Good Stuff Odds and Ends

There is a fantastic thing going on the internet today. I daily go creeping round the literary blog world without leaving footprints. Nathan Bransford's site is magnificent. He is an agent at Curtis Brown and his site helped me with the entire querying agent publishing process. His advice is good, clear, specific and invaluable. On his blog today--the one that I read everyday--he writes about a group of writers that came together to form a 'donate 50 cents to certain library per comment left on blog' challenge.

The turn out is phenomenal. Blogs that have six people following and only two comments in their history suddenly have forty seven comments all from people creeping around the bloggy-sphere like me. I like that. I like money donated to libraries. I like people leaving footprints for a good cause. More footprints Priya.

In other good news a wonderful writer who I absolutely love wrote me a wonderful blurb--yipee! I almost fell out of my chair when my editor sent it to me. I can't say anymore (for fear of it somehow being mysteriously taken away more than anything) but I am truly delighted. I did not see that coming.

And--if yesterday wasn't wonderful enough. I was in Barnes and Noble (where I use big history/design/biography books for research but do not buy them--as soon as I can I will because I fervently believe in buying books, but these books are just out of my budget/baggage/packing limitations right now) and I was reading Breaking Dawn. Ok, I have a thing about Twilight. It is all my friend Amber's fault. A couple of years ago we had coffee in Kapaa and she told me that she had fallen in love with a fictional vampire and I had to read these books. Feeling impervious to such wacky vampire mania and vaguely superior I read Twilight--and then I refused to speak to anyone for three weeks while I plowed through the other three.

I love these books. I read them over and over to try to figure out what she did to my brain to make me react that way and... nope. Haven't got it yet. Anyway I often treat myself to ten minutes of these books when in other cities (mine live in the laundry room in Hawaii where I actually hid them from renters who might want to steal them). These hefty little monsters are also outside my packing/baggage limitations and so wherever I go I read them in bookstores. But you have to limit it to ten minutes--anymore and the stories get into your head and that is the ballgame for your own writing that day. You people are getting way too clear an idea of how bizarre my days really are...

A ten year old girl sat next to me and started reading Eclipse. Total silence. Total absorption. A few minutes later I felt more people sitting on the bench but did not look up. When my ten minutes were up I put the book down and looked around. I was in a row of nine girls no more than fourteen, reading Twilight books. Love it.