Keith Raffel's Blog – March 2007 Archive (4)

Allegra Goodman Has 4 Kids, Too

I've donated money to the National Yiddish Book Center which gathers and saves Yiddish books from around the world. Doing a little to save a millenium of rich culture should be reward enough in itself. Still, receiving the Center's quarterly…

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Added by Keith Raffel on March 30, 2007 at 5:15pm — No Comments

Second Class Citizens?

I just finished reading Christine Falls, the much ballyhooed new book by John Banville. Mr. Banville won the Commonwealth's highest writing honor, the Man Booker Prize, in 2005 for The Sea. He penned Christine Falls under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. In fact, the copy I picked up at …

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Added by Keith Raffel on March 28, 2007 at 3:51am — 3 Comments

Baby Naming

As I noted last week, Randi, my agent, wouldn't send out manuscript #2 until I came up with an acceptable title. I spent some time leafing through books of quotations and browsing through online quotation sites. Confucius, it turns out, could turn a phrase. How about…

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Added by Keith Raffel on March 27, 2007 at 4:18am — 1 Comment

Whew! What A Relief!

My agent has read the manuscript of Book 2. I will not be doing any bridge-jumping this week.

When I was in business (i.e., up till two weeks ago), I regularly did written performance reviews for the people who reported to me. For the best people, the reviews would run three pages, the first 2-and-three-quarters of which would be praise. There would be one paragraph, maybe two, near the end, mentioning one or two areas that could use improvement and providing suggestions on how to…

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Added by Keith Raffel on March 19, 2007 at 3:50am — 1 Comment