I’ve joined the hip generation and gotten on the Crocs bandwagon.  Guess what? I like them.  They’re comfortable and they even have a few cute styles.  Take a look at what I got from Amazon.  I couldn’t get too hip.  All mine are black.  I’ll post an update in a week after I’ve had a chance to wear them a bit.  Anybody else wearing them?  Let me know what you think.

It occurred to me the other day that I have a link on the blog with resources for writers but I don’t have one for readers.  Then it occurred to me that I don’t know what readers want on an author web site or blog.  So help me out, readers. One of the reasons I started doing cocntests is that I thought readers liked them but I never really asked so I’m asking now.  What do you want to see on this site?  What would make this a fun place for you to visit?  What about a place for you to act out characters?  A place to discuss books?  All responses are welcome.

Have a safe and enjoyable Labor Day weekend!

For those of you in the Charlotte, NC area, I’ll be in your stomping ground on Saturday, August 30 at 1p at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in (or near) the SouthPark Mall.  Come by and visit with me if you have some time. I’d love to see you.

In news that I’m still trying to get my mind around, Up Pops the Devil has been chosen the November African-American Book Club Pick for Books-A-Million. This is great news as it means Up Pops the Devil will be featured prominently in all Books-A-Million stores from September 1 through November 31.

If you follow this link, you’ll see that Victoria Christopher Murray’s Too Little, Too Late and  ReShonda Tate Billingley’s The Pastor’s Wife have been recent picks.  LIterary great Richard Wright had two picks.

This is the first time one of my books has been chosen for as a book club pick for a chain bookstore so I’m very excited about it.  Be sure to drop by your local Books-A-Million and look for it.

In fact, you can be my eyes and ears.  If you send me a photo of you in a Books-A-Million store next to the book display for Up Pops the Devil as the African-American Book Club Pick, I’ll post the photo on my blog and enter you in a contest to win a $15 Books-A-Million gift card.  Three GRAND PRIZE winners will be selected from the entries.  The contest will continue through September 31 and the winners will be announced on October 15.

You may submit your entry (or entries) via e-mail to me at the address HERE or you may submit via snail mail to Angela Benson, PO Box 868643, Tuscaloosa, AL 35486-0077.

Each entry should include your name (first name or nickname is sufficient) or the name of your group, a photo of you standing near the book display with a book in hand, and the location of the Books-A-Million store where the photo is taken.  All photos become the property of Angela Benson and will be posted on my blog at angelabenson.com.

I’ll probably run the contest again in November so if you don’t win this time, you’ll have another chance in November.

NOTE: This is the second version of this post.  My computer ate the first one and I’m sure it was much better than this one.  Trust me.

Now get to clicking those cameras.  I can’t wait to see your smiling faces on this blog!

Patricia Woodside at http://readinnwritin.blogspot.com tagged me. I believe I’ve been tagged before but I’m not sure I’ve ever participated.  Thus, today is a day for new things.

Here’s how it works:

I list three categories of books.
5 MUST Read Books.
5 Books on Your Nightstand.
5 Look For These Soon.

Keeping with the theme, I tag bloggers. They should put these same lists on their blog but SUBTRACT one book from each list and ADD one of their own. Then they should tag at least 5 more bloggers.

It will be fun to see how the lists change as it goes around the blogosphere. Please come back to this post and leave a comment so I can see how the lists are changing as they go around the blogosphere. Since this is Book Buzz…please keep your lists to titles released in 2007-2009.

My additions are in BOLD.

5 MUST Read Books:

Rhythms of Grace by Marilynn Griffith
Demon: A Memoir by Tosca Lee
Yellow Moon by Jewell Parker Rhodes
Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon
Better Than, Leslie Esdaile

5 Books on the Nightstand:

Secrets of a Sinner by Yolonda Tonette Sanders
Dance with the Devil by Sherrilyn Kenyon
From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison
My Soul Cries Out by Sherri Lewis
Murder Mayhem & a Fine Man, Claudia Mair Burney

5 Look For These Soon:

Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins
Nailed by Jennifer Lauren
The Hood Life: A Bentley Manor Tale by Meesha Mink and De’nesha Diamond
Wounded by Claudia Mair Burney
Rainbow’s End, GiGi Gunn

I’ve tagged: Marilynn Griffith, Missy, Angela, Cashana, and Shelia.

