Arielle Ford: The Golden Age of Authors: Why Books Are Alive and Well

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Arielle Ford: The Golden Age of Authors: Why Books Are Alive and Well:

'via Blog this'

The stats are in:

Americans, young and old, are reading actively in all print and digital formats

This makes a great follow up to yesterday's post regarding the, to my mind misguided, war between Amazon.com and similar online platforms for publishing and distribution of print media and the old vanguard of big publishing houses and big bookstore chains.

The truth is showing up in the numbers but why isn't it just plain intuitive that if you have more of something available in more formats more people will use it?  And if you have formats that can reach billions in seconds isn't it obvious more appetites will be whetted and sated?

One of the really amazing things about the web is the way those with similar tastes can find each other and in their digital fellowship know exactly how to provide the very thing that answers to their fellow fan's craving.

Once maybe a new author or artist needed the echelon of professional editors and promoters the big publishing houses provided because the tools required to do it well were expensive and often individually too large for the family garage let alone the family room.  Now all of those same tools and techniques are available to anyone from the fourteen year old Junior High geek to the frumpy granny in gingham.  All of them together fitting in junior's backpack or granny's handbag.  As long as they have web access, curiosity and the willingness to learn they can avail themselves of all the same techniques the old bastion used to generate hype and create desires only they could fulfill.

The difference being that for them the cost of such promotion was so prohibitive they could only do it for a few and in order to profit had to create huge mass audiences for their fair.  Not so for granny and junior. They can start reaping profit with only a few thousand fans/customers and yet if persistent can go on to create the tidal wave of want known as going viral that can put them on the map.

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Amazon Rewrites the Rules of Book Publishing - NYTimes.com

Amazon Rewrites the Rules of Book Publishing - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

What Penguin did to Kiana Davenport as told in this article is proof of the lack of imagination and flexibility the old print industry has and those are what will bring it down not the existence of Amazon.com or any other forum that eliminates middlemen from between author and reader.

By canceling Davenport's contract for her upcoming novel due out next year because she used one of the well known, well tested self promoting techniques of publishing online some of her unpublished short stories and threatening to force her via legal action to return her $20K advance, Penguin has shot itself in the foot. Not only have they lost what even they must have thought was a potentially profitable relationship with a new author for this first and any following novels but the publicity of this case will likely lose them many future new authors if not many current ones.

I've been thinking for some time now that self-publish is the way to go for me. And the more I read about the arrogance of the big house publishers and their paranoia regarding the web, their elitist exclusivity, the difficulty breaking in--the no agent no submission acceptance/no publish credits no agent catch 22) the hit or miss promotional efforts for new authors and so forth, the more I am convinced I will have to get over my reluctance to self promote and just do it.

I've been holding back partly because of the stigma of the so called vanity press from the days before the web and electronic publishing.  But I'm beginning to see that as another artifact of the past.

I've also been holding back most of my best work off my blog and other web presences for fear of scaring off publishers and agents as I'd heard they frowned on that and would refuse to publish stuff previously published online.

It is my prediction that these old print publishing houses are going to find themselves unable to satisfy the readers and writers coming of age in this decade who have no memories of before electronic publishing and the web and will have no patience with waiting months for responses to submitted manuscripts and years to see an accepted one actually in print. And it will be there own fault not the fault of those with the vision to foresee the potential of the new technology and do something with it.

Whether publisher or bookstore I have no patience with those who see Amazon.com and their like as their enemy. I'm tempted to blame the age of those in the decision making positions for this tunnel vision but none of them can be more than half a decade older than me and even this ol fuddy duddy can imagine ways in which they could mutually profit so why can't they?

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Sunday Serenity #249

I spent the afternoon taking an inventory of my thread and putting together kits for several projects I'm about to start for the holidays.  I also looked at patterns and new stitches I want to learn.  And I did a little bit of crocheting as well.

My inventory showed me I am dangerously low on: Kelly Green, Frosty Green, Orange, Brown, Navy, and Burgundy in size 10 cotton.

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Buttons and Bows

I was trying to get this set of bows finished for yesterday's 'I Love Yarn Day' post but had to go another way.  They are pictured here with the set of flowers I finished and posted pictures of last Sunday but since then I rummaged through my Mom's vintage buttons and found a set of pearl like buttons to set in their centers.

