Category Archives: On Writing

Readathon Spring 2013

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This is one of my favorite weekends of the year–Spring Readathon! I’ve got a stack of books that I hope to finish today and tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have work-work to do, but I should still get some serious reading-work done too.

Here’s what’s on the menu:

Wild

I’ll be updating this post as I read, so tune in throughout the weekend to follow my progress! And leave a comment below with a link to your blog or social network updates if you’re participating, too.

1:30 pm, Saturday

I’m about 2/3 of the way through Wild. It’s going well so far, although I’ve heard it falters and loses some speed around where I am. But Strayed is a talented, confident writer.

A bird just flew up to my window and peered in, flicking his head back and forth nervously. Kizmet ignored him.

8:17 pm, Saturday

I’m still trucking–or should I say trekking?–through Wild. The end is in sight; I’m pretty sure I’ll finish it tonight after dinner.

I was interrupted earlier by a flash of white outside the front window. A beautiful pale dog stood at my front door, only skittering away when Tinker barked at him. I went into a neighbor’s yard, where the dog was trying to squeeze back through the hole in the fence he must have escaped from. I was able to get a leash on him, and I took him over to the house with the broken fence. The woman, who was pet-sitting for her neighbor, hadn’t realized he had escaped, and was very grateful that we brought him back.

Good deed for the day: done! Now back to reading.

3:05 pm, Sunday

I finished Wild! Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, Melody. I thought you were a reader, and here you are slacking off on Readathon, the most hallowed reading holiday of the year. All you’ve done is finish a book you’d already started before this weekend!”

You’re right, dear reader, in that my literary eyes are always too big for my overcommitted stomach, and I have not finished nearly as many books as I’d hoped. But I have not been sitting idly by! Oh, no, I’ve been very busy. “Busy how?” you ask skeptically. I’m glad you asked.

A Partial List of Things I Did While Reading Wild

  • Ate half a box of salt water taffy
  • Took Tinker on two long walks in the woods
  • Contemplated backpacking the Appalachian Trail
  • Added The Dream of a Common Language to my wish list
  • Added A Walk in the Woods to my wish list
  • Found A Walk in the Woods already on my bookshelf
  • Mowed half the lawn
  • Wondered why the Astapori wouldn’t just steal all of Dany’s dragons, instead of trading their entire army for one
  • Pledged to journal more, or at least blog more
  • Sat on my couch a lot
  • Decided to memorize more poetry, just in case I find myself alone in the woods for three months
  • Added The Ten Thousand Things to my wish list
  • Weeded half the garden
  • Pondered why I leave things half-done
  • Vowed to finish what I start
  • Finished the box of salt water taffy

Plympton Cashes In on Tradition

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I’ve been keeping an eye on a new publishing company, Plympton, and I thought I’d share what they’re doing. (Note: This is not paid content; I’m genuinely interested in their innovative work.)

Love-is-Strong-as-Death-683x1024I recently met Jennifer 8. Lee at a journalism conference. Lee is a reporter who launched Plympton, a digital publisher of serial fiction, with co-founder Yael Goldstein Love. In predicting publishing’s future, Lee and Love have looked to the past and drawn inspiration from serialized authors such as Dickens, Flaubert and Conrad.

Plympton is taking advantage of the rise in tablet and e-readers to release serial fiction. The e-installments of each book will be released biweekly or monthly, ranging from 7,000 to 25,000 words per issue. The founders hope to launch the careers of new writers and to expand the networks of already influential authors by offering solid editorial assistance and tapping into new reading technology such as tablets and e-readers.

Hacker-Mom-by-Austen-Rachlis.-Cover-by-Emily-Carmichael-640x1024Online serialization of stories are not new; Byliner, the Atavist, and Longform, to name a few, have made names for themselves publishing nonfiction and fiction stories of varying length. Plympton plans to focus exclusively upon publishing fiction. When I asked Lee, a well-known nonfiction writer, why she’s focusing on fiction, she said simply, “That’s where the money’s at.”

And she may be right; their month-long Kickstarter campaign raised nearly double the amount they had planned. It didn’t hurt that Plympton’s first three titles were featured prominently in Amazon’s most recent Kindle event, when CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle Serials program.

The-Many-Lives-of-Lilith-Lane-by-E.V.-Anderson-640x1024This is an interesting business story, but more than that, it’s a compelling literary story. Publishers have scrambled for years to find a financially sound model for digital books, but Lee and Love may have found a simple solution that speaks both to the past and the future of fiction.

It’s not the only way forward, but it seems to be one viable path. I’m very interested to see how Plympton does in the next few months.

Nonfiction Book Group at One More Page

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I’m excited to announce that I am now the leader of the Nonfiction Book Group at Arlington’s One More Page Books & More, one of my favorite places in the world. We’ll meet on the second Monday of every month, beginning tomorrow at 7 pm.