Please tell me this isn’t the equivalent of a chain letter.

If you attended the Faith and Fiction Retreat this past weekend in Destin, FL, I’d love to hear about it. I’m sorry I missed it.  So details please!  You can post here as Comments or drop me an e-mail if you want to do a full-fledged conference report.  I welcome both.

UPDATE 3:  Ty has an excellent recap of the Retreat as well.  She even has pictures. See HERE.

UPDATE 2:  Patricia shared her Retreat experience HERE. You know, I think I’m breaking a commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy fellow bloggers’ Retreat experiences.

UPDATE 1: Rhonda McKnight blogs about her time at the Faith and Fiction Retreat HERE.  It’s great reading.

I couldn’t wait for Rhonda’s post.  I had to call the Retreat sponsor and founder, author Tiffany Warren.  I kept the poor woman on the phone for about an hour.  I got the scoop though.  This conference is on my list for next year.  It’s about time for me to become a regular conference-goer again.  I think my last one was RWA in 2001.  It was in Houston.

What conferences do you attend regularly and why?

I’m blogging today at FreshFiction.com. The topic is siblings. I originally wrote this piece back in December when I did my blog tour for The Amen Sisters. I’ve revised it a bit to include Up Pops the Devil.

You know, siblings are getting to be standard in my work. Francine and Dawn in The Amen Sisters. Preacher and Loretta and Barnard and Natalie in Up Pops the Devil. The manuscript I’m working on now has siblings, a son born within the marriage and a son and daughter born outside the marriage.

One of the reasons I have so much fun with siblings is that I have such a good relationship with my brother.  It’s a good relationship but not without its bumps.  I was talking to him on the phone the other day and I told him that there were times I had stopped speaking to him, but he hadn’t realized it. He started to laugh, really hard. When he finally piped down, I asked him what the laughter was about. He laughed again before telling me that he had stopped speaking to me, too, but I hadn’t realized it. Isn’t that a kicker? Now it’s your turn to laugh. It’s even funnier when you think that my brother and I talk multiple times a week.

Now that you know about me and my brother, tell me about you and your sibling(s). And don’t be surprised if you find yourself in one of my upcoming books.

Author Evelyn Coleman is one of my dearest writer friends.  I met her early in my career and we hit it off immediately.  We used to spend what seemed like hours on the phone but now we rarely speak.  Time and distance have a way of doing that to a friendship.  But when we do speak it’s as though there’s never been a lapse.  Evelyn is one the smartest and kindest people that I know.  Sometimes I think she’s too kind. 

I got an email from Evelyn today telling me about her granddaughter, Taylah P (aka Taylor), and the group she’s formed with a childhood friend, Kelci.  The group is Vistoso Bosses, which means gorgeous in Spanish, or so Evelyn tells me. 

As with any new group, they’re trying to build their fan base in hopes of moving on to bigger things.  If you’re willing, you can help them out by going to visit them on myspace, where they’re being featured for this week only, listening to their songs and viewing their videos. 

Now I’m going to be honest with you. I usually hate pages that play music automatically but I actually liked this one.  It’s such a cute song and has a nice tune and beat.  It seems appropriate for the teenagers.  We could be seeing the next Mylie Cyrus (times two, of course)!  Anyway give them a look and let me know what you think. 

You can find them on myspace at http://www.myspace.com/thevistosobosses OR you can find them by going to the main myspace page at myspace.com, selecting the Music tab and looking for the group among the Featured Artists.  Have it your way, as they say at Burger King.

They have a video series called The Hamiltons that you should check out.  You’ll see why Evelyn’s so proud of her granddaughter. They’re adding an episode every day and by Thursday they should be up to episode 4.  So let’s show Evelyn some love and support her granddaughter. 

