Owner: Of Making Many Books URL:http://rebeccagrabill.blogspot.com Join Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:35:59 -0500 Rating:1 Site Description: Of Making Many Books there is no end. This is a place where author Rebecca Grabill searches for meaning in the endlessness, and has some fun doing it. Site statistics:Click here
She was astonished to see how her grandmother looked - Gustav Dore 1970-01-01 00:59:59 My first Wordless Wednesday. Shhhhhhhh.(Wordless? I can't do it! Check out the translation feature in the sidebar, and if you want to translate your own blog, find the widget here. Okay, that's it. No more words. Promise. Really. I mean it now, not even one more wo-)
Lessons from Deadwood: Sentences 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I was going to talk about the dialogue in Deadwood, the individual and powerful voice given to each character. But Milch's genius goes beyond snappy dialogue. It goes beneath dialogue, to something even more foundational. Sentences. I've been devouring Francine Prose's book, Reading Like a Writer. Devouring in small doses. I'll read a page while watching my son's fencing lesson, or I'll sneak it into the bathroom with the rats and spiders, or take it in the car to flip open at stop lights. I'm up to chapter three, Sentences. There is beauty in a sentence, isn't there? Sure, there's beauty to a careful story arc and to a brilliant idea—but without the sentence even the most honed plotline of the most novel premise is relegated to "that commercial stuff," the careless tripe that fails to inspire, even if it does sell a million copies. And of course, there are the books made up entirely of beautiful sentences, without the plot or premise, and these are great for Read more:Lessons
To Swipe a Title: A Pounding at the Polls 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Old news, but when it comes to current events, I'm not very current. This is what happens when I spend more time scanning iTunes radio streams for something passably cool than scanning msnbc.com. Anyway, I did my civic duty (my civic privilege, I should say) because if you don't vote, you can't complain about your elected officials. Not that I know enough about what's going on to complain. So, since I have nothing to say on the election, I will share some links to those who do.Chuck Colson talked of the pounding conservatives took in the polls, and suggests a reason for it. I think he makes a good point, and I hope you will check out his Breakpoint, A Pounding at the Polls
: Why Conservatives Lost. You can listen to it, or read it.I listened.Total aside, speaking of Chuck Colson. I had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of weeks ago. Uncanny, to hear a voice so familiar, and to see not the sliver gleam of my kitchen radio but an actual person, full of expression and reality. I sho Read more:Swipe
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What I Do When I'm Supposed to be Writing 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Your Vocabulary Score: A-Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!You must be quite an erudite person.How's Your Vocabulary?My thanks to Karlana for the distraction.
I Guess I Shouldn't be Surprised (Yes, I'm still wasting time) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 You Are 44% Capitalist, 56% SocialistWhile you are definitely sympathetic to a free economy, you also worry about the less fortunate.Wealth and business is fine, as long as those who are in need get helped out too.You tend to see both the government and corporations as potentially corrupt.Are You a Socialist or Capitalist? Read more:Guess
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Things that Go Squeak in the Night 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This morning I awoke to a startling sight. Something dark and shadowy in the toilet. I suppose that, in itself, isn't so startling. I have a five-year-old who is very adept at taking care of himself independently. Washing hands, fixing snacks, using the bathroom. He even knows not to flush at midnight because his baby sister sleeps just one wall away from the bathroom.What startled me was that, after flushing, the shadowy thing was still there. And when I looked closer, eyes stared blindly up at me, and a little lifeless nose, and tiny paws curled inward.A rat. Drowned in my toilet.Just one of the many things I love about living in an old, old house in the somewhat-inner city. This was not as startling as one might think - it was not the first rat we've had in this old house. I had one scamper over my bare feet and out the front door at four AM, after an hour of chasing it through the house with a broom, while eight months pregnant. Another met its demise from that same broom, again Read more:Night
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13 Reasons I Don't Like Halloween 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This year I'm dressing up as the Halloween
