Reading Books And Writing Blogs

  Tucson Weather Today

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I arrived back home from the desert yesterday and got right to work catching up on various tasks that had been shoved aside for more pressing matters.

The first thing I did was to finally order a kindle from Amazon.com and I am looking forward to receiving and reading from it one day within the coming week. For the last few weeks I have been reading from my son's kindle so I have grown familiar with its operation. Of course I have been reading e-books using my Kindle for PC for quite some time, but it will be nice to be able to read them while lying in bed at night, which is my favorite time for reading fiction.

My friend AVT recently advised me to purchase a Kindle. It took me a while to do it, but I finally got around to taking his advice.

One of the novels I read using Mike's Kindle was the opening book in the Left Behind series. I will offer no review of the book except to say that I most certainly do not suggest that anyone should pay good money for a copy of it.

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I was asked why I include the WORD FOR THE DAY and the BIRTHDAY sections in most of my daily blog entries. The main reason is that I enjoy looking up and selecting my personal choice of listed birthday subjects, featuring only those celebrities with which I am familiar and who interest me. Additionally, I like knowing the meanings of words, and I recently received an email message from a young reader living in Germany who told me she reads my blog every day just so she can add some new English words to her vocabulary.

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WORD FOR TODAY


disparate [DIS-puhr-it]
Adjective
Essentially different in kind; not allowing comparison.
Noun
Things so unlike that there is no basis for comparison.
Synonyms
different - dissimilar - unlike

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY


Neil Armstrong

 

Born Aug 5, 1930
Age: 81 years old

Neil Alden Armstrong is an American former NASA astronaut, test pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor, United States Naval Aviator, and the first person to set foot upon the Moon.

John Huston

  Born Aug. 5, 1906
Died Aug 28, 1987

John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Misfits (1961), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). During his 46-year career, Huston received 15 Oscar nominations, won twice, and directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston, to Oscar wins in different films.

Loni Anderson


Born Aug. 5, 1946
Age: 65 years old

Loni Kaye Anderson is an American actress who is known for having played the role of Jennifer Marlowe on the CBS television sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and for playing Jayne Mansfield and Thelma Todd in television movies.

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Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
--Stephen King

What Is A Successful Blog?

Tucson Weather Today

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According to the owners of several successful bloggers, it is important to have a focus -- in order to build a 'brand' one must be associated with an idea. Aha! So that is why I have so few readers, or at least so few that bother to comment on my unfocused renderings of random content.

A successful blog attracts readers who agree with what is offered, but I tend to write about too many conflicting ideas on too many different subjects.

And I do that very thing . . . every day.

This lack of focus is something I believe I can conquer, but to do so I would have to give up the idea of posting to the blog every day. I am just not that prolific a writer. Or else I am not that skillful or intelligent enough.

Or do not care enough.

And . . . do I even want my blog to be successful?

I'll have to think about it.

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I read an online newspaper's headline that stated: Thai state media: Thai billionaire who created Red Bull energy drink dies at 89.

And this brought home a fact that I have almost always known --

Everybody dies!

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Gene Weingarten: Publish and perish is the title of a column from The Washington Post that might (or might not) be of interest to new writers hoping to be published.

Weingarten wrote: This is excerpted from a speech I gave last week at the Tucson Festival of Books -- and then he went on to give his opinion about the modern literary scene. Below are some of the highlights:

". . . books do not sell."

“. . . jacket copy, which is the material on the book jacket, lavishly complimentary about the author, and often written in the third person by the author himself."

"Publishers love blurbs; it’s their system of influence peddling. The dirty little secret about blurbs is that they are often written by someone who not only isn't familiar with the writer, but sometimes hasn’t even read the book. He is writing the blurb as a favor to his publisher."

The column is supposed to be an insider's somewhat comical rendition of what book publishing is really all about.

I doubt its veracity, and I didn't think it was funny at all.


By the way . . . I did not attend last week's Tucson Festival of Books but a member of my family did, and she had her picture taken with author Terry Brooks, a famous American writer of fantasy fiction.

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Word For Today

inveterate
(adj.)
stubbornly established by habit

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Bruce Willis

Born March 19, 1955

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Now that I have started thinking about becoming a successful blogger, I can't seem to let the thought go.

Damn!

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A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.
--David Brinkley

Second Thoughts . . .

After posting the last three entries I have been feeling some regret at the direction being taken. I suspect that a blog is not the proper venue for fiction. Not for me. Not at this time anyway. Not yet.

I am considering a move to delete the 'fictional' entries and re-write them then store them for future use as compositional 'notes' to be used later in a fuller more conventional form, such as a 'short-story' or as scenes from within a novel of some kind. Or a screen-play, or something else altogether.

But I am not sure yet.

Just thinking about it.

Always On My Mind

While sorting through my horde (hoard?) of old pictures I found myself assailed by some stinging pangs of regret, especially as I lingered over photos of my married life -- pictures of my two former wives -- images from my first marriage of fourteen years and the second one of twenty years.

The regret stemmed for my recollection of the many thoughtless and undeserved hurts I so cruelly and unnecessarily inflicted on those two fine ladies. I think of those times often. And the older I get the more intense become the feelings.

Elvis sang of such remorse . . .

Sigh . . .

I take notes . . . constantly. Not all of them result in fruitful action but occasionally a thought will strike a particularly emotional note and I compose (sketchily in my mind) a description of what happened or at least what I think happened back then.

And that has stimulated me to consider writing a kind of 'Memoir' (But not a 'traditional' one fer God's sake) and I think I'll do so, at least I intend to work up a list of remembered events from the early years, even if merely an 'idea-skeleton' to be fleshed out later.

One real problem while doing this will be to maintain honesty as much as possible. Whenever I have in the past tried to depict a factual event there was always the tendency to prevaricate and to exaggerate or 'whitewash' actual actions of the people (especially myself) that are being remembered.

Prevaricate?

I have always thought that prevaricate means to tell a lie. But prevaricate does not mean merely 'to blatantly present an untruth.

According to one dictionary prevaricate means. "To stray from or evade the truth; equivocate."

Another dictionary defines prevaricate as: "To speak falsely or misleadingly; deliberately misstate or create an incorrect impression."

And the definition of quintessential is, "the perfect example of..."

To make an unfamiliar English word one's own, one should use the unfamiliar word or words in a newly composed meaningful sentence. Therefore:

"The quintessential product of the conventional memoir is boredom and the quintessential ingredient of boredom is prevarication."

The paying market for an honestly rendered memoir is probably quite small. There are always writing contests, though. And personal website journals. And blogs.

Sigh . . .