For those of you who don’t know Evelyn, you can visit her at HERE at evelyncoleman.com.  She started out writing thrillers with What a Woman’s Gotta Do.  She’s written a number of acclaimed books for children of various ages including The Footwarmer and the Crow, White Socks Only, Born in Son and a mystery for ADDY in The American Girl series.  Freedom Train is her latest.  You can go diretly to her children’s pages HERE.

Don’t forget to tell me what you thought of Vistoso Bosses.

I found some wonderfully exciting news on Dee’s Christian Fiction blog–drum roll, please–Stephanie Perry Moore’s Payton Skyy series of teen novels is being made into a series of Direct-to-DVD movies by Tyler Perry!  This is great news!

I’ve bought the Payton Skyy series several times over the years.  I even bought it for my niece TWICE!  She called me up and said, “Aunt Angela, you already gave me these books–years ago.” I admit to getting a little sheep-faced at that, but when I saw them in hardcover at Black Expressions, I had to buy them.  Well, dIdn’t I?

I recently purchased (around Thanksgiving, I think) Stephanie’s pre-teen series, Carmen Browne, for a younger niece (the aforementioned niece’s sister).  To make up for giving the older niece the duplicate Payton Skyy books,  I tossed in the first books from the Perry Skyy Jr. series, figuring she’d love a series about a boy.

I realized today how long Stephanie Perry Moore has been writing young adult Christian fiction, particularly African-American young adult Christian fiction.  She is truly the godmother of the genre.  (Note she has at least one series, Laurel Shadrach, that stars a Caucasian pre-teen.)  Come to think about it, Stephanie is a pioneer in African-American Christian fiction, in general, as her first book came out in 2000 when the genre was first starting. 

Congratulations to Stephanie!  Let’s all be on the look-out for the DVDs.

I haven’t been to a Romance Writers of America (RWA) Conference since the year Awakening Mercy was a RITA finalist. I think that was 2001 in New Orleans.  UPDATE: You can find the 2008 RITA winners HERE!

This year they’re in San Francisco and The Today Show paid them a visit. Nora Roberts and Beverly Jenkins made the tape that was shown on the show.

Thanks to Anika at WriteBlack for the heads up!

At the start of the year, I mentioned becoming more active on the blog this year. Well, I got off to a pretty bad start. I’ve picked up a bit lately. I really enjoyed having the guest bloggers last week and will do more of that in the coming weeks and months.  I’ve also joined the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance (CFBA) as a reviewer and Blogging in Black (BIB) as a columnist.  I hope that my association with CFBA and BIB to enrich what I do on the blog here.

Christian Fiction Blog Alliance (CFBA) 

I really like the idea behind CFBA.  Their goal is to raise the profile of Christian books on Technorati Popular Books site, making them visible to more bloggers.  Every month I will get a mailing from CFBA listing 5-10 books that I have the option of reviewing. I choose the books I want, they pass my name along to the book’s publisher, and I get a free copy of the book in the mail. In return, I agree to blog about the book on the dates of the CFBA blog tour for that book. You all know how I feel about authors and reviews so I won’t really be offering my reviews of books. Instead I’ll be posting general information about the book provided by the CFBA.  If you’re interested, check out their Requirements for Reviewers.

Blogging in Black (BIB)

Blogging in Black is an interesting blog that I read regularly.  Its purpose, from the website, is as follows:

Blogging in Black is a collective of mostly black writers and readers sharing their views on the writing life, publishing, and anything else related to books, writing, and the publishing biz.

Our goal is to present a strong and consistent product for our readership. No, we aren’t different from blogging in any other color; we all have different views, opinions and stories to share.

We have a group of regular columnists, who present their views, interviews, reviews, profiles, and other information relevant to the literary landscape. We will also present guest commentary from a host of literary professionals.

The views of each columnist are his or her own and do not reflect the views of other columnists, guest columnists, our moderators, or our administrators.

My first BIB column, My so-called career, will appear today, Thursday, July 31.  After that, I’ll have a column on the 12th of each month, starting in August.

Let me know what you think about the changes I’m making, and especially your thoughts/experiences on CFBA and BIB.  I want to hear from you.