The bows are made from a rectangle about the size of the smaller bookmarks I've made--4"X1"-- which is then slip stitched end to end to form a ring that is folded with the seam on center of back and then the center is pinched together and something wrapped around it.  I chose to use two short chains wrapped around and slip stitched to the back.

I made these patterns up as I went based on a number of pictures I'd seen.  The blue one was my first and took me two days of experimenting to get right to my satisfaction.  I then wrote out the pattern and started to follow it exactly but as I reached the end of row 1 decided to mix it up by making each one different.  Three of them--the blue, lilac and yellow are each some variation of fillet alternating with HDC and SC rows.  The coral is rows of bobbles and the pale pink is two rounds of a version of the shell--2XDC + 2CH + 2XDC in single stich then CH 2 and skip 2 stitches.

One of the tricks I learned by accident when I discovered I'd made the blue one too short and then decided to add an extension by adding a row of quadruple crochet on the end before slip stitching to the other end.  When I then centered that quadruple row on the back and pinched it together I found the bow to be less bulky and easier to bind with the wrapped chain. So I made the rest too short with the QC row on purpose.

Both the bows and the flowers are made with Aunt Lydia's bamboo size 10.  I've placed the crochet hook on the right and the marble on the left as indicators of size.  The flowers might cover a 50 cent piece but I didn't have one to test that theory.

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I Love Yarn Day

In honor of I Love Yarn Day I thought I'd repost all the LOLcats I captioned over the last several years that featured yarn or string.

This exercise is also good for keeping me distracted from fretting and busy without too much thought as I await news on my sister who had surgery today.

And maybe it will entertain my sisters as Jamie recuperates in her room later this evening.

Good news.  Jamie is awake and talking.  There was some fear earlier that a trach might become necessary again due to swelling but that threat seems to have passed.

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It's That Time Already?

I was crocheting on something that I was planning to take a picture of for today's post but it's almost tomorrow and my eyes are wrecked so you get this instead.  Sigh.  I'm always misunderestimating how long something will take me to do.

My sister Jamie is having another throat stretching surgery again tomorrow. It's only been three months this time before her throat became dangerously obstructed and it had been averaging six months.  They are also including  another biopsy hoping to discover what is causing the repeated buildup of scar tissue near her trachea.  It's almost guaranteed it is one of the autoimmune diseases so the answer isn't likely to be good news but we need an answer so correct treatment can commence. Prayers and blessings sent Jamie's way (and her family's)would be greatly appreciated.

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Chandler: The Note-to-Self Organizer

Chandlerproject.org

I'm always trying out aps to help me organize my time, my to do lists and my mind.  Most are complete busts but Chandler is closest among those that provide calendar functions, assigning date and time, alarms, separating urgent from it-can-wait, and one of my must haves--allowing links to web and computer folders and aps to be associated with tasks.

Chandler is an open source project and has just recently provided 1.0 rendition which indicates it is out of its infancy.  I had high hopes on seeing the screenshots on their site and reading the testimonies of users.  So I downloaded it last night and spent upwards of six hours inputting tasks.  Though it has the ability to import from some other aps like Google calendar and outlook that was of no help to me as my to do lists are in my head, in my WhizFolderDeluxe note taking ap and in my email inbox.

The problems I encountered were not so much the fault of the application's ability to do the tasks I need of it but rather the fault of my eyes and the fact the program has compatibility issues with Windows platforms newer than XP.  Maybe if I wasn't working on a netbook  with a screen whose default font is the size of a mustard seed the vision issue would be moot and I hope in the future they develop an RTF for the notes so I can enlarge fonts, though that wouldn't help with the font in the menus and sidebar.  I assume the compatibility issue with Windows 7 will also be addressed in future builds of Chandler but until it is I don't think I can trust my data to it.  FYI if you are using Linux or Mac Os X you might be in better luck.  As is often the case these open source programs have fewer compatibility issues with those platforms than with Windows.

There was another irritating issue I hope they resolve in the future.  The alarm pop up dialog box causes the cursor to freeze and move like molasses over ice so your work is interrupted while you wait until you can click it away.  Maybe that is one of those Windows compatibility issues.