My first selection is Boomerang: Travels in the Third World by Michael Lewis. I know this is late notice, but I would love to see supporters of my blog attend the group. Even if you haven’t read the book–I’ll bring you up to speed!
Here’s more info on Boomerang:

Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

Michael Lewis’s investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

I hope you can join me tomorrow or in future months. We’ve got some great books planned!

Read Like a Writer: Join the Club

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I’ve contributed to the wonderful Literature and Libation, which is run by my classmate and good friend Oliver Gray. Check out the post, and don’t forget to subscribe to his blog–he’s got some very solid advice for writers!

So you want to be a writer? Join the club.

The book club, that is.

If you are serious about writing, start reading. Whether you want to write fiction or nonfiction, articles or trilogies, you need to be aware of what else is out there. Keep reading…

Reading Challenges in 2013

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It’s that time of year again: Time to survey the new year ahead of us and dream about all of the wonderful books we’ll read and the places we’ll go. I’m already planning four international and three domestic trips this year, which I’ll be writing about here. And how better to keep entertained on those long flights than with books?

Goodreads Reading Goal: 50 Books

This year, I’m setting a more reasonable goal for the 2013 Goodreads Reading Challenge: 50 books. After only completing 33 of 100 planned books last year, I’ve decided to set my sights on about one book a week–very doable. Hopefully I surpass this goal! Follow my progress here.

Bookshelf ROWDOWN

Bookshelf ROWDOWN!The rules of this year’s Bookshelf ROWDOWN challenge are simple: read physical copies of books that you own.

After you’re done reading, you may decide to keep the books or pass them on to someone else to read. The point of this challenge is to read the books you’ve bought but keep forgetting to read, and possibly to trim your shelves a little bit; I, for one, am always running out of room on my bookshelves, and this challenge helps me winnow out books that I don’t need to keep.

In 2013, I hope to read at least 12 books from my own personal stash. I’d love to make it to 25, though!

Update:
1. Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over by Cathy Alter

Audio Book Challenge

Last year, I failed rather miserably at this challenge, only reading one of six planned audiobooks. This year, I’m already thinking about what I’ll listen to on those long plane rides. For the 2013 Audio Book Challenge (hosted by Teresa’s Reading Corner), I’m again planning to read 6 audiobooks.

Update:
1. I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert

South Asian Challenge

Swapna Krishna will hopefully be hosting her South Asian Challenge again in 2013, and I’m really looking forward to participating. Last year, I did abysmally on this challenge, reading only Butterfly’s Child by Angela Davis-Gardner (set in Japan) and War by Sebastian Junger (set in Afghanistan). (And do they really count?)

This year, I’m hoping to read at least five books set in South Asia or by South Asian authors. I’m visiting India in February, so I’m reasonably confident that I’ll make progress with this challenge.

As I read throughout the year, I’ll come back to this post and update it on my progress. Here’s to another great year in reading!

I receive a very, very small commission when you purchase the book through the above links to Indiebound. Thank you for helping to support my site–and my book addiction!

How to Archive Your Documents Like a Pro

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Recently, I found myself in a panic, trying to find beloved footage of sea turtles from my vacation to Maui. I pored over my work laptop, my home desktop, my home external hard drive. Desperately, I tried to think where I would have put the files. It might be on my work desktop or my work external hard drive…

“This is ridiculous!” I thought. Something must be done to control all these files.

We’ve all been there. You accidentally delete an important work project and unthinkingly empty your trash. Your PC succumbs to a virus. Your laptop gets run over by a car. And you sit, numbly, too heartbroken for tears, as you realize that a labor of love—or, at least, tons of time—has been lost forever.

Learn from your mistakes. Maintain an active, well-organized archive. Especially for writers, keeping your work backed up is crucial. Even if something was published in a major venue, you should have your own copy (or copies).

I’m certainly not perfect, but I do try to keep organized, complete archives of all of my work—dating back to when I stored it on floppy drives. (Yeah, I said floppy drives. Now turn down that rap music and get off my lawn, you whippersnappers.) So I have a few suggestions.

Everything important should be backed up in three places. I use external hard drives and cloud storage in addition to local drives (such as my computer’s desktop or Documents folder).

If the phrase “external hard drive” is new to you, don’t panic. Follow these links to the Amazons (or, if you’re into that sort of thing, check them out at your local computer store). Do not look at the price tag! These are your digital babies we’re talking about—this is no time to cheap out. I recommend LaCie, especially the “rugged” drives, which work with both Macs and PCs. My faithful Western Digital drive has stood the test of time, and I haven’t had many problems switching from Mac to PC with it, either. I’m old-school; when I bought the Western Digital drive back in 2006, 320 GB was an amazing amount of space, and I haven’t really needed more than that. However, you might want to spring for the 500 GB or even 1 TB (terabyte) drive if you are storing a lot of photos and video.