Scrooge. BAH HUMBUG! 1. The same kids keep coming back, and on the latter visits they shout indignantly, "Hey! That was only one! You gave me three baby Snickers LAST time!" 2. If I bother taking the kids trick-or-treating, we have to walk half a mile to find a house with the light on. And we live in the city. 3. Sometime after 10pm, a drunk 18-year-old trick-or-treater who isn't in costume will ring the doorbell and demand candy. It won't matter that the porch light has been off all evening. 4. There's not much point to a costume if you have to wear a snowsuit over top of it. 5. Except there will always be at least one crowd of pre-teen girls roaming the streets without snowsuits, without clothing, too. (Costumed as the Spice Girls?) 6. However much I enjoyed dressing up as a Hatchet-Murder-Victim in my youth (I was a macabre child), I am disturbed by my own child's interest in the fake blood and oozing scabs on sale at the groce Read more:Reasons
Show Me Some Links and I'll Show You Some Love 1970-01-01 00:59:59 It's LinkLove Friday at Of Making Many Books.I received an invitation to visit a new site called Share My Testimony.org. I found myself clicking through stories, following links. I love personal stories, whether they are memoirs, birth stories, or conversions, and this site is sure to grow. Well worth a visit.On a more personal note, my wonderful husband's wonderful book has its first blog review! I don't understand it, and I'm not quite sure how much the reviewer liked the book (Hubby says, "For a VanTillian, yeah, he liked it."). But it's exciting, all the same.And another new blog. The owner of A Garden in the Pocket is working her way through a list of the top 100 works of literature. Everything from The Da Vinci Code to Wuthering Heights, and as she's reading, she's posting reviews. So, stop by and add to your list of must-reads. Tegan is not only sweet, but a talented artist, and I love her blog title.Another blog title I love, Beelzeblog. Why did the devil need a blog? Hi
Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure 1970-01-01 00:59:59 No, I'm talking about my computer. Really. My laptop hard drive is toast.It all began last week when Microsoft Word wouldn't save my document. Out of memory? What? I know I'm close to running out of memory, but how would the computer know that? (Har har.) I worked around the error, rebooted and all was well. Well, except for overall sluggishness, so I ran some PC Doctor utilities (I didn't even know I had them until then) and defragmented the hard drive (took seven hours). And who would have thought—it seemed fixed!Seemed. Until yesterday.12:14 pm Kids eating lunch, I decide to check email and maybe put something together for Miss Snark's Crapomiter. But, odd, what's that strange clicking noise? A fan? Not the hard drive. Certainly NOT the hard drive.Flashback to early spring: A refurbished HP desktop, a Christmas gift for my oldest child, and it started acting funny. Hmmm, that's a new error message. I'll reboot and then I'll get our files backed up just in case. S Read more:Catastrophic
First Lessons in Economics 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Late last week my oldest lost his second tooth. It was quite the Event, complete with tears and blood and several hours of wiggly-tooth anxiety. Captain Intensity does everything at 110%, including losing baby teeth. Hopes for the Tooth Fairy sustained him through it, and his hopes were not disappointed. But with a second tooth, like with a second child, it got the same excitement but it got a little less attention. The Tooth Fairy made a special trip to the bookstore for the first fall-out and she had to enlist a few dozen of her fairy friends to help her tuck the monster-sized book about Noah's Ark underneath Captain's pillow. This time, no special trips. TF tucked a $1 bill under that pillow and added in an edible treat. Captain Intensity was just as thrilled. He's been holding his dollar ever since, scouring toy catalogues (which we have in plenty this time of year) for something to buy. The only problem being, his prize won't even cover shipping costs, let alone the p Read more:Economics
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Is it Friday Yet? 1970-01-01 00:59:59 No. It's Thursday night. (For those who notice dates, I'm post-dating for tomorrow morning, early. Just so it will "seem" like it's Friday
.)So what do we have to do on a Friday but watch YouTube videos? And since I'm in a dark and artsy mood, here are two classics:The first, a reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. It is long (8 mins), but wow, the voice is just perfect for this tale, isn't it? Creepy.And now for the Simpson's take on one of my favorite poems of all time, The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. I remember first seeing this clip on a Halloween night when I was maybe fourteen. I loved it and thought I'd never see it again. Thank you, YouTube for making me younger.*The artwork is "The Raven" by Gustave Dore.Oh, and for the blog-tweak-obsessed among us, here's a place where you can build custom buttons for your sidebar. How cool is that?