I also would prefer not to have to type in the date and time especially with those teeny fonts and I've worked with aps and online forms that provide the little calendar for selecting the date and  little popup lists of times to select.  I imagine Chandler will provide that eventually.

And a minor irritant tho minor as a mosquito bite is compared to a wasp sting is the presence of a demo file aka Cllection called US Holidays which they made read only and disallow delete and it is cluttering up my dashboard with two years worth of past holidays in the Done section.  Tho it is may be nice to have the reminders show up in the Now and Later sections as the holidays approach and pass, it is irritating I can't write notes in their note section regarding personal plans for that holiday and it is irritating I have to create a separate Collection called Events to collect Bdays, Anniversaries and other occasions which I would just as soon have grouped in with Holidays and also be able to add non US Holidays.

But since the calendar function--assigning date and time to a task so they are automatically prioritized by the program, moving into place at the appointed time--is the only function my WhizFolder does not provide while also having a smaller footprint, faster opening and closing, font size control and no Windows compatibility issues, I guess I will be sticking with it.

Screenshot of my Whiz Master Task List Outline Collapsed

That task list with all it's nested hierarchy opened is approaching a mile long.  I exaggerate.  Slightly.  Maybe.

I've been fiddling around trying to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done method since last February.  Chandler was the first ap that came close to automating the prioritizing task that I now do manually with Whiz--moving task topics out of the To Do Queue and the Daily/Weekly/Monthly sections into the Today/This Month/This Week sections.

Before you go away thinking that I'm totally dissing Chandler, rest assured I'm not. I wouldn't have bothered writing a review if I'd no admiration for it at all.  If not for the compatibility issues I'd be using Chandler in conjunction with Whiz for prioritizing the upcoming two or three months.  And if I were working on a project with a team or even trying to coordinate schedules and tasks with a family Chandler can do things no other small p project manager can do: It can share data with others and synch data between platforms.  I can imagine how helpful that could be for a couple raising a family, for partners in a small company, or for a community organized event.

Chandler is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

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NaNoWriMo 2011

I'm a 2011 NaNoWriMo Participant

Just under three weeks or 20 days left to prepare.

Nanowrimo.org has just relaunched their site for this year's National Novel Writing Month.

What is NaNoWriMo?  It's a global web community of writer's taking the challenge to write a 50K word novel in 30 days.

This will be my 8th Nano.  Tho my first in 2004 began mid week 3 at the hour I first discovered it.

Here's my NaNo profile where you can request to be my writing buddy if you too are participating.

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It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Share what you (are, have been, are about to, hope to be) reading or reviewing this week. Sign Mr Linky at Book Journey and visit other Monday reading roundups.

Well, I'm up a creek this week.  I had four high demand books come in via my library requests the week of BBW and though I did browse in them, read a few pages to a chapter or so in each in the days after the came home, I put off focusing on them in favor of the banned and challenged books.

That week I started Twilight, East of Eden and read selections from several other books.

The Child Thief

 This past week I started out trying to go back and forth between the Twilight series, East of Eden, A Prayer for Owen Meany, (another BBW read and a Wordshakers book club selection,) some of the fable/myth reading I'm currently into and occasional browsing in one or more of these four exciting reads, I began to feel like I had a wardrobe of heads I was switching back and forth between.

The Night Circus

So I eventually settled down with Twilight and read them compulsively until I finished the third one Saturday.

Did I pick up one of the other begun or pressing reads then?

No, I started watching videos and crocheting.  And maybe sleeping a bit extra.

And now here I am with one week left on these four library books that not only will not renew for me but will be hard to get another turn with before New Years.

The Tiger's Wife

One week to finish four barely begun books?

There was a time when that would have been doable for me.  So doable I wouldn't have even fretted a moment about whether I could finish them all or which one(s) I'd have the hardest time waiting several months to finish.

But that's no longer the case.  Though I did read the three chunky Twilight books inside of a week that is rare and has a great deal to do with the very light quality of read they are.

The Weird Sisters

None of these four have that going for them and if they did I'd not be so frustrated at the thought of giving one or more of them up for three months.

Sigh.

