Katiaesque

  • Childhood Fear: A Door In A Dead-End Hallway

    A huge part of being a writer, of being an artist of any kind, of making or doing anything worthwhile, is facing your fear. Sometimes it means digging in, far and deep, all the way back to the root of who you are, back to your childhood. Last month, fear was a big theme in my…

    Katia Raina

  • Social Caterpillar

    When I was a toddler, I was incredibly outgoing. My mom tells a story of me waking up on a cross-country train in the middle of the night when I was around one and a half or two years old. I only knew two boys’ names at that time, Vova and Andrei, or so my mom says.…

    Katia Raina

  • “Soldier X” by Don Wulffson: A Book Impression and My Own Take on the 1940s History

    Speak (Penguin) 2001 I usually try to stick to new books when reviewing, but I couldn’t keep silent about this one. My 12-year-old son recommended this book to me, and the concept totally intrigued me. A teenage German soldier gets sent to the front in 1944, at a time when German supplies ae dwindling and…

    Katia Raina

  • Changing Your Fortune: a Grace Lin giveaway

    So it’s been a week since the New Jersey SCBWI conference. Already? Well, I am still all fired up and have a busy writing week to show for it! (Many revising hours — very little human contact — or even virtual activity — not as many revised chapters as I’d like for all that work, but that’s another…

    Katia Raina

  • A Drifiting Friendship And A Giveaway

    Nothing is constant in the Universe,  except change, great philosophers say. (Change — and love, I would add — sorry Heraclitus!) Have you ever experienced these changes when it comes to friendships? What was the longest friendship you have ever had — and have you managed to keep it going strong through the years? What…

    Katia Raina

  • Nuclear Memories

    Ever since the nuclear crisis in Japan first unfolded, neighbors and friends have been asking me: “Does this bring back memories?” I was an unsuspecting eight-year-old Soviet citizen living in the Ukraine when on April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor ruptured in a series of explosions in the small city of Chernobyl some 155 miles…

    Katia Raina

  • Fear

    The manuscript I am working on (waiting for friends’ feedback at the moment) is set in the 1930s in the then-young Soviet Union. The 1930s was the time when the USSR was but in its twenties — the youngest nation in the world. It was the time of frantic building, an epoch of wild pride…

    Katia Raina

  • Books are Our BFFs: A Giveaway

    To continue with last month’s friendship theme, I’d like to offer you a little giveaway to celebrate books and friendship! You see, starting this blog has been one of the very best things I have ever done. Through it I have met — physically and virtually — some amazing award-winning, up-and-coming, super-talented authors who, most…

    Katia Raina

  • How to celebrate the New Year, Russian-style

    Since Soviet Russia wasn’t allowed to officially celebrate Christmas, we had to have some other major holiday. And it had to be big. Huge. BETTER than Christmas. Thus was born the Soviet New Year, honestly THE BEST holiday EVER. Think Halloween with its costumes and candy. Add to it Christmas with its dressed-up evergreens and…

    Katia Raina

  • From Russia with love; from Russia with hate

    INTERNATIONAL CORNER Entering the classroom of a summer course I am taking on English language and grammar, I grab a random desk in the front right corner of the room, and find myself in an international section, all of a sudden. So we get together into a group, where we’re supposed to discuss our relationship…

    Katia Raina