Now, on to the fun part: Organizing and backing everything up.

I have two different archives.

One, named “Melody’s Master Archive,” lives on my home desktop and my home external hard drive. Individual folders worth keeping—for instance, a folder containing all of the papers I ever wrote as an undergrad—should also be stored on discs. (And they will be, once I quit writing this blog post and start taking my own advice.)

My Master Archive contains everything that I have deemed worth keeping over the years, from pictures to music to half-baked story ideas. Everything. Every 4-6 months, I make sure everything is organized on the home-desktop version, and then I copy it over to the home external hard drive. The external exists only to store back-ups of the Master Archive. I recommend storing the external in a warm, dry, safe place—perhaps wrapped in silk and nestled among pillows, with a cloud of guardian angels surrounding it. Just like a computer hard drive, external drives can break, so never store anything on an external drive that you don’t also have somewhere else.

Then I have my cloud storage. I use Dropbox primarily, with Google Drive as a backup. I have linked all three of my computers—home desktop, work laptop, and work desktop—to sync with Dropbox, and I keep all of the documents I’m actively working on those folders. Once I’m done with a story or a bunch of reviews, I then move those documents over to my Master Archive and delete them from Dropbox.

Note: Do not store sensitive or confidential information (your social security number, passwords, sources’ names and contact info, W-2s and taxes, pictures of your weed, etc) in the cloud. Identity theft can happen to anyone—even the pros.

It is extremely important to make sure you keep your Dropbox documents backed up. These are the documents that I use every day, and I would be lost without them. It is fearfully easy to delete items in Dropbox, and deleted documents are only retrievable for 30 days. Therefore, I like to create a “Dropbox backup archive” on my home desktop that I update every month or so. I copy all my files to a local desktop in a folder named with the date on which I copied them.

No matter what system you devise, the most important thing is that you save your work in as many places as possible. Hoard it. Your documents, pictures, videos from vacation—all of these digital items comprise hard work and fantastic memories, a life represented by a series of code and some tubes (as I understand). Don’t lose the things that matter to you just because they’re technically not real.

Do it for the sea turtles.

Women’s Prize for Fiction Reading Challenge – January 2013 Edition

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January is one of two magical months where I focus on reading books from the winners and nominees of my favorite literary award, the Women’s Prize for Fiction. (Previously, it was known as the Orange Prize–hence the original name of the challenge, “Orange January/July.”)

I’ve already read the works of several winners and nominees over the years, including:

This month, I’m in the midst of more wonderful Prize titles, including:

  • State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
  • Property by Valerie Martin
  • The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
  • The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
  • The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison

If I have time, I’d also like to read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht; and Paradise by Toni Morrison. But some of these will definitely have to wait until the July edition of the challenge.

(Thanks to nomadreader for a complete list of Orange Prize winners and nominees!)

Blogging Resolutions in 2013

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Happy new year!

In 2012, I had a lot of competing priorities, and sadly I had to stop blogging for a while. However, I never stopped reading, and I have plenty of great books to share with you. I’m still pretty busy, but I’m trying to make my blog a higher priority this year. I miss interacting with all of my bookish friends, and even thinking about blogging regularly again has put a smile on my face.

So what, exactly, should you expect from Melody & Words this year?

Reading and reviewing books is still very important to me, so my reviews and top-ten lists of books won’t go anywhere. Since I’m still chugging through classes at Johns Hopkins (and loving it!), I’d also like the blog to become an outlet for the writing advice that I’m gleaning from my professors, as well as copyediting and proofreading tips that I’ve discovered throughout my career.

In addition, I’d like to include more posts on my travels, which should be fairly extensive this year, and I’d like to have more posts on cooking–both recipes and cookbook reviews. I’ve enjoyed experimenting with video, and will try to continue my video reviews and mailbox series. In addition, I’d like to try out photo essays.

But always, I’ll return to my first love: reading.

Book challenges continue to be a fun way of meeting my reading goals. I will be renewing my annual (but as-yet unfinished) challenge to read 25 books from my personal collection, Bookshelf ROWDOWN, and I also plan to participate in Orange January–more on that later.

Here’s to another fantastic year!

Monday Mailbox: Anne Tyler, Hasidic Sects, and Marvelous Memoirs

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I receive a very small commission when you purchase the book through the above links to Indiebound. Thank you for helping to support my site–and my book addiction!

Orange July 2012

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It’s incredible to think that 2012 is halfway over. What a busy but fun year so far!

This month, I will be participating in Orange July, a twice-yearly challenge to read more books from the winners and nominees of the Orange Prize, my favorite literary award.

This month, I’m planning to read We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver; State of Wonder by Ann Patchett; The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison; and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

I’m also hoping to get to The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht; Property by Valerie Martin; Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and Paradise by Toni Morrison.

Wish me luck, and have a great month!