Get Lost in Literature

  This is the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. I assume most of you already know this, but if you're from a country other than the U.S.A maybe you don't know. What it means is this: With regards to religion, you have the right to practice or not practice whatever the hell you want without the Government cramming a specific theology down your throat. You also have the freedom to say whatever you want and may do so at any time even if a cop is informing you of your right to remain silent. Media like newspapers, tv, magazines and books are allowed to express opinions and distribute information unhindered by the Government whether They like it or not. If you feel a cause coming on, you may join a nonviolent protest in private or in public, and you may hold the Government accountable for wrongdoing because it is supposed to work for the People by the People and not for itself. This Amendment has long been interpreted as "the freedom of expression" because...

I've been having trouble focusing, having trouble reading. I took a step back, and decided to relax with some old friends. Which led me to pick up a Harry Potter book and subsequently to a decision and a breakthrough. The decision of course, was if I was reading the series again for the umpteenth time, I really ought to come up with some kick ass reasons as to why the story is so good. The breakthrough, came when thinking about things that make HP standout. One of the things, isn't how it's different, it's how it's alike. I want to examine (or ramble about) patterns. The most common theme in young adult media is a protagonist from a broken home. It occurs in Harry Potter, but if you're a movie fan, maybe you notice that Disney built its entire franchise upon this idea. Neglected, belittled, abandoned, or orphaned, children from broken homes tend to do really well in mainstream media. Even if an individual observer comes from a loving family, these stories of t...

It drives me crazy when I hear people say, "I don't like books...Reading is boring." I have a suspicion this stems from how we're taught to read as children. We go from having cute picture books and silly rhymes read to us by the people we love, to school where the teachers pick out the most brutal and boring and occasionally upsetting books and force children to read them for grades. I love books, but I remember reading in school and it sucked. Bad things were constantly happening to people and animals... I didn't like that. The writing was so dull, I'd rarely make it 3 pages in to find out what horrible thing was happening in fiction this semester.  I remember my mother yelling at me, "How can you be have an F on a book report! You read!"  That's true. I read. I never left the house without a book, and that was before I was ever enrolled in school. I didn't have a security blanket, I had a security Where the Wild Things Are (and a...

Criticism - the analysis and judgement of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work It's a fine line between criticism and trolling in today's dramatic digital world of Internet Balls. I suspect anyone who's posted an opinion on an online forum or messaging board is familiar with Internet Balls. It's the thing that turns nerds into raging, venomous, insult flinging, know it alls whose tempers won't be soothed until they feel they've successfully torn you a new one. I've got a few indie-author friends who complain about negative reviews. No one likes being told their writing is bad. Less so if it's done by an angry reader with a case of I.B--it's a syndrome so wildly out of control people are now becoming desensitized to any form of criticism that isn't positive. And as a reviewer whose actually had to give negative reviews, I can admit it is so effing tempting to start ripping away... So how does a reader walk the fine ...

Because Nerds want answers to the hard questions. This topic was inspired by a friend on Facebook and The CW's upcoming television show, iZombie. The upcoming show looks cute. Like kittens riding Roombas cute. The concept is fairly simple (it's The CW, of course it's simple) a med student becomes a zombie and winds up working in a coroner's office. I mentioned on Facebook the concept was both intriguing and confusing. On the one hand, zombies are "in" and CW plays its cards right, it could be a hit show. On the other hand, CW's focus is usually pretty actors and actresses to distract from mediocre writing; which means its unlikely CW's going to play cards at all. I want to know how a zombie, who by definition is brain dead, achieves cognition, instead of just the miracle of standing upright and chasing down victims. If CW's writers were smart, they'll explain this and have a hit show. If they're not smart, they'll pretend like...

...if you don't already know. If you haven't been on GoodReads today, or if you aren't a member of the Feedback group, you may have missed the memo. Apparently, GoodReads has been taking the accusations of bullying very seriously and have decided to update and enforce their policies. Hateful comments between venomous readers and spiteful authors are being erased; reviews, bookshelves, and booklists that personally attack authors are being permanently deleted even as I type this entry. Personally, I'm pleased to see that GoodReads is restricting negative reviews to book content, if only because I'm a very literal person, and GR is very literally a book review site as much as a social network... I was also a bit relieved to see Admins stepping up and trying to rein in the animosity...until this announcement spurred on a whole new round of whining. Who would complain? People who have the most to lose, the people who enjoyed flaming, spamming, and  bullying. The peo...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales from the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald This is one of the books I'm trying to read at the moment. It was a free book, I got off of  Pixels of Ink . Its a compilation of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer who is supposed to be one of the greats. So far I've read, Benjamin Button, Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Tarquin of Cheapside , and for the most part I'm enjoying them. But whoever did the compiling screwed up. Dropped words, phrases and at times whole sentences. I'll be reading along, reading along, and suddenly I hit a blank space. When the blank space ends, I'm located somewhere in the middle of a sentence. When I finally muster up a review, I'm going to review Fitzgerald favourably... But I'm gonna flame the shit out of the transcriber. The real question is, who takes classic literature and butchers it? Who does that? Seedbox Press, LLC apparently. Here we have a s...

The phrase, pull-to-publish is getting thrown around a lot these days. P2P is the act of taking a story that started out as a highly popular fan fiction and translating it into an original work of fiction. Fan fiction is basically amateur writers, showing their appreciation for the works that inspired them by writing stories based on those works. So if you like Harry Potter, maybe you write a story where Hermione falls in love with Draco...Or if you're a Twilight fan you write about what happens if Bella chose Jacob instead of Edward. And if you're a fan fiction author, who has chosen to P2P, you take the story you once offered for free, down off the Internet, send it to an indie-publishing house, and make money off of it. Stories like Fifty Shades of Grey come to mind, as does The Mortal Instruments . Two very popular stories that started out as something else entirely. Is this illegal? No. P2P is not illegal because plagiarism is considered merely unethical; it is mor...

GoodReads is my favorite social network/ book blogging website at the moment...And as someone who enjoys and fully supports the freedom of speech, I'd like to weigh in on an issue that's been pissing me off. Bullying on GoodReads. I see people making mountains out of molehills; author's claiming readers are bullies, readers claiming authors a bullies, and readers at each others' throats in general. One complaint on GR, is that people are marking books they've never read with negative ratings... Often these are books that haven't been released, only the cover and summary to tell people the story's coming, and occasionally while the ARCs are floating around. People call this bullying. My problem with this claim is that there are other readers, marking books they haven't read, marking books that haven't been released, with 5 star ratings! So here we have two groups of people who think they can predict the future, but only one of these groups of people...