Kayaked lake union today from julie's landing, by AGC, to Hooters? Around Zymogenetics, to gasworks, under the aurora and fremont bridges, back around to china harbor.
Ouch my body hurts.

Edited: google says it's around 6 miles...around the lake, that is.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Booksquare/~3/293700022/

Today’s links of interest:

• ‘The Dumbest Generation’ by Mark Bauerlein
  So tired of Mark Bauerlein and his theories on how we’re going to hell in a handbasket. Is it really such a shock that 15 to 24 year olds aren’t doing a lot of pleasure reading in their free time?
• Writers Set Slate for Strike.tv
  One of the coolest things to come out of the writers’ strike: an online network that falls outside the traditional studio/producer structure. Bonus — some top notch talent is behind the project.
• 2b or not 2b?
  Can it be true? Can texting be good for reading and writing?
• Ex-Prosecutor?s Book Accuses Bush of Murder
  Ignoring the obvious punchline to note that Vincent Bugliosi’s latest book hasn’t received any mainstream media love, yet is selling quite well. Lesson? Readers don’t play by the old rules anymore…and neither should publishers.
• Is a Kindle to books as an iPod is to tunes?
  No. But it’s paving the way for the next device.
• Rate Cuts At Gawker Media
  Second quarter in a row. Seems to us that the Gawker Media Empire is buying into its own hype and hubris. Sure it can coast on increased page views and search engine traffic, but it’s lost so much in quality writing that who bothers anymore?
• Sci-fi writer Andre Norton’s legacy still in court’s hands
  Sad. Really sad.
• Electronic Papyrus - The Digital Book, Unfurled
  You know how you know that the New York Times doesn’t take the future seriously? They filed this story about flexible e-paper under "novelties". Sigh.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Booksquare/~3/328996481/

BS is moving into its shiny new headquarters today (as long as the Internet gods shine upon us!), so all thoughts are focused on frantic last-minute packing. Only the cat has completed her move-related tasks, though, in all honesty, she didn’t bring as many clothes. Frantic minds need distractions, and we have a fun one today.

It comes as news that a “genteel world of historical biography” exists, much less that it’s being destroyed by “glamorous young female writers trying to make a quick killing in the bestseller lists”. Who knew?

It’s a new twist on the age-old youth are ruining the world meme. Damn kids, can’t be trusted to followed hallowed tradition. Don’t they know that biography is supposed to be dull and biographers even duller? Even if you’re writing about lust and scandal and depravity, you must be staid. It simply doesn’t do to have fun with life.

Naturally, all of this fussing is happening in the UK. One Kathryn Hughes, who, so worried about this, published an article called “The Death of Life Writing”, mostly because Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, got all naked in print. Real naked with books. Tawdry, indeed. Hughes is agitated because Foreman, whose book, it should be noted, was published in 1998, is still marketing her work. Horrors!

Of course, Foreman’s nudity is not what really worries Hughes. She more concerned with the fact that pseudo-celebrities are pumping out “autobiographies” (use of quotes very intentional) like they’re real authors. We all know they aren’t and we all know these silly books are like candy on a publisher list. You cannot expect the life memories of a 24-year old to be compelling, much less intellectually meaty.

Publishers adore this stuff, for reasons that have everything to do with selling a whole bunch of units quickly and nothing to do with logic. These instant biographies are not killing the weighty world of historical biography. Amanda Foreman, nude or not, is not killing the weighty world of historical biography. The truth of the matter is that many of these works simply don’t appeal to a broad audience.

Or, hmmm, maybe they do, but the insistence on treating them like little pearls of historical fustiness is the differences between selling over 200,000 copies of a book and

Hughes wrote in The Guardian: “By choosing to be photographed nude behind a pile of books, and by allowing her own life story — starry father, tricky adolescence — to become as important as the person she was writing about, Foreman did an accidental disservice to biography in general and to young women biographers in particular.”

Hughes, whose most recent book, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, has sold a respectable 28,759 copies, added: “Since Foreman’s unprecedented hit, photogenic young women are routinely commissioned to produce biographies of equally camera-ready subjects, regardless of whether they are equipped to do so. The results are often intellectually slight and stylistically poor.”

While we might agree that Mrs. Beeton was a, ahem, household name to a certain generation, Georgiana and her life are far more engaging from a storytelling perspective. Two different books, two different audiences, two different authors.

And one serious case of sour grapes.

Hughes needs to get over herself. It’s not the photogenic girls writing fluff who are destroying her world. Pretty girls are the red herring.

• Bitchiness breaks out in the world of biography

It's a specific author's birthday today, and I've made a new LOLcat for you writers. Find out more here.

Mega-thanks to everyone who visited my WordPress yesterday (Tuesday 8th July). You gave me my highest page visits in one day: 223. Considering the previous best was 177, this was quite a jump. Here were the most visited pages:

August 2008 Releases
[REVIEW] Even for Me - Taryn Blackthorne
July 2008 Releases
Reading Wishlist
[COVER ART] Witch Heart - Anya Bast
Cat with Books, Manny, WordPress & Tokyo

Sneezy me has to walk through muddy paddock again now.

There is a NELSON secret on fandomsecrets today. OMGYES!

And no, it wasn't me.

My mom was on national television today, wtf? I left to meet peeps at the Science Museum at 6:30 last night, and for reasons I'm still not clear about, Good Morning America called my mom at 7pm and asked if they could interview her for a segment about keeping a food journal while dieting.

Out of the entire country, they called MY MOM.