Well, one thing i have decided is that I will be setting aside Twilight's Breaking Dawn until these four books go back to the library next week and I've finished A Prayer for Owne Meany and East of Eden.

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Sunday Serenity #248 Handmade Spring

Crocheted Flowers

I mentioned last weekend as BBW was ending that I was anxious to pick up the thread again and suggested I'd be posting pictures before the week was out. I did pick up the hook and thread again on Tuesday but after hours of fiddling on half a dozen unfinished projects I had nothing to show for it as I'd had to pull out every stitch I'e put in all day. I was so fumbled fingers and my count was constantly off and the work on the lavender flower in progress already was lopsided.

Well today I tried again and managed to finish the lavender flower and add the yellow and the pale pink ones seen here. The blue and the coral pink were already finished. I'm still happier with those two than the three I finished today but I'm still satisfied with today's work.

 My control of tension is returning and so hopefully the next ones will be even better. If I don't wait so long I forget the right counts for each of the sections. Since I had made it up as i went on the coral, the first one, I knew at the time i should be writing it down but I didn't listen to myself.

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A Different Drummer

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

 I always knew I was marching to the beat of a different drummer but who knew she had such style.

Well the Frightful Read-a-thon has 24 hrs left in it.  I just finished Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer the third book in the Twilight saga.  I've just read all three back to back and tho I'm anxious to get on with the story I feel that's partly due to wanting to just get it over with.  Maybe I'm just burning out on it but if I were to write my review of the series right now I'm afraid I'd be less than enthusiastic.  Whether that is because I'm burned out or because I march to the beat of a different drummer than the millions who have gone gaga over the story who knows.  On the other hand, I did read something like 1200 pages in less than a week compulsively turning the pages.  The feeling of distaste building up and that compulsive page turning and the fact that I continue to think about the story when I'm trying to do other things doesn't jive.

I'm thinking I should wait on the forth one for now and move on to one of those four library books due on the 17th.  Ah, but will I...

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Spook Me

I watched the entire 15 hours of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital this week. I had watched the first 4 or so when it first but somehow missed the rest. Can't remember why but it has often bugged me the way an unfinished story will.

As I watched and in the hours when I wasn't I marveled at the idiosyncratic imagination of Stephen King and contemplated the trajectory of his influence on my imagination, my understanding of people and of the way the line between good and evil is drawn right down the center of every soul.  Before I encountered Stephen King's stories in the late 1970s and for at least another decade, the moral universe I lived in was fairly black and white and people   were either sunny souled saints or sinister souled sinners.  Never both at the same time or one day one and the next the other and a week later the other one again.

Believing that set up a severe cognitive dissonance in my psyche caused by the collision of that belief with the evidence of my eyes and of my own inner duality whenever I caught a glimpse of it in my accidental introspections and nightmares. 

By the mid 1980s I was an avid King reader in spite of the fact that I knew his stories were anathema to the teaching elders of the Christian sect I grew up in and whose doctrines I continued to hold and whose concept of spirituality I continued to aspire to.  Reading King was a guilty pleasure at that time with a heavy serving of guilt.  

In 1984 I had one of my severe depressive episodes and on the advice of a friend reached out to her pastor for help.  I met with him for one exploratory session and he agreed to take me on if I agreed to abide by his rules.  One of his expectations was that I keep a journal of the cultural things I was exposing myself to: movies, books, TV, music and then to eliminate anything he deemed inappropriate.

I was in my late twenties at the time and had been married for six years to someone whose reading habits were even more eclectic than my own and our relationship from the beginning had revolved around book talk.  The beginning of our friendship was in our high school library where I was a Teacher's Aide to the librarian and he would help me shelve books and we'd talk about what we were reading and recommend books and authors to each other.  Two years later our first date had been going to the first Star Wars movie.  What this pastor was asking of me would have amounted to an emotional divorce from my husband.

But as harsh as that was it wasn't the reason I never went back.  It was envisioning a future without 80% of the stories I loved.  I felt extremely guilty for this choice at the time but I now believe that something deeply self-preserving in my psych had saved me from a return to the freezer of thought which I'd escaped when I married outside our sect and the slow thawing of my mind underway at the time would have begun to reverse itself.  Instead, a few months later I enrolled in college and began the exhilarating adventure of learning that there were more stories in heaven and earth than were dreampt of in our sect's philosophy and just possibly they didn't hold a lock on the only valid stories.

