Miriam Forster, of the charmingly monikered Dancing with Dragons is Hard on Your Shoes blog, has issued a challenge to writers (and readers!). It springs from an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association, called Banned Books Week. From the ALA site: Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the [...]

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Some things are just too entertaining and… unclassifiable not to pass around. Hence: “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” [Hat tip to Eileen of Speak Coffee to Me, temporarily coming out of... well, you know.]

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I’m pretty sure I posted a link to this on Facebook and/or Twitter a couple months ago, when I first encountered it. For some reason it’s found its way back into my head today, and has been positively ringing there for the last several hours. When a song will simply not leave me alone, my [...]

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Every year around now, a large chunk of blogosphere real estate is turned over to posts, tweets, Facebook status updates, and Flickr albums about a gathering called BlogHer. As the conference title suggests, the focus in on women who blog — it’s apparently attended by a number of guys, as well — and for the [...]

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My review of this book is now up over at The Book Book. So is another reviewer’s, as of yesterday — and we’re just following on the heels of the first, from a year ago. Clearly a book that draws reviewers like flies! I liked the book very much although (as you can see from [...]

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Yesterday, Granta magazine kicked off a new collective-memory project called “Nostos Algos.” From a publicity release which just made its way to my Inbox: The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek words nostos (‘a homecoming’) and algos (‘pain, grief, distress’). We have all known the desire to return to another place or time, and the [...]

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From whiskey river: Moonrise And who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, [...]

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(With apologies to site visitors who might be unfamiliar with one or the other work…) [via the reliable, insanely good taste of literary agent Janet Reid]

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[Image of 18th-century dowser from Wikipedia... Wonder if it's sized to fit?] I’m going to be computerless much of this week. Which presents me with a convenient dilemma — to wit, how to do a whiskey river Friday post? You may be thinking: How, exactly, will this be “convenient”? Sounds rather like a pain, in [...]

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So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon. I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. [...]

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