If you are an indie author or a publicist, agent, illustrator, editor or anyone else working for and in the independent and self publishing world, then this is a call for your guest post.
Do you have a tip or a story related to indie books, authors or the indie publishing world that you want to share with the bookish blogging world? Why not be featured as a guest on Elgee Writes?
I would love to receive guest posts related to indie publishing world from indie authors. Let us talk about everything from your writing process to formatting and designing the book to promoting it.
As much as I would love to, I won’t be accepting promotional posts to your specific projects or books. We all love discussion posts more, don’t we?
What is in it for you?
The posts will be published with your name, a bio and links to your website or Amazon book page.
Make your byline short and crisp and in theme with the post.
You can add a few or all of your social profiles.
I will promote it as much as I do for my other posts, which means your post will be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
Guest posts submission guidelines:
Here are some quick guidelines for making this work for both of us.
Is your post relevant to indie authors or other people who work in the book industry?
Is your article useful or thought provoking and not just a marketing tool for your book or product? You can however add relevant links to your website or the Amazon book page.
Does your post have practical and actionable tips for the reader? Add in a lot sub headings and bullet points to make it easier for the reader to take action and restrict the post to 800-1500 words, unless we agree upon something else specifically.
Does your article have a personal voice and matches the tone of my blog? Feel free to add in relevant images, funny or not to make the post more interesting.
Do you accept to not reuse the content from your blog or elsewhere? It has to be new and original. However, you can repost it after 30 days with the note that it was published originally for Elgee Writes.
The final editorial control lies with me. I might edit your article or headline to fit my site’s theme and I will discuss with you if there is any major change. I might ask for revisions rarely, if need be.
If you think you have what it takes please contact me right away. Send me your guest post pitch through the contact form and we will work on it.
We all love meeting new authors and their books especially independent or as we call them indies. And no prize for guessing what my first question would be to any newly found author – yes their favorite books!
So here I have Greg answering that ‘not so totally random’ question through a guest post. Don’t we love a good book list?
Greg Hickey is the author of the accessible, philosophical, grown-up choose-your-own-adventure novel The Friar’s Lantern and the curator of The 105 Best Philosophical Novels. You can contact Greg through the following social media profiles.
Philosophical novels use fictional stories to explore thought-provoking questions that are often challenging, overlooked or controversial.
The collection of philosophical novels listed below range from contemporary science fiction to inspirational to a mind-bending thought experiment to a few literary stalwarts, all of them devotedly enjoyed by a group of die-hard fans.
These books delve into topics like the existence of God, the nature of self-hood, humanity’s place in the world and more in ways that have inspired thousands of devoted readers.
The Cult Favorites of Philosophical Fiction
1) Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Stephenson’s popular sci-fi novel follows pizza delivery boy and computer hacker Hiro Protagonist as he fights a nefarious virtual villain.
Along the way, it taps into virtual reality, Sumerian myth and the burgeoning information age and explores other topics in history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography and philosophy.
2) The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma
This fable by a litigation lawyer-turned-motivational speaker and author follows Julian Mantle, a dissatisfied attorney who sells his vacation home and titular car and undertakes a life-changing spiritual journey through the Himalayas.
Sharma originally self-published this book, but it proved so popular that it was picked up by HarperCollins a few years later.
3) God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams
The first non-humor book by the creator of the comic strip Dilbert introduces readers to a being who claims to know “literally everything” and explains the mysteries of quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity and more in a way that seems to make perfect sense.
Skeptical about the appeal of a non-Dilbert book by Adams, his publishers first released the novel as an ebook but quickly produced a hard copy version after its rapid success.
4) Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess
A virus spread through the use of language devastates the small Canadian town of Pontypool, causing victims to lose their linguistic abilities and devolve into madness, rage and animalistic violence.
Burgess adapted the novel into a screenplay for the 2008 film Pontypool, which was nominated for three Canadian film awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay.
5) The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
A favorite in literary circles that never seemed to achieve the same level of popular appeal, this novel about a New Orleans stockbroker’s quest to find his inner self won the 1962 U.S. National Book Award in fiction.