Now with nearly 30 years of hindsight I believe that stories were more instrumental in alleviating those regular bouts of depression than all of the counseling. Since then my personal philosophy on the role story plays in our lives and our cultures has developed into one that sees story as crucial and as necessary as breathing.  Whenever I hear stories blamed for bad human behavior or cultural decadence or dumbing down of the masses or what have you I believe a very wrong assumption is behind those accusations.  

The assumption that stories are the root of human behavior, that they cause it somehow even if only by the mechanism of monkey see, monkey do is, I think, absolutely backwards.  Stories are the fruit of human experience, the distilling of our understanding of what it means to be human, the expression of our essential selves.   the mirror in which we see ourselves.  So those who object to the content of the stories shouldn't waste their time and energy trying to suppress them.  Rather they should be asking why that story? why now? what is that story trying to tell us about who we are, who we could be?  For if a story has reached a big enough audience to catch the attention of those whose tendency is to object to things outside their comfort zone that is proof that it is resonating with a large cross section of the culture and thus necessary in some way maybe not immediately obvious.

I now believe that my attraction to scary stories was my psyches attempt to release the pressure building up inside due to my determination to fit all that I witnessed within and around me into the rigid frame I'd been given and told was the Truth the only Truth and nothing but the Truth.  I shudder to think what would have become of that pressure if it had never been defused.

Having come to that understanding of the role of story it was quite gratifying to discover, upon reading the afterward in his Full Dark, No Stars, that Stephen King's own philosophy of story resonates with mine. I'll leave you with the quotes from those pages that speak to this:

I have little patience with writers who don't take the job seriously, and none at all with those who see the art of story-fiction as essentially worn out.  It's not worn out, and it's not a literary game.  It's one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, and the often terrible world we see around us.  It's the way we answer the question, How can such things be?  Stories suggest that sometimes--not always, but sometimes--there's a reason.
Here's something else I believe:  if you're going into a very dark place...then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything.  If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?
...when it comes to writing fiction, the writer's only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart.  it won't always be the reader's truth, or the critic's truth but as long as it's the writer's truth...all is well.  For writers who knowingly lie, for those who substitute unbelievable human behavior for the way people really act, I have nothing but contempt.  Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do--to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

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October Spooky Themed Thons and Challenges

Frightful Fall Read-a-Thon

I almost forgot I was planning to do this.  And here I've been scrambling each day for something quick to post so I can get back to reading!  I've been reading qualifying books all week too!  But I won't be officially a participant until I get this post up so I can sign in.  :(.

Books on my agenda this week:

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer - finished on Monday
New Moon by Stephanie Meyer - finished on Wednesday
Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer - begun on Wednesday
Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving - begun - for Wordshakers an online book club posting reviews this week!  but I just got my library copy Tuesday.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck - begun last week for Banned Book Week and I'm very anxious to return to it.  Was going back and forth between it and the Twilight series until I got my hands on Owen Meany.  Going back and forth between multiple fiction stories is not my typical style. :)

Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - begun the day it came home from the library last week.  It's not going to renew for me and the queue is getting longer by the day!

A Child Thief by - Bron.  Tthis one came home from the library same day as Night Circus and is also in a queue.  I had 4 books with that same issue arrive the same day.  I don't know how I'm going to finish them all before they are due on the 17th!

The other two due and not renewing on the 17th would also qualify for the scary theme but I'm probably not getting to by the time the Thon ends Sunday night:

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown  I began this in June the first time I got my turn with it and didn't finish and now my turn came again the same week as three other high demand library books!

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht


What I need is a month long Read-a-Thon!

Ask and you shall receive!

On the Frightful Thon blog this month long Thon at Psychotic State was announced:

Things that Go Bump in the Night Read-a-Thon

Click on the caption to join in.

So now I have my month long spooky themed thon and I can add a few more from my current hoard of scary stories:

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

Turtle Moon by Alice Hoffman

There are more but  those are the ones coming due in the next two weeks and that is plenty for now.

And on Psychic State I found a link to a Spooktacular challenge for the Spooky month:

And one blog sidebar leads me to another, to another, to another...