Unsanitized - The Next Book Banned by the LOLOL (League of Outraged Little Old Ladies) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 First, thank you to Karen Hancock for letting me know about the LOLOL, a powerful lobbying group campaigning for the reform of Christian books. They actively petition retailers everywhere through letters, phone calls, and the occasional face-to-face finger-wagging. Their goal is to remove all smut from every bookstore worldwide. Karen's books, of course, are among the offenders.(Image of what is to believed to be a member of the LOLOL taken by Manamanah.)Now for another book the LOLOL is fighting to have removed from the public arena. From the introductory letter, which will accompany their report (the report is excerpted below. And no, in order to protect my source, I will not divulge how I came upon the document.), "A book such as this is a disgrace to all who strive for purity and wholesome reading. Together with the AEOPLOM* we insist the book in question, in all its forms and translations, be removed from your shelves at once"The following is excerpted from the most recent Read more:Banned
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Night of the Evil Gnomes: Origination of the No-Market Myth 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This post appeared back in June, but I hadn't yet dragged it over to my "new blog." What new blog, you say? Well, I so liked the features of blogger beta, had contorted my template so badly with the old blogger I was afraid to add links, and just wanted something easier (blogger beta is easy - wow) that I switched over manually. Most of my posts, but not all. So, think of it like re-runs. And since there's a blog tour going on, even though I'm not an official participant this month (no time to write something original), it's as good a time for a re-run as any, yes? For you who've read this before, too bad. For the rest, enjoy!(If you want a list of all those in the Tour, click here. For the site being featured this month, click here.)Now, allow me to tell you a story.Once upon a time a famous fiction editor (so famous I need not name him or her) opened a fat manila envelope. Inside was a nice little story — a fantasy — about a gnome. The Torturous Tale of Princess Abigail and Read more:Gnomes
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Art Inspiring Art 1970-01-01 00:59:59 My oldest child, five and a half, saw Donita's book on the living room table. The image so captivated him, he had to run for paper and crayons and draw it. He frequently gets creative urges that will not let him rest until the vision is out. Even in the middle of the night, before a meal, when he's supposed to be setting the table for dinner.I know that feeling.Today is the final day of our tour and for words of parting and a promise for more excitement next week, visit Becky Miller. And if you haven't seen them yet, and to permanently link them, here are the highlights as I see them.Donita K. Paul, the person, from Beth Goddard.A personal story of the editing behind Donita's book, from Shannon McNear.Interviews with the author, from Rebecca LuElla Miller (aka, Becky Miller).Reviews and more, from Sally Apokedak.Discussions on Donita's love of bunnies, from Stuart Stockton.The Dragon Debate, from Leathel Grody.And musings all over the spectrum, from Mirta Ana Schultz.And even more
What Chuck Colson Has to Say about Literature 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In Breakpoint magazine, Colson first talks about The Resurgence of Christian Fiction. The links at the bottom of his article are worth a click-over in their own right. He also has a few words to share on the novel, Gilead. In the same vein, the Times-Tribune (Scranton, PA) is talking about Christian Books Moving Toward the Thought-Provoking. Enjoy and have a happy Friday! (And thanks to this guy for making me take time out of my day to read those articles.) Read more:Chuck
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What do you get when you cross a writer with a theologian? 1970-01-01 00:59:59 A kid who comes up with this:Setting: Pizza Hut, last Friday evening.Captain Intensity, who will be six in two weeks, had been staring intently into his cup for several minutes."MomnDad? I have to tell you a question." He pauses, but not long enough for a reply from MomnDad. "What if this restaurant was a bubble and we are inside it, and outside was all pop? And there was a cup around the Whole World, all full of pop, and there was a giant straw in the cup, and someone was blowing on it?"Daddy asks, "Who's blowing on the straw?"Captain Intensity thinks. "You?""Or maybe God?" he says.Long pause. Then Captain Intensity asks, "Does God eat at Pizza Hut?"Someday he will write a book: The Cosmology of Root Beer.
