Tag: reading-is-hot

Button Sunday

Today’s button is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I can’t tell you how much it means to me to know there are so many masterpieces making Tim’s world a more beautiful place. I’m delivering all the good thoughts and get well wishes being sent his way from friends who’re calling, e-mailing, Tweeting, and Facebooking (that’s a verb, right?). Tim may be the perfect example of a broke writer and artist, but he’s wealthy in the love and support from new and lifelong friends.

Then there are the ones of you who don’t really know him but know how much he means to me and send your best. I draw so much strength from all of you–and it gives Tom a chance not to have to be my rock of fortitude 24/7.

What could be better than having a King Cake delivered all the way from New Orleans? It may be Greg’s bad luck that he pulled up to The Compound on the same day Tim’s lung collapsed, but it was our good luck that he was here. Between him, Rhonda, Lindsey, Rex’s attorney Laura, and Lynne, The Compound people and dogs have been taken care of, amused, diverted, and surrounded by love and endless acts of kindness and attention.

Greg’s signing at Murder By the Book was a lot of fun on Saturday. And in one of those spontaneous acts of friendship and generosity, he pulled A Coventry Wedding from his shopping bag and held it up to show everyone. I didn’t even know they were carrying the book there, and the great folks who staff this jewel of a bookstore were right on it, bringing stock to the front counter so I could sign it and offering to host a booksigning for me, though there’s not a murder to be found in Coventry.

Now I need to get one of Lindsey’s delicious cookie brownies to the hospital for Tim before they take him off solid foods again in preparation for his surgery tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted on his status. He’s in good spirits–thanks to his many friends.

Three Shots

I didn’t exactly get permission for this, so if you want your photo removed, let me know. But here are three reader shots. If you have a photo of yourself, your dog, your child, your armadillo (we can’t keep those in captivity in Texas), your entire class, office, or knitting group, or strangers on the street reading A Coventry Wedding, please send it on and I’ll post it here.

Here you see the coy, the tough guy, and the happy bookseller:

Thanks for these photos, and for the photos of the novel on the shelves in stores!

Reading’s getting hotter

I was alerted by Shawn over at Everything and Nothing to this article in the New York Times telling us there’s been a reverse in a twenty-five-year decline in the number of people reading for pleasure. Since the publishing industry has been as hard-hit as any other recently–and no one’s offering writers a bailout, the bastards–it’s always good to hear anything encouraging.

I love readers, and related to that…

Linda over at Raven’s Range gave me permission to reprint a photo of her enjoying a book during a sunny break from a blast of snowy weather they had recently.

ETA 2022: Unfortunately, we lost Linda to illness a few years ago, and links to her blog and photos no longer work. She is so missed.

Linda’s promised to send me a photo of herself reading A Coventry Wedding as soon as she purchases a copy. I am SO LOVING the e-mail I’m getting. I’ve hit a bit of a writing slump. Not writer’s block, just writer’s dormancy. So getting positive feedback on the new novel is sort of a kick in the PJ bottoms. I felt the same upon reading a thoughtful review from Lawrence Schimel in the Lambda Book Report for When You Don’t See Me.

Did I mention that I love readers?

I’ve posted before on here, or maybe on MGH’s LJ, about the first book I remember reading, which was aptly titled Baby’s First Book. The cover illustration gave me my first glimmer of the concept of eternity. It’s a book the termites ate, and my mother later found a used copy to replace it. Little Golden Books, bless them, still publishes it, and I scored a copy for Miss Amelia because the cover baby reminds me so much of her:

And speaking of children reading, my sister wrote a book to give to her granddaughter Morgan at Christmas. Morgan’s aunt (Debby’s daughter Sarah) illustrated it. I don’t have a copy of the illustrated version, but I do have the story itself on my computer now, and I’m looking forward to reading it. You never know with kids if they’ll understand how special something like that is, but when Debby turned away from Morgan after giving her the book, Morgan suddenly hugged it tightly to her chest and closed her eyes. I didn’t get a shot of that, unfortunately, but I did get Morgan in the coolest jeans ever.

There’ll be more beautiful/cool children photos for a while, because I’m so crazy about them. And remember, if you have a photo of yourself reading my books, or ANY books, I’ll be delighted to post them on here as part of the Reading is Hot campaign. Even if the book you’re reading is one by Famous Author Rob Byrnes, although we’re still not sure who he paid off to steal our Lammy back in Aught Seven.

