily ever after.” But there’s a twist: the reader gets to decide what she does next to change her fate.

Bury Your Gays: Misha is a jaded scriptwriter who has just been nominated for his first Oscar. But when he's pressured by his producers to kill off a gay character in the upcoming season finale, Misha discovers that it's not that simple.

The Coin: A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

DallerGut Dream Department Store (US Release): Each floor in the department store sells a special kind of dream, including nostalgic dreams about your childhood, trips you've taken, and delicious food you've eaten, as well as nightmares and more mysterious dreams.

Goodnight Tokyo: Set over several nights, between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., in and around Tokyo, this mind-blowingly constructed book is an elaborate, energetic fresco of human nocturnal existence in all its mystery.

Lenny Marks Gets Away With Murder: Lenny Marks is very, very good at not remembering what happened the day her mother and stepfather disappeared when she was still a child. The day a voice in the back of her mind started whispering, You did this.

The Spellshop: a cottagecore cosy fantasy following a woman's unexpected journey through the low-stakes market of illegal spell-selling and the high-risk business of starting over...

State of Paradise: A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly, from a reality-warping storyteller.

Toward Eternity: In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer. At the same time, literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning "Beloved," in honor of his husband.

[nanowrimo]

Pro Tips from a NaNo Coach: Getting Through the Muddy Middle of Your Novel

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, our NaNo Coaches are here to help guide you through November! Today, author Peng Shepherd is here to share her advice on how to set yourself up for noveling success:

Welcome to the middle stretch of the NaNoWriMo challenge! Whether this is your first NaNoWriMo or you’re a seasoned, ink-stained veteran, and whether you started strong right out of the gate or it took you a little bit of time to warm up, we’re well on our way with this journey now—and reality might be starting to set in. 

Beginnings are the easiest part of a novel, I’ve always thought. It’s just you and the blank page and your excitement. Anything is possible! You can do whatever you want! It’s easy to lay down words in a frenzy because you’re building from nothing, so nothing has to make sense, nothing has to pay off, yet. You’re just trying to get from “zero” to “something” as fast as you can. 

And then eventually, far in the future, the ending of the novel will come. And at that moment, even if you’re exhausted, you’ll have so much momentum and you’ll know your characters and story so well that you’ll be hurtling toward that finish line—possibly even faster than when you started the story, full of inspiration and still unsinged by the first flames of burnout.

It’s the middles the are the hardest.

Those meandering, saggy, slow middles.

The problem with middles is that by this point in the manuscript, your draft actually might be starting to look like a book-shaped thing. And while this is great in terms of progress, it’s also really tough in terms of morale. Because for the first time, there’s finally enough material that you can see how messy, confusing, and seemingly unsalvageable what you already have is… and also how much farther you still have to go. 

Then, life gets in the way. You miss a day or two, and fall behind on word count. A work emergency happens, or your laptop goes on the fritz. Friends need help, you realize you have to delete ten pages, then the roof starts leaking. And your plot still doesn’t make any sense, your characters won’t behave, and you have no idea how to fix any of it. You’re lost, you’re exhausted, and you’re still nowhere near the finish line—how did you think you were ever going to write something as gigantic as entire novel? It’s impossible!

There’s a little piece of advice I give myself at overwhelming moments like these:

When the goal or the pressure feels too big, go small. Really small.

A book is a huge thing. It’s way too big to hold in your head like that! Trying to face a goal of that size every single day you sit down can crush you.

So, don’t think about the whole picture. I like to tell myself, I’m not writing a book today. Or, I’m not writing a first draft today. Or even, I’m not writing a chapter today. Instead, I tell myself, I’m just writing this next scene, or, I’m just changing her location from Chicago to San Francisco. 

Or, in this case, I’m just writing 1,667 words today (or whatever your session goal is).

This advice helps me remember that I indeed do not have to write the entire book in one day. I just have to write a single scene, or fix a single thing. I’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. And I’ll worry about whether the draft any good or not, or how to revise it, even later than that.

So, if you’ve been struggling lately or feeling crushed under the weight of your goal, I invite you to try this tactic. Right now, or after work, or later tonight, find a few minutes and open up that laptop or notebook. Don’t reread what you wrote last time and start tinkering to make it better, don’t review your outline to confirm things are still making sense, don’t take stock of your progress to see how much you have left. Don’t think about the rest of the manuscript and how it all has to connect. Just think about the part that’s right in front of you. The scene that you’re in right now.

Remember, you’re not writing a whole book today. You’re not writing a whole chapter today, even. 

You’re just writing this one small scene.

Now, onward! Because the only way out of a middle is through it.

Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, and Mexico City. Her second novel, The Cartographers, became a national bestseller, was named a Best Book of March by The Washington Post, and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her debut, The Book of M, won the Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today show and NPR’s On Point.

[bethanydelleman]

Summer Reading Interlude:

It's summer, I'm reading new things! I will be tagging them as summer reading interlude. Also will contain spoilers but this is probably the only new book I'm reading. The others will be at least 100 years old.

Here is my stack!

First book: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

-Why does all the media I've been consuming recently have main characters with dead parents? We start with the heroine, Nell, becoming orphaned. (Silly me, stories love tragic orphans)

-As an academic, I find it a bit hard to believe that this map incident would blackball Nell permanently in the cartography world. She was an intern, newbies make mistakes. Her dad sounds like a treat. Also, never work with your parents!

-The ending of Ch 3 was wonderfully ominous

-Interested to know if someone did search her father's office before or after he died. I'm suspecting yes.

-I would love to have an ancient looking map hanging somewhere in my house.

-very tragic mom dying in fire to save her

[vfdinthewild]

"There, organized and labelled and catalogued on what had once been bare shelves, were copies of the same map Wally and Tam has found by accident, the very first day we came to Rockland."

-from The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd, pg. 247

[theinquisitxor]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

June 16th: Favorite Cover Art

[emmersreads]

Slowly chipping through my unpublished reviews to bring you my thoughts on The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd.

This book made me understand why people reflexively hate literary fiction.

1.5/5

Read the Review Here

Nothing about the book is effective because at a foundational level the wordcraft just isn’t good. The nadir is the sentence, ‘he’d been standing in a puddle, his shoes soaked to the bone.’ What the hell.

[freckles-and-books]

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