(View entire post here)

Ira Rosofsky is our guest blogger during the week of March 16th. If you have any questions for Ira Rosofsky, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about Nasty, Brutish, and Long:

A coming of old-age story.

In nursing homes across the country, members of the Greatest Generation are living out their last days. No matter how exciting or mundane their lives, they're now occupying a hospital-style room-a public space where you can't lock your door and strangers come and go. Life is a succession of pokes and prods, medications, TV, bingo, and, possibly, talking to Ira Rosofsky.

(View entire post here)

"Hey, Sherri," people ask me, "how did you come up with the idea for Flygirl?" I chuckle and say, "Voices in my head told me to do it." Those voices were actually part of a Radio Diaries story about the WASP that played one evening on National Public Radio. I was sitting in the gleam of another Los Angeles rush hour, taillights facing the ocean, headlights going nowhere, jamming the buttons on my radio for some good entertainment or at least a traffic update. I've got two NPR stations programmed into my car radio, KCRW and KPCC. I believe I ended up on the former when, with a burst of bugles and some old-timey songs, the WASP story came on.

To give a little background, I had just finished my second novel, Sparrow, and was casting about for what to do next. Then this story bursts into life and I was sat at rapt attention (to the radio, not the traffic, I'm sorry to say...but we were at a standstill...really.). And then one of the WASP, Ethel Meyer Finley, says, "And here are all these women from different walks of life, millionaire heiresses like Florsheim Shoes, Upjohn Drug Company, and then you had poor kids like me from the farm. And everybody was in the same boat, had the same ill-fitting clothes." Just like that, I was hooked. I loved it. Slobs and snobs, studs and scrubs all in the same drab olive green boat. It was romantic, it was terrifying and exhilarating. I went to work the next day and my friend, Karen, said "Did you hear that piece about the WASP last night? I think that's your next book." She was right. I went online and ordered a tape of the story, then I did my mea culpa and actually renewed my lapsed subscription to public radio. (Confession: I let it lapse again, then renewed when I sold the book. You have to pay the piper if you want to dance!)

(View entire post here)

Christopher John Campion is our guest blogger during the week of March 16th. If you have any questions for Christopher John Campion, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about Escape from Bellevue:

(Read an excerpt and view a trailer for the book.)

Indie rock raconteur Chris Campion-one of the few patients ever to escape from Bellevue's locked ward-recalls his band's tumultuous ride, his plummet into addiction, and the strange road back to sobriety.

Chronicling more than twenty years in the life of a Long Island kid who became a hardcore fixture of Manhattan's indie rock scene, Escape from Bellevue is a coming-of-age tale like no other. As the lead singer of New York-based indie rock band Knockout Drops, Campion got a taste of fame (but, alas, no fortune) on a wild ride that lasted from the early 1980s through the 1990s.