We're assuming she's on some Weight Watchers success shortlist. But even that is pretty crazy!

They showed up at 9pm, did the interview (look, it's my dog!), then left, and I had no idea until this morning when my mom woke me up to watch it.

Astute locals may have seen a shortened segment on the Channel 5 news this evening, but who watches Channel 5 news, for reals? Anyway, here's the full segment. They told her they were interviewing multiple people, and that they were specifically looking for someone who was still dieting, not done dieting, but she's the only one in the interview.

Weird!

Mamacita.

(I don't get embed codes so much, so I'm just posting the link, heh. If anyone cares to explain the embedding thing to me, I'd be happy to actually add it here.)

Back
Safe
more to follow.

Vacation was WONDERFUL.

A couple of weeks ago Gena Showalter had contests going on over at her blog every day for books (from her and others). The first day of the contest I won copies of the first two books from her new series (Darkest Night and Darkest Kiss).

Then yesterday over at Smart Bitches they had a contest to win an ARC of Ann Aguirre's new book WANDERLUST. Well, I LUUUURRRRRVED GRIMSPACE, so of course I entered. And guess what was in my inbox this morning... an email from Ann saying that I'd won! I immediately sent back my address and she wrote back saying that my copy would be going out in today's mail.

SQQQUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEE

I can not wait!

i am so tired. it's not even funny. i woke up at 2:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. i figured i'd stay up a bit, write and try to tire out my brain. i gave myself one hour. after that hour, i snookied yoshi and headed for some sleep...which didn't come until about 4ish. then the alarm volume wasn't on so i overslept a bit.

rushing around the house, i left any lunch i could have had in the kitchen. ::sighs:::

and now i'm at work having a triple shot venti soy white mocha and launching the new application. woot. three years! finally.

my inbox looks like a red pen puked in it.

i think my boss finally understands what is i do. or at least closer to what he used to. ( cut for mind stuff )

Last night, theemmer and I were supposed to start a 6-week yoga class. It starts at 6pm in Kent. We get down to the train, sit down, and are sitting there for about 5 minutes when they announce that due to accident on the tracks south of Kent our train will not be leaving at 4:45, but instead will become the next scheduled train and leave at 5:20. The train ride is about 25 minutes (we'd arrive at 5:45). So we were left with a conundrum - Do we stay on the train and know that we'll miss the yoga class or do we dash up to the street and try to catch a bus and maybe still make it in time?

We decided to try the bus route, along with the rest of downtown Seattle. We have two buses we can take that get us there fastest - 158 or 159. The 158 bus showed up first and about 1,000 people tried to get on the already crowded bus. We were not so lucky to get on that one (though it might not have been lucky if we'd had to stand the whole way). We wait and wait and wait and finally the 159 shows up. We jump on and each find a seat. The bus takes off and we're actually making pretty good time down I-5 (which is amazing going south during rush hour). We get off the freeway at the Kent exit at 5:16 and I'm thinking "oh we'll be fine, there will be enough time".

It then took almost 30 minutes to go from I-5 to Kent Station. In fact, we were off the bus and getting ready to cross the pedestrian bridge to the other side of the tracks (where the parking garage is) when guess what rolls into the station... yep, the train we had been on.

So needless to say we did not make it to yoga. We stopped and had italian food at this tiny little place downtown Kent (Bev's Cucina - YUMMY!) and then went home and crashed for the night.

When the school system finally allowed us to learn a second language in a formal classroom setting in 7th grade (when it becomes much much harder to pick up a second language according to all experts and text books), I learned German. I learned it for a few years until I took enough courses and was too flummoxed by the anshlagan, einshlagen, aufshlagen bits (the three ways of saying "the" didn't help either) to continue (my college second language was Latin.)

Anyhow as soon as us 12 years old learned German, we learned that the proper name for Germany was Deutshland. Deutschland? Anyhow, my classmates would give the teacher the finger behind her back, call her Frau Hitler and generally make her cry (she was a strange wacky teacher and a bit too sensitive to be teaching middle school. I always feel bad about my part in never learning much and joining my classmates in disliking her. In my defense, I did like the bitchy 7th grade social studies teacher who was probably a dyke. Everyone else hated her but she didn't need to be liked.)

But even though we were all 12, no one made the obvious pun of calling it Douche-Land.

I wonder if it's because feminine hygiene products were too sophisticated for us. That's a scary thought in and of itself.

Nick Mamatas on Great Writers vs. Good Writers

Read if you haven't read already.

He talks about Stephen King as a great writer who is not a good writer. Ironically enough it was Stephen King's essays before his Gunslinger books that crystallized why J.R.R. Tolkien is also that kind of writer. In both cases, the imitations have been borrowing the imagination of the masters. Ok, it was also Lin Carter's book about what went into The Lord of the Rings (basically everything from WWI to his years as an Oxford professor) that initially gave me the impression that Tolkien did all the work and that fantasy writers afterwards copied off his notes.

Stephen King just tried to do what Tolkien initially did with LOTR and used his own cultural baggage to create an American mythological magnum opus (I think he failed ultimately as the 7th book was just a rush to get things done and have Roland finally get to that fucking tower already, but there were some great moments along the way.)

i will be making an appearance at The Crucible this friday, showing some work and saying hello to anyone that would like to meet me.

here's all the info:

http://ritesofbacchus.com/Artrotica9.html

....Menu Maven, instead of Dinner Diva or Supper Solutions?

Y/N?

Just found the cover art and summary of something I'm really looking forward to. Find out more here.