It was ranked sixtieth on Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century and was included in Time’s 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005.
6) The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa, who attributed his prolific writing to several alternate selves with different biographies and ideologies, left behind this posthumously published “autobiography” of one those selves.
This incomplete collection of 500-plus fragments of essay, diary, poetry and narrative touches on many of life’s essential questions in what Electric Lit called “the weirdest autobiography ever.”
What are your favorite philosophical fictionalized books? Do you like fiction coupled with philosophy or do you read for just pleasure? Let us talk.
I am so excited today to write today’s post as we have Camilla as our guest blogger from Italy under our Flyaway Friday feature. She is a straight shooter and her answers are not sugar coated. I loved reading them and learned so much about the country. I will hand it over to her.
Hello, I’m Camilla. A 24 years old Italian currently living in Rome. I’m a fashion student, a writer when find time and calm mind, warrior reader, your proud in plain sight but also in the closet ace girl. And your nice and bitter blogger at The Reader in the Attic.
1) What do you think is exotic about Italy?
You want me to be honest? That’s difficult. I always lived in Italy, every thing the culture is made of is normal and everyday thing.
Okay, one thing… is that every region of Italy has its own tradition. Carnival, for citing a well know Italian tradition, change very much in forms and traditions depending on where you are. Not everything is Venice’s Carnival.
There’s plenty of sweet (savoury recipes too) that have the same name but change part of their ingredients depending on the region. But also, some sweet, despite being made in the same region, change even from city to city. Sometime even from village to village, despite both places being quite near.
A picture of the marble caves in Carrara
Same thing for dialects. I’ll make a real-life example. I’m born in Carrara, north of Tuscany, really near Liguria, and city of marble. It’s situated up in the mountains, while the zone at the sea is called Marina di Carrara. Both are really near, but their dialects are different and some food recipes too.
2) Will you tell us about Italy’s eating habits and its national cuisine?
Italians can start a war over food. And trust me when I say that, despite saying it with a smile and looking like they’re joking, the great majority of Italians despise the way people outside our country eat typical Italian food.
There are also some deeper social reasons (Italians think often that their culture is the better one, no matter how toxic), but it’s fun to have food discussion. Just recently, I told one of my fellow Italian friend that an American blogger asked me if we eat pasta Alfredo…. and we laughed a lot. No one in Italy eats this Alfredo thing, whatever it’s. A part of me dies every time I hear Alfredo something.
With the same blogger (we’re friends, I swear XD ) we also had interesting discussion about ice cream and gelato, and the great illusion that eating ice cream/gelato (the English translation of gelato is ice cream for Italians) in Italy doesn’t make it the Italian gelato everyone seems to dream of.
An image of handmade Italian pasta
I think that is true that Italian kinda fall into the pasta stereotype. It’s also true that in certain families, houses, street, sometimes more rustic corners, people are gonna almost force feed you, drinking on vine, talking at really high voices, and spend entire hours at the table.
3) Tell us more about a typical day in Italy.
Well, I guess you wake up, goes to work or school or university, whatever you have to do. Then you eat something outside and go back to what you have to do. Or find a way to go back home. At night adults may not go out that often, but the young generation are easy to find outside. They don’t do anything particular, just stay in the same place for hours until the sun rise, drinking and smoking (boring, if you want my youngster opinion).
I think the week is kind of common, but it’s when Saturday and Sunday arrive that things change. People go around the city, shops a lot, go to some mall, bring the kids to the parks. Some people go to the church for the mass. Going to watch sport or reunite with fellow friends is also common.
During summer is typical to reach to sea, but to be honest depends a lot from where you live. Here in Rome you can do everything, the only problem maybe is that we don’t snow that often and the city get blocked.
Casino of Bel Respiro
(the image features a pic of a villa, the Casino of Bel Respiro, situated inside the park of Villa Doria Pamphili. Such place was once a park and hunt zone owned by the Pamphili family, and now it’s one of Rome bigger park. The villa is sually closed to public because it’s used as a government base)
4) Can you tell us about some of your unique customs and practices specific to Italy?
