Just to continue the light-hearted theme of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, and grinding to its climactic conclusion (see, it’s contagious), the winner of this year’s award goes to David Guterson, best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars.
What is it about reading a sign? You’ve seen it plenty of times—someone drops litter beside a fully signed-up trash can, dogs and their human slaves roam unfettered on a dogs-on-leashes only beach, we skip across the road when the sign says, DON’T, and junk mail appears in the letterbox, despite the sign that asks otherwise.
In Michael Hyatt’s blog about five ways to find time to read, he comes up with some useful ideas. You can read the blog post here.
Finding reading time seems to be a real problem for many avid readers.
Things are about to warm up around here. Shorter, sharper blogs, delivered with far more frequency. Not that we’ll lose all the thinky posts—they’ll still be there, and we’ll have a few more from time to time.
In the olden days—no guys, that’s not a mere twenty years ago, let’s say the mid 1800s—we can picture the writer, sitting at his or her desk, quill in hand, staring contemplatively out over some peaceful English rural scene.
In my late teens, I and three companions—my girlfriend, Vanessa, and two cousins, Derek and Lenora—decided to take my very shaky Ford Cortina from London to the south of France. We’d never been to France and had been invited to help rebuild an ancient farmhouse in return for food, a place to camp, and drink.
I was having a cup of coffee with Jane Teresa the other day—a not infrequent pleasure—when, on my way back from a loo visit, someone stopped me to say, hello.
It’s that in-between time—the funny period that separates Christmas and New Year. I really enjoy these few brief days. Before Christmas it’s hectic. There’s simply too much to do and not enough time to either do it properly or, more importantly, enjoy doing it.
I’ve just finished At Home by Bill Bryson. Those of you who’ve read it will no doubt be nodding, grunting, smacking your lips, or whatever you do when you agree, when I say that Bill’s book is absolutely packed with facts—too many to easily recall as it happens, although in recent conversations some of them have conveniently popped back into my noggin when someone mentioned a key word.
I had to laugh the other day. I was poof reading a section of a client’s book I’m writing when something niggled out of the page at me. I couldn’t put my finger on it straight away, but I was aware that I had been burning a little midnight oil and was on the lookout for any interesting little errors a tired brain can easily produce.
How many times have you heard the expression, “Everyone’s got at least one book in them”? In non-fiction terms, I believe that everyone has—as long as they’re old, crazy, or experienced enough to have had some life experience.