The Wonderfully Wicked Read-a-Thon is being held over the same weekend as the Dewey 24 Hour Read-a-Thon which I'm already committed to but why not combine eh?

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Litquake 2011 Kickoff This Weekend

Imagine a full stadium crowd roaring, lights flaring. For a game?  A concert? No.  For literature, for authors, for poets, for readers.  It's a festival for lovers of story!

Whether it’s poets reciting in a cathedral, authors discussing science versus religion in a library, or novelists reading in a beekeeping supply store, the goal remains the same: whet a broad range of literary appetites, present the literary fare in a variety of traditional and unlikely venues, and make it vivid, real, and entertaining. Now grown to the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast, Litquake continues its mission as a nine-day literary spectacle for booklovers, complete with cutting-edge panel discussions, unique cross-media events, and hundreds of readings.

I wish I'd known about this when I lived in the SF Bay Area.

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Some Stories Give Me a Complex

Maybe not but I bet I can make your eyes pop too.

Some stories/authors intimidate me and I have to find my way back to inspired.

 More musing on this later.

Right now I'm busy being wowed.

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It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Share what you (are, have been, are about to, hope to be) reading or reviewing this week. Sign Mr Linky at Book Journey and visit other Monday reading roundups.

What I read and posted about reading over the last week is pretty well covered in my Saturday Banned Book Week Wrapup post.  So I won't  repeat it again here.  I will just talk about what I've been reading since Saturday and what I plan to read in the next week.

Twilight Series:
I'm 2/3 thru New Moon

Since Saturday I've continued reading New Moon the second book of the Twilight series and reached page 362 before my eyes quit on me in the wee hours this morning.  Can you believe I had to quit in the middle of the scene where Belle jumps off the cliff?!!  And haven't picked it up again yet because I knew I would get nothing else done today if I did.

I have 40 odd items out of the library but most of my reading over the last week for BBW were from books without due dates either owned by me or like the Twilight series borrowed from friend or family.  I hope to return to chasing the due dates this week but I don't think I'll set aside Twilight now that I've started it.  And as my sister pointed out to me they are after all borrowed as well and my poor niece has been waiting nearly two years!  Getting them read and returned to her will also free up premium space on my shelves!

A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving

I will probably take a short break from Twilight after finishing Bk 2 tonight as I want to try to read and review A Prayer for Owen Meany for Wordshakers this week.  I ordered it from the library several weeks ago but won't get  my hands on it until after midnight tonight when my husband gets home from work.  He was stopping to pick up library holds on his way to work this afternoon.

Another novel I hope to get back to ASAP is East of Eden which I started last week the same day I started Twilight and went back and forth for awhile and then settled down with Twilight because I needed an easy, light read to counter all the serious, heavy stuff I was encountering in Chaucer,Milton, Boccaccio, Aristophanes and Whitman.  Like mentioned in one post, sometimes it felt like I was reading algebra.

And of course I will continue to browse among all the fable/fairytale/myth items both owned and borrowed as my obsession with them has not let up.

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Sunday Serenity #247

Vintage Buttons from my Mom's collection
ranging from pre WWI thru 1970s

I'm going to be playing in my fiber arts supplies this week--thread, ribbons, yarn, buttons--with two main projects in mind: accessorizing crocheted and embroidered bookmarks and a sweater.  Also will be planning Xmas gifts and birthday gifts coming up over the next six months or so.

I have been severely limiting my crocheting and other sewing for over a month now.  At first it was because I'd strained my shoulder and couldn't control tension on the thread. But then as the balance of my attention shifted back towards reading, writing and blogging from the obsession with crochet I'd held for nearly two years, I realized that I did not want to allow it to shift back into obsession--in either direction.

I love reading and writing as much as crochet and needlework so was missing it terribly but struggling with my tendency to get so locked in on what I'm doing that I lose all track of the passage of time.  Sometimes for days at a time.

This past week I was nearly that focused on blogging for Banned Book Week but the fact that my attention was split between writing and prepping posts, reading, surfing other blogs, and social networking saved me from hyperfocusing on any one of them.  But I did drop the thread, so to speak, and my fingers are itching for it.

