Now Write! contributors are prolific working writers.  Just in time for holiday shopping, here are some of their newest works – all published this year, or even this month.  There’s something for everyone, so check out this wonderful array of new books.  

And if you’re looking for a gift for an aspiring or professional writer,  of course a Now Write! anthology is perfect.  You might also want to explore Writing Books by Now Write! Contributors.

Happiness as a Second Language: A Guidebook to Achieving Lasting, Permanent Happiness
by Valerie Alexander (Now Write! Screenwriting contributor)
Goalkeeper Media, Inc.  (April, 2013 – Kindle Edition]

Happiness as a Second Language teaches happiness the same way you would learn any language that wasn’t spoken in your home. Being happy is completely within your reach, but you have to do the work to get there.

Simple and straightforward with easy-to-follow instructions  and familiar sample situations, this “ultimate textbook” is touching, often heartbreaking and sometimes hysterical.  Start now, and you will be fluent in Happiness before you know it.

*** Read Valerie’s guest post: Writer Happiness. ***

Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves
by  Robert Root (Now Write! Nonfiction contributor)
Amazon (February, 2013)

Collects the best of the “Thinking Out Loud” series of essays Robert Root recorded for Michigan Public Radio in the 1980s. In them he muses on the old house in which he lives, the neighborhood around it, memories of growing up in Western New York, the seasons he observes, the sensations of traveling, encounters with the cosmos, and interludes in the natural world—the things that make him want to think out loud.

The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic
by  Bruce McAllister (Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror contributor)
Aeon Press (February, 2013)

During the Cold War a 14-year-old American boy, Brad Lattimer, moves with his family to a fishing village in Northern Italy.  It’s no ordinary village, but Brad is welcomed like a long-lost cousin.  This is the village where Mary Shelley may have dreamed her dream that became Frankenstein. It is certainly the village where Brad, too, will start to dream strange dreams and write his own first stories; where he will fall sick because the village’s magic has its hold on him, wanting him to become something other than a boy–something that can never leave it–something it can have as its own for eternity.

Nursing a Grudge 
by Diana Orgain (Now Write! Mysteries contributor)
Amazon (November, 2013 – Kindle Edition)

Book Four in the Maternal Instincts Mystery Series 
: Bringing up baby—bringing down a killer.

Kate Connolly would like nothing more than to cuddle with her new baby, except to solve her next case and become a bonafide P.I. She gets her chance when San Francisco’s hottest critic writes a particularly scathing review about the trendy new restaurant, Philosophie. The critic’s boyfriend falls to his death under mysterious circumstances from Painted Rock Cliff, and Kate fears that the restaurant critic may be targeted next. Battling sleep deprivation, diaper blowouts and breastfeeding mishaps, Kate muddles through her own investigation, Mommy style.

Downtrodden Abbey: The Interminable Saga of an Insufferable Family
by Gillian Fetlocks (aka Billy Frolick,  Now Write! Screenwriting contributor)
Thomas Dunne Books, (December, 2013 – Hardcover)

Welcome to Downtrodden Abbey, where a battle for the deed to the property is waged between legitimate aristocrats and pretenders to the throne.  The overwrought melodrama takes the reader upstairs and downstairs, into parlors and drawing rooms, boudoirs and bathrooms, and across every class—from the classiest to the classless—in the social pecking order of Edwardian England. A wicked sense of humor skewers your favorite Downton Abbey characters in this winning parody.

The Incredible Sestina Anthology
by Daniel Nestor (Editor) (Now Write! Nonfiction contributor)
Write Bloody Publishing (October, 2013)

The book collects more than 100 examples of this poetic form, from Sherman Alexis to Louis Zukofsky and everywhere in between: sestina classics; modern masterpieces; double sestinas, comic sestinas,  minimalist takes; Jonah Winter’s world-famous “Bob” sestina; selections from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and much much more.

Slice of Moon
by Kim Dower  (Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror contributor
Red Hen Press (October, 2013)

In her second poetry collection, Kim Dower retains her whimsical style while reaching deeper inside what it means to be human — writing of love, longing, motherhood, vulnerability, death — with the same humor and accessibility of her earlier work, but with greater lyrical intensity, irony, poignancy. The collection is a rainbow rope of entwined emotional fibers, each one a different expression: funny, sad, angry, loving, strong, fearful, sexy. She  weaves these colors beautifully to create a book that resonates with honesty and the complexities of life.

If you would like to recommend your own or someone else’s book as a great holiday gift – please give the details in a comment below.  Thank you!