Kristen Hall-Geisler

Author: Kristen

  • Final Book Interviews!

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    Today, I finished the last two interviews I’m allowing myself for the book formerly known as A Car of One’s Own.  The first was with a numbers guy who, despite being told what I was working on, answered my first question by telling me he didn’t have data broken down by male vs. female. Not so…

  • Trolling for Titles

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    As I mentioned in my last post, Nicole the Mistress of Marketing told me at our first meeting about my book that I had a terrible title. I had been calling it A Car of One’s Own, a nod to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Turns out most women are not so up on their century-old feminist…

  • Putting My Money Where My Pen Is

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    I wrote a draft of A Car of One’s Own last year and shopped it around to agents, to no avail. It’s a weird length at 30,000 words, and it’s not the kind of book a person would buy at Barnes and Noble for $15. It’s a tough sell for an agent. Publishing it electronically myself…

  • Ladies Love Cool Bikes

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    Kristen
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    Only 11 percent of motorcycle riders are women, according to this MSN Autos blog post, but that number is growing every year. Between 2003 and 2009, there was a 45 percent increase in chicks on bikes — and not in the bitch seat. [shudder] What do women buyers look for in a motorcycle? It’s not…

  • The Nouveau Commonplace

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    Kristen
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    I learned a few months ago that the word “commonplace” has an older meaning than the current definition of something being so common it’s no longer interesting. It’s the kind of word you’d think hipsters would use more often than they do. But a commonplace is also a notebook where you write down quotes and…

  • What I Learned from HowStuffWorks.com: Research and Documentation

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    Kristen
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    I do lots of work for lots of different outlets, but there are a few publications (online and print) that I work with regularly. One of those is HowStuffWorks.com, which is part of the Discovery network. I’ve been writing for their Autos channel since 2008 — nearly three years — and the most important thing…

  • Automotive Art at the Museum

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    Kristen
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    Sometimes I get to write articles with fascinating story lines, long-ish word counts, and fantastic pictures. Like this one for the New York Times Autos section, on the Allure of the Automobile at Portland Art Museum. The cars themselves were great, beautiful, worthy of art museum treatment. But the really interesting part came in talking…

  • To Holiday or Not to Holiday

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    Kristen
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    I am writing this at my desk, in my office, on Memorial Day, an official holiday in the United States. Yet here I am at my desk. Most people are camping this weekend — or as a friend of a friend on Facebook called camping, “drinking near trees.” I did not leave town for the…

  • Are You Smarter than a Sixth Grader?

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    Kristen
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    Having spent time with 81 sixth-graders in three writing classes today, I can say I am indeed smarter — in most cases. But Miss Guttag’s classes had some great questions when I visited her at school. Just about every year since my friend Miss Guttag started teaching, I’ve come in to her classroom to talk…

  • 30 Things I Have Done to Avoid Working on This Novel

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