So stay tuned, I'll probably have photos of fiber art WIP over the next weeks.

I'm also going to be prepping for NaNoWriMo but most of that is mental work--daydreaming--which I can do while playing with my thread WIP.

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Banned Book Week Wrapup

Banned Book Week
Censorship Causes Blindness

For BBW this past week I will have posted ten times on the theme counting this one.  The other nine are listed and liked below.

There were seven book reviews, the last two brand new and the first five excerpts of previously posted reviews with commentary and quotes related to BBW.

I mused and occasionally ranted and rooted my aversion to censorship and the misguided overprotection of young adults in my personal experience as one who was kept so naive I was unable to function with competency once I became a legal adult.  And that in spite of my being able to make the President's List at college when I went back to school at age 27 the first semester and the Dean's List the second.

I'm not revealing that last in order to brag about my brightness as I discovered it to be fairly meaningless in the long run since what I had still not learned to do by age 27 was think for myself and was still so naive I continued to be continually traumatized by things I encountered in the real world which I had been so sheltered from all the way to age 21 when I got married and left home.

I was 35 before it dawned on me why this was and began my quest to learn to think for myself.  That was 20 years ago already and I'm still struggling.

When I wasn't preparing posts this week, I was reading.  In the first post and again in Monday's post I listed the titles of banned or challenged books that I currently had in my possession either owned or borrowed from friend, family or library or had access to online.  Of those books I listed I read in:

Aristophanes Lysistrata --the first several pages
East of Eden -- the first chapter
Twilight series -- the whole first books and some 40 odd pages into the second.
Milton's Areopagitica -- about 3 pages
Boccaccio's Decameron -- several pages
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales -- several pages
Whitman's Leaves of Grass -- several shorter poems and some browsing
I also reread many pages in both Speak and Nickel and Dimed while preparing the reviews.

I've kept my bookmarks in the classics and intend to keep plugging away a few pages at a time.  Except for East of Eden which is the only one I don't own and has a library due date and besides is modern enough in language I can read it at the same speed as Twilight without loosing comprehension.  Some of those others--Milton, Boccaccio, Chaucer--give me the sensation I'm reading algebra.  I had less trouble reading Russian by my second year of study.

My Banned Book Week Posts

Banned Books Week Begins

Book Banned Week: Review Repost of Lovely Bones
Sunday Serenity #247 The Soul of Books

Banned Book Week: Review Repost of Leaves of Grass

Banned Books Week: Review Repost of The Kite Runner

It's Monday! What are You Reading? #36 [Banned Book Week]

Banned Book Week Review Repost of The Bluest Eye

Banned Book Week: Review Repost of Impulse

Book Review: Nickel and Dimed [Banned Book Week]

Friday Forays in Fiction: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson: A Review for Banned Books Week

Every one of my posts during BBW had several quotes opposing censorship following are some of what is left of the dozens I collected as the week began:

• Every burned book enlightens the world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?" ~Joseph Henry Jackson
• To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.  ~John Aikin
• The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged.  The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship.  And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted.  ~Jonathon Green, "Did You Say 'Offensive?'," as posted on wordwizard.com
• We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.  ~Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764
• Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself.  It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.  ~Potter Stewart
• The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. — Carl Sagan
• What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books.  ~Sigmund Freud, 1933
• Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935
• A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.  ~Albert Camus
• To reject the word is to reject the human search.  ~Max Lerner, 1953, on book purging
• I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech.  ~Nancie J. Carmody
• It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle. —Sutton Elbert Griggs

Here are a few bookish events going on for BBW:

Hosted by Bookjourney

Get on the BANNED WAGON!

Giveaways, a scavenger hunt and links to participating blog's BBW reviews are some of what's happening at Sheila's BookJourney this week.  Along with her own reviews of banned or challenged books and of course her daily Morning Meanerings post.

Banned Books Week Giveaway Hop

Banned Books Week Hop

Giveaways galore and lots of participating blog's to visit and comment on.

Banned Book Week Virtual Read Out

Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out

The annual BBW readout traditionally conducted in public at bookstores and libraries where individuals read aloud form a banned book has now gone digital. Now you can video record yourself reading a banned book and upload to a YouTube channel

Read more...