Sharp Words

I spotted this on one of the book-related blogs I read, and thought I’d promote it myself:

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

It runs from September 14th until the 18th (which is a very short week, IMO), and its raison d’être is to celebrate book bloggers – which as far as I can tell, means those blogs which concentrate on posting reviews, long or short, of all sorts of kinds of books.

Book bloggers are encouraged to register and participate; one of the fun-sounding things is that bloggers swap interviews. There are awards of course, and giveaways, and over 400 bloggers took part last year (that’s an awful lot of books being promoted out there).

I’m not registering myself, because I don’t think I blog enough about books (nor have I been blogging enough at all lately), but some of my readers might find it relevant… and I just like the idea.

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It’s strange – after so long without really blogging anywhere, I have the urge to do so once more. This might be because I’ve started a new blog completely unrelated to anything I’ve tacked previously – it’s called The Travelling Wombat, and it contains a lot of photos which illustrate the adventures of a small stuffed animal as it travels round the world (well, it’s been to Italy and Ireland so far, but is off to some other locations soon).

But working on that has given me the blogging bug again, which is good for my personal blog too. Trouble is, although I really want to post here as well, I’m completely stuck for ideas. Even my stack of Quotes and Words of the Day aren’t much help – none of them are providing me with the right sort of inspiration. I haven’t even really written any poems lately that are worthy of being shared with anyone else.

Anyone got any idea they’d be prepared to share with me for something I can post about? (Help? Anyone?)

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I had six days away from home. I did have some net access, but not enough for me to be bothered to do more than check email, approve comments, and toss up a couple of posts and photos to my more personal blog.

However, that means that since I got home on Monday evening, I’ve been trying to catch-up with non-urgent emails, replying to comments, Facebook, LiveJournal friends and the couple of dozen blogs in my feed reader (I’m a Bloglines gal, if anyone’s interested).

I’ve been doing a pretty good job of avoiding most of the work, though. I’m caught up, mostly, with friends’ blogs and LJs, but I’m resolutely ignoring all the requests on Facebook. And although I’ve read the feeds which only had one or two posts, I’m daunted by those that have four or five or fifteen. Where do I start? The whole point of my feed reader is so that I don’t miss posts by those I like – and yet, when they pile up like that, I begin to wonder if there’s any point in wading through them.

Does anyone else get like this after missing a few days’ worth of blogs, as if it’s too much trouble to read them? What are good coping strategies? (Help?!)

I do like all my social networking connections, but it does take time out of my day, that’s for certain.

And in other news, I had a great few days away in the land of my mothers, and even got to watch the rugby in company. I need to get back to the grind though, as I didn’t do as much writing as I’d hoped (even if I got some poem ideas) and I obviously missed a week of blogging here.

Edited to add: I forgot Twitter in my list of social networking! I tweeted while travelling, but haven’t checked for replies, nor have I even launched Tweetdeck since I got home. I don’t even follow that many people, but I know there’ll be a whole stack of tweets waiting for me. I could just ignore them, of course…

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As per the subject, this post is just a reminder about my Group Writing Project – Writing that we love.

Comment on that post (or this one) with the link to your own blog post contributing to this group project! (And please do it even if I read your blog – I might not have realised it was related to this project.)

The deadline is January 31st (this Saturday), and I’ll post a synopsis next week.

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All statistics correct to the time of posting this – further hits and comments on December 31st not included.

Posts made: 170 (including this one)

Most popular posts:

1. A love poem for St Valentine’s Day (Feb 14th) – 1009 – most of these hits came from StumbleUpon although quite a few searches pick it up too
2. Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (May 15th) – 878 – most of these hits came from searches
3. Word of the Day (06/08/08) – 600 – most of these hits came from StumbleUpon, I suspect – it was an odd post to have stumbled (the word of the day being feuilleton), but there’s no accounting for taste

Comments posted: 678 (not including any on this post)
Spam comments: nearly 15,000

Top commenters:

1. Ken Armstrong – 74
2. Susan – 69
3. A. & Fiendish – both with 23

Most commented posts:

1. Aaargh, the horror… (July 25th) – 17 – the hideousness of a hairdresser’s salon name
2. Thoughts about reviewing books (July 6th) – 16
3. I wrote this poem: Childhood Colours (May 24th) – 14

Books read: 200 + 15 re-reads
120 (60%) were first-time reads; 87 (43.5%) were borrowed from the library or friends, 13 (6.5%) BookMooched, 19 (9.5%) bought and 7 (3.5%) were free review copies.

Book reviews written: 17

Favourite new book: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

Technical Writing posts made: 18

Poems posted: 10

Guest posts: 5

My own favourite posts:

1. 4×4 inspirations for writing (April 3rd)
2. I wrote this poem: Holes in the World (April 14th)
3. Do dreams influence your writing? (June 8th)

Top 10 search terms used to find this blog:

• sharp words (sharp word and other words for sharp are both in the top 10)
• lorna freeman (shame I’ve never actually written anything about her novels except mentioning them in passing)
• the book thief (there are 3 other variations on this in the top 10)
• misread words
• 100 books to read

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I thought for some variety, I’d take a list of the questions people have entered into search engines to find this blog with. And then answer them.

Why do we give satsumas at Christmas?
Because they are bright and orange and shiny. And once upon a time, were a rare treat which probably cost as much as most basic toys. (I have no idea why this question turned up this blog – no, wait, I figured it out, I mentioned Christmas satsumas in my poem Childhood Colours.)

How to pronounce feuilleton
Try looking it up in a dictionary and learning how to use pronunciation marks. Even try an online one – Merriam-Webster even has little sound files of how words should be pronounced. Or else go to this Word of the Day post.

Is The Book Thief written in third person?
Well, yes and no. It’s essentially Death recounting a story, so large chunks of it appear to be in the third person, but overall, it’s written in the first person. It’s a bit confusing, actually. (review by me & Ken)

What are technical words?
They’re ones that the ordinary person doesn’t understand because they’re, well, technical. If you want a more specific answer, they are words which have definitions relating to a specific industry or craft or enterprise, and which might not be in common use.

What day of the week was May 6th 2006?
Looking at a calendar tells me that it was a Saturday.

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