Showing posts with label For the Readers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label For the Readers. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Friday, February 15, 2013

An Inconvenient Thing: Part I


An Inconvenient Thing by Sky Sloderbeck
Welcome to a new feature that I hope you enjoy, a story called An Inconvenient Thing. This story is a serialization with no rhyme nor reason. There will be no set lengths since I'm writing on the fly and letting the story go where it will: this first offering is tiny at just over 200 words when I'm used to writing 2000+ words at a sitting. There will be no set publication dates since it depends on the kind of time I get to update due to life's demands. But maybe the randomness will help to make it a little more special. Or maybe it will hurt it. I guess we'll find out.

 This serialized story was inspired by stories you may know, and is in a way a response to them. How long will the story go on for? That depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is you, the reader. Subscribe, visit, comment. Let me know what you think of An Inconvenient Thing. Let me know where I can improve. Let me know lines you love, or characters for that matter. If the story takes a turn you don't understand or like, let me know that too. Help me write Tatiana's story by being an active reader. I look forward to your feedback, and I hope you enjoy this serialization.

AN INCONVENIENT THING
Part 1: Upon Waking


I tasted the dirt on my lips and felt the weight of the earth pressing down on my chest. I didn't expect dead to feel so alive. A synapse fired in my brain, reminding me that I should be panicking. After all, I was buried alive, wasn't I? But I was dead. I remembered dying. I remembered the darkness flooding my vision and how it felt like his tight embrace was becoming as wispy as smoke.
          I tried to lift my hand, but it was held tight, pinned by the demanding earth. Another synapse fired, urging me to struggle, but I kind of liked it here in the ground. I don't remember what my mother's womb felt like - who does - but I imagined it felt much like this. I wiggled a finger, working it through the loose loam, and reveled in the sensation. 
          It was nice here, comforting, but it was an inconvenient thing, too. As the synapses continued to fire and my brain continued stretching, waking, I felt more and more like it was time to be reborn. It seemed appropriate that I remembered my death before I remembered my life, but it started to come back to me - I am Tatiana. I am nineteen. And I am a vampire.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Why We Need Bookish

Book-ish by Sky Sloderbeck
Last night, a service two years in the making launched. The web site, Bookish, is the brainchild of three publishing powerhouses: Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster. That seems like a lot of big fish with hands in one little fish pie, so to help me remember who is backing this exciting start-up, I'm going to call this powerhouse Simon the hachette-wielding penguin.

The initial buzz on Twitter was positive:




I ran over to Bookish and played with it for a while, and sure enough, Simon the hachette-wielding penguin may have hit on a very good thing here. It's barely a day old, and there's already a great selection of books available, as well as some exclusives like a joint interview with crime fiction author Michael Connelly and suspense author Michael Koryta, an essay from Eat, Pray, Love's author Elizabeth Gilbert, and my favorite, a handful of book reviews courtesy of The Onion.

But what makes Bookish different from Amazon? Or Goodreads? A lot, actually. Amazon may have the lion's share of the market on book sales, but people value convenience, and if readers head to Bookish to look for recommendations, they may buy through Bookish since they're already there. Plus, Amazon isn't exactly known for making it easy (or fun) to find new books to read. Sure there are lists and "Viewed by Others," but those aren't tailored to your current reading style.

At Bookish, you can enter up to four books and get back recommendations on new books you could try. As the web site grows and more books are added, this part of the service will surely get better and more accurate.

And while Bookish may have shelves like Goodreads, the simplicity of those shelves suggests that they are meant as a place to keep track of books you've read so that you don't inadvertently purchase them again. Maybe (I'm hoping) Bookish will eventually use that data to deliver even better recommendations, in the same vein as Netflix: the more you read and rate, the better the recommendations are. But let's give that particular feature time. They are only a day old, after all.

So why do we need Bookish? Instead of thinking of it as a replacement for or competition against Amazon and Goodreads, it might be better to think of Simon the hachette-wielding penguin's digital baby as a tool to use alongside them. With a clean, fast interface, content-rich author pages, and author exclusives, Bookish is a nirvana for readers - a stripped down and beautiful way to find and enjoy books.

Monday, February 4, 2013

OCD About Your Library?

Home Library by Sky Sloderbeck
I have a confession: I have an addiction to cozy home libraries. My ideal library would have an old world explorer vibe, complete with a globe mounted in a brass-and-wood stand, a brass telescope, and a taxidermied mountain lion stalking a taxidermied big horn ram. It would also have a massive fireplace and at least three of the four walls would be lined with mahogany built-in bookcases. And those bookcases would be filled with books, yet have just enough shelf space left to accommodate any additions.

My current library attempts to mimic that dream library vibe, with mahogany lookalike bookcases on every wall, stuffed animals of the teddy bear kind propped on the bookshelves and the bookcases filled (to overflowing) with books. My Goodreads profile shows I only have 188 books, but I'm fairly certain that I have closer to 500 (many are too old to be scanned using their app and I will have to enter them by hand).

Ideally, I'd love to get all of them entered on Goodreads so that I could use it as a searchable database of my books, and then organize them on their physical shelves to match their Goodreads shelves, but until then, I have rudimentary organization going on. Horror over here. SciFi over there. Memoir up there. Children's books down there. Series are grouped together and placed in chronological (publication) order, but that's it.

And it works, in a sense.

Every once in a while, though, I stare at my bookshelves and know that as soon as I add a new horror book or if I purge some of the books given to me that I know I'll never read,  I'll have to reorganize. That thought is depressing when there are so many books to deal with.

So now my questions: If you have a glut of books, how do you organize them? If you organize by genre, how do you organize books that cross genres? How do you organize anthologies? And how much space do you leave per shelf so that you can add new books (or do you pack the shelves tightly and worry about that later)?