Confirmation of my skepticism AND that reading is hot

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rolled my eyes when people share “What I’m Reading” on their blogs. And this story from BBC News explains why.

Nearly half of all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read to try to impress friends or potential partners, a survey suggests.

Men were most likely to do this to appear intellectual or romantic, found the poll of 1,500 people by Populus for the National Year of Reading campaign.

The men polled said they would be most impressed by women who read news websites, Shakespeare or song lyrics.

Women said men should have read Nelson Mandela’s biography or Shakespeare.

Among the 1,500 who took part in the research were 864 teenagers.

About four in 10 of the 1,500 said they had lied about what they had read to impress friends or potential partners – 46% of men and 33% of women.

Among teenagers, the figure rose to 74%, with most saying they would pretend to have read social networking pages or song lyrics.

One in five adults said they would read their chosen material whilst waiting for their date to arrive in the hope of making a good first impression.

Honor Wilson-Fletcher, director of the National Year of Reading campaign, said: “Reading is a brilliant tool for self-expression.

“I love the fact that every generation seems to know that it can help us all increase our potential appeal in the search for love and romance.

“For all the talk of our superficial obsession with beauty, it looks like underneath it all we know that brains contribute to sex appeal too.”

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/7776046.stm
Published: 2008/12/11 02:47:26 GMT

Such gifts!

No, I’m not talking about Christmas gifts. For those who read my LJ but may not read Timothy’s, he’s been doing interviews with the contributors to Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction, the anthology he and I edited with a release date of early next year. The most recent interview is with one of my favorite writers–one of the first writers of gay fiction I ever read when I “discovered” the genre back in the late 1980s. I can’t adequately express what a gift it is to read an unpublished short story by Felice Picano, and to have him contribute it to a collection I helped edit.


Photo by Christopher Oakley, 2007,
used without permission

You can read Tim’s interview with Felice here. At the end of the interview are links to earlier ones. Tim’s order follows where these writers’ stories appear in the anthology, and there are lots more to come.

Button Sunday

Using certain tags, I’ve gone through four years of LJ archives to fix bad photo links. I know this doesn’t matter to anyone other than me, but when one of my reasons for keeping a LJ is to publish photos, it’s kind of ridiculous to think of people ever meandering through my archives only to see “This photo is no longer available.”

Please, if any of you ever stumble over a missing photo or dead link, let me know. I try to keep this place always at the ready for that moment when one of you wakes in the middle of the night–or the middle of the day for some of you–and MUST FIND THAT PHOTO OF THE KENS WITH BAD HAIR. How tragic if you should be denied seeing it. Not that I remember seeing it when I was fixing things. It could be missing for all I know. My brain is fried from looking at old posts, and what I want to know is, WHY are you people reading this thing? Has anyone ever been more random and unfocused and needlessly verbose than I am?

I figure you’re here for the man and dog photos. So from the true archives–the ones from the shelves in the study–here’s a shot from April of 1999, when Stevie became the first of The Compound dogs to adore Tim. Whenever he was here, she was all his.

My own personal Hump Day Happy

One of the most fun parts of writing a novel is the day you get the galleys. It’s the last part of the process before the actual physical book is printed. It’s the moment when you can not only hold accomplishment in your hands, but still feel the wonderful anticipation of the book to come.

Today, that fun has been doubled for me, as Fedex delivered my galleys for A Coventry Wedding from Kensington, and Tim and I also received the galleys from Cleis for Fool For Love. I’ve been sitting here reveling in the joy of it all, and I’m not making it up that when I flipped to the first page past the front matter and I saw this:

it made me every bit as happy as when I saw this:

Yes, I whited out the lines of David’s story. You don’t think I’d give it away for free, do you?

ETA: If any other contributors to FFL would like to see your first printed page, with text whited out, let me know. I’ll put it in comments for you.

Fools For Love

You would think, looking at my photos, that I sought a co-editor and contributors to the anthology Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction on the basis of handsomeness alone. You’d be wrong to think that, however, as I can’t imagine a more talented group of writers. It makes me want to start another anthology right now just so I can invite them to contribute.

herding cats