*start to go thought the list* As I said, we have Carnival and I think we have a quite good number of our own unique Carnivals, different from the one of other nation. In Italy we have plenty of random festivities days because of some saint and our sort of Halloween, our day of the dead, is just about bringing flowers to the tombs. We have specific kind of sweet for some festivities.
A picture from Viareggio’s Carnival
Other things we do, that some people find strange, is that we kiss on the cheeks when we meet, or people shake their hands. Sometimes you bring little gift if you’re invited to someone house, but I think it’s a more education fact than an actual tradition. It’s not observed at all by many younger generations.
5) Which books / films in your opinion were very much true to the Italian culture?
I’m not a great film watcher, so I can’t give a good number of titles but I’ll say: films made by Italians.
They know their thing. We either have really useless romantic comedies, that heavily relies on gender stereotypes… and are actually quite painfully true when it comes to many relationships I’ve seen. Or are really obtuse. We have a real passion for idiotic film with extremely low and misogynist humour. Another thing that is not far away from Italian behaviour.
Panoramic view of Rome from Gianicolo
I may suggest you to check out things like Suburra or Gomorra, or old films about the fascism and such periods. These are quite truthful about Italy. Or any other film by an Italian that show some rural village or the rich part of the society.
Those are quite good indicators that you’re reaching for what can be the right film. So many Italians were really angry at films like La Grande Bellezza, because it painted a really decadent image of Italy, talking about the richer people.
But I’m a girl that kind of lived between the more common and everyday life of Italians and had the chance to slip into places represented in such film. So, yes, I can confirm that is kinda true in what it represents.
6) Tell us about some of the stereotypes about Italy as depicted in the media, books / film etc that annoy you.
One thing I say is that: stereotypes about Italians are false but also true at the same time. One part of me relate a lot when some POC talks about their family behaviour or mom way of being. That’s because is also typical Italian parent material.
On other sides, recently I was talking with a friend that read a book, in which the protagonist was all about how amazing was the Italian family she was with: those women that sang, dance and drink wine and her Italian lover who was a fervent feminist.
Oh, please… Italian party, we have loud voices and use a lot hand gestures. We drink and laugh, but is not like we jump on table and dance. We’re not that passionate, because the passion that is usually represented is straight up misogyny and possessive behaviour. Italian men are hardly feminists.
Italian are also shown as friendly and welcoming, and we can be. Some people will do everything to please you and treat like an actual human being. Some other people will open the door of their house while openly mocking you in term of gender, race, sexuality and disability. The same moment they are called out, they will tell they’re joking.
For Italians everything is a joke. So, even the warmest welcome can be not actually that nice. Italians, if they hate you, will heavily display that, from touching you without permission, to abusive behaviour, physically hitting and verbal assault.
Also, we have this horrible habit of using slurs of every type as common words. Do not let me start of bigotry, culture levels and such. Also, I think that people have this idea of mafia like another sort of thrilling thing to take inspiration from.
Mafia is a thing and is not nice at all to write book inspired by mafia system, describing it as “interesting and dashing”. It’s not. Mafia exist, is present, it’s deadly, kills tons of people every year, and terrorize the others.
It’s corruption and murder, that keeps growing in every part of the govern, even inside religion. It’s drug and human traffic. Do not let me start on the damage it does to younger generation. Every year we remember people killed by mafia, including whom that fought it. Who is alive, is currently forced to live under special condition, because they denounced the mafia system.
Basically, what people do with their mafia’s romanticized idea, is insulting and spitting on the dead.
7) What are your favorite fictional (bookish or otherwise) characters native to Italy?
That’s hard because I’m not exactly passionate about my country literature and work, while if I reach outside, like to US production, at beast I can find some mafia involved character. So, the answer is no one.
8) Tell us more about your national language. Teach us some very common words and few uncommon ones.
For this last answer I searched around the internet for finding some Italian words you people may find interesting, and I found this article and I found it too be behind silly. What is even sprezzatura? No one use it in common everyday language (at least in my zone). Same thing for impiraressa. And why would you need this world in English when you have words with the same exact meaning already?
Fascination with Italian language is.. strange.
But let me start with the uncommon, because it is much more easy that way. Mostly of our uncommon words, I think are from dialect. Romanaccio is the dialect of Rome and we have particular way to say things like yay, which is daje. Or when we want to say that we’re going to see at a certain hour, we say: ce vedemo a una certa.
One thing about my national language is that it’s really heavy and for saying a single thing, we take hours of our time. And also, verbs. So many verbs. We are also very vulgar, and swear words can be kinda incorporated in our language… despite having people who still react like touched by a bee if someone swears. Like, we can say easily sticazzi (literal translation is: these dicks) for meaning something that impressed us to what we don’t care at all.
Okay, few words that can help when you’re in Italy. If you want to say hello, go with ciao. Our good morning is Buongiorno. If you want to say good evening to someone or to pass a good night out, you said, respectively: buona sera or passate una buona serata. You want to wish a good night you will go with buona notte. Grazie and per favore are our ways to say thank you and please.
If you want to ask for things like breakfast, lunch and dinner, those are colazione, pranzo e cena. We also do a thing called meranda during the afternoon, when we eat a little things, usually sweet, and a drink.
We also take aperitivo or apericena. The first consist in drinking specific types of drinks along with savoury snacks, like potato chips, olives, peanuts… The apericena is kinda the same thing but with much more food, and is a mix between a dinner and an aperitivo.
Wow that is a lot of Italian for a day, I suppose. But again, we can always reach out to Camilla to ask for more help. You can contact her via.
I guess this is the end of this month’s travel, the Italian edition. I hope we will meet yet again next month with another country with its books, author and bloggers. I can’t wait!
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Let’s talk
Tell me what makes Italy such a romantic place to visit. Have you visited Italy? If so share your favorite Italian memory. Do you have any Italian stereotype that you would like to talk about? Let us chat.
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie has been on TBR forever now and I finally had the opportunity to read it. And incidentally I got to watch the 1978 adaptation soon after. How did that turn for me? Read my book review of Death on the Nile to know more
Characters: Colonel Race, Simon Doyle, Hercule Poirot, Linnet Ridgeway, Jacqueline de Bellefort, Mrs. Allerton, Tim Allerton, Dr. Carl Bessner, Miss Bowers, Jim Fanthorp, Ferguson, Salomè Otterbourne, Rosalie Otterbourne, Andrew Pennington, Cornelia Robson, Marie Van Schuyler, Joanna Southwood
Death on the Nile is set on the streets of Egypt and features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who is on an adventurous trip full of action in Egypt. While he is on vacation in Egypt and is sailing on a river boat on the river Nile, he finds himself in the middle of two murder mysteries.
The book focuses on 4 major themes:
good will always conqueror evil
things are not as they appear on the surface
greed and revenge are not justified
Every individual has a choice between right and wrong.
The book takes a bit of time to set up all the characters and laying out the plot. The murder doesn’t occur until the mid-point of the book and this keeps the readers involved and curious.
Each one of the characters in the book has a motive and each one of them has secrets of their own. And it doesn’t come as a surprise that Christie does a great job on the red herrings.
Hercule Poirot was much more lighthearted in this story and also made little jokes about him which added a different look to his character.
Bottom-line
The book is a complete feast for the book lovers as it is really going to stick with you till the last word. Read the book yourself and awaken the hidden detective in you.
I have Jenny, better known as Tecsie, from Finland to share us about her country and their Finnish ways of life. I know her from our common Discord groups and then her blog Tecsielity;. She is a book worm, designer, video gamer and of course a blogger. Here is her bio that she shared with me:
Jenny (or Tecsie, either way is fine) is a 25-year-old Finnish lover of books and video games so she blogs about both of them. She’s currently obsessed with the Outlander series and also enjoys napping a lot because it’s cold outside.
Jenny takes over from here:
Finland
The common stereotype of Finnish people is that we are silent people who possibly drink a lot of alcohol, listen to metal and of course enjoy the sauna. Most Finns probably won’t deny these.
Small talk is not a big part of our culture and people are very comfortable with silence but don’t worry, we also have some chattier people among us. We may warm up to strangers a little slowly, but once you get to know us you may find that we’re actually very friendly people. And yes, we do love our saunas!
Sauna
You can pretty much expect to find a sauna in every Finnish house, they’re that important. Yes, we go in there naked and yes, it’s very hot. The temperatures can be anything from 60C to 120C, but personally I think 60-70 is the most comfortable. It may sound way too hot if you’ve never been in one, but it’s actually very comfortable and especially lovely in winter.
A fun sauna tradition is gathering a bunch of leafy birch branches (vihta) and hitting your back with them (it’s supposed to be relaxing for the muscles and it also makes the sauna smell really good).
All the snow
Another thing you can of course expect to find in Finland is snow. Since it snows everywhere in the country it doesn’t affect the life much, we don’t close schools etc. for any weather and buses and trains will run unless something actually breaks down. I have unhappily walked to school in -30C weather quite a few times in my life.
Winters have become a lot milder these past few years though, especially in the southern Finland and even my area had surprisingly little snow last year despite being pretty north. Lapland still gets the harsher winter no matter what, and that’s probably part of the reason majority of the population lives in the south. North is the way to go if you wish to see the northern lights though! I know many tourists come here just to see those.
Food
Our traditional foods probably won’t sound very fancy compared to many countries, but I’ll introduce a few examples anyway. My personal favorite are Karelian pasties which are basically rise wrapped in a rye crust and they’re so good! It’s common to put egg butter on them, but I prefer just normal butter. Karelian stew is also very good (it’s usually beef or pork stew). Some holiday related things would be mämmi (rye pudding) on Easter, and star shaped Christmas tarts (joulutorttu) that usually have plum or apple-cinnamon jam in the middle.
Don’t be alarmed if a Finn offers you salmiakki, it’s just salty liquorice. I’m personally not a fan, but it’s a very popular candy here it may be slightly hilarious to offer it to people who have never tried it. We also have a weird love for tar flavored things because for example tar flavored soda is a thing.
Finland in media
Finland does not come up a lot in fictional media (or elsewhere, I mean there’s a conspiracy theory that Finland doesn’t exist) which is why Finns are always very excited if something has Finnish characters in it or someone even just mentions us! You may see the phrase “Suomi mainittu! Torille!” on the Internet a lot if we’re actually included somewhere. It means “Finland mentioned! To the marketplace!”.
Some examples of Finnish fictional characters: M.K. (aka Veera Suominen) in Orphan Black and Ritva Tuomivaara in the game Wolfenstein II. Vikings has also had two Finnish actors (Jasper Pääkkönen and Peter Franzén) in major roles in the newer seasons.
Finnish Language
Since I already taught you one great Finnish phrase, let’s continue with a few more of those:
Moi/Terve/Hei = Hello
Mitä kuuluu? = How are you?
Terveydeksi = Bless you
If you’re learning Finnish it’s also important to know that there are a lot of different dialects in different areas, so if you end up coming to Finland it probably won’t hurt to research a little bit how people talk in the particular area you’re going to so you won’t be completely lost. (Most Finns are pretty okay at English though.)
You’ll notice the difference even in such simple words as I or you. I can come up with at least five different ways to say each of those.
You = sinä, sää, sä, sie, nää
One of my favorite very local words is “pahki”, which basically means bumping into something or someone. If you tried to use that in southern Finland people most likely would have no idea what you’re talking about unless they’ve happened to hear it before!
Thanks Jenny for your time and sharing with us a glimpse of your Finnish life. You can contact here through her blog and social accounts.
That brings us to the end of our travel, the Finland edition. I will meet you next month with another country with its books, author and bloggers and whatever I can think of.
Do the Finns live up to your stereotypes? Do you have any friends from the Finland? What other countries do you wanna travel next? Let me know in your comments.