The Many Obsessions of Me (or: Somebody Slap Me) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I have a deadline for my current novel (self-imposed, mostly), a contemporary YA. I'm excited about the book - loving it, actually. But I've been sidetracked.My first obsession of the week was with learning blog design. I opened a "test" blog to play around with code, layout, images - I wanted to tweak the heck out of Blogger Beta, to get a whole new look and feel, while maintaining the functionality of Beta's cool new features. Like moving sidebar items with one click, changing the colors of text and backgrounds without dipping into template code. I'm happy to say I've done it and I've applied it to my home-education blog (sorry, it's private so I can't show off my work). Eventually I will redesign this one. I have the images all picked out over at istockphoto, and the color scheme, and all I have to do is some photoshop work on the graphics and ... But that book! The deadline!I got back to it briefly and had a breakthrough in a scene, but then I got feedback on another manus Read more:Obsessions
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Me In the Middle* 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Last night I walked up a stranger's driveway, my long wool coat flowing behind. My friend and I had to round to the front of the house to check the number. Yes, we had the right one. So on to the back we went, down to the spacious basement where coffee percolated, cookies smiled up from a Thanksgiving tray, flower-tipped ink pens made a centerpiece in a ring of comfy chairs. My second homeschool support group. "Hello, my name is .." I filled out my nametag and found a seat and in expected support-group fashion, we rounded the room and introduced ourselves. Number of children, ages, and for diversity's sake, genders. "Hi, I'm Rachel and I have three, age nine, five, two. Boy, girl, boy" Without a pause, the next woman said, "Cynthia, three kids, seven, four-and-a-half, two" She patted her belly. "And this one due in the spring. Girl, girl, girl, and we don't know yet" I had to think. Hard. "Uh, hi. I'm a little slow on Mondays. Um. I have one, al
Wordless Wednesday: Caption This, Baby 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In the fine tradition set by Curmudgie-poo, why not let creativity soar? Caption
if you dare. (Click to enlarge.)Oh, and forgot to say, check out the rest of WW! Read more:Wednesday
Real Men Do Eat Fluff - Cranberry Fluff 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The hit of the holiday, my grandmother's famous Creamy Cranberry Salad. The kids love it, I love it, and my brother said, "It's the only way I'll eat cranberries!" Since the recipe is in high demand, I will share it here. Enjoy. (And the family-famous Secret Cranberry Relish will follow - my husband's particular favorite.)Creamy Cranberry Salad(Otherwise known as Cranberry FLUFF)1 can Mandarin oranges, drained1 can (20 oz) crushed pineapple, drained2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries, coarsely chopped1 medium apple, peeled and chopped2 cups miniature marshmallows2/3 cup sugar1/8 teaspoon salt1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)2 cups (one smallish container) cool whip (not Lite - honestly, what is the point of "lite" at a holiday dinner? Let's get serious about celebration.)In a bowl, combine the oranges, cranberries, pineapple, apple, marshmallows, sugar, salt, and walnuts if desired; mix well. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Just before serving, fold in cream.~~~~~~~~~~~Secret Cra Read more:Fluff
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You Write the Caption (Wordless Wednesday) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 This was taken outside my in-law's.I should also mention, I will be hosting the Carnival of the Blogging Chicks Sunday the 10th. I think that's this Sunday (it's been one of those weeks). The theme is: holiday laughter, or just laughter if you don't holiday-blog. So, if you're a blogging chick (or want to be - visit the metablog to find out how to join) my email address for submissions is right there in the sidebar. I'm ready when you are.Find more wordless here. Read more:Caption
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Seasons of Change 1970-01-01 00:59:59 One of my children's favorite books is PD Eastman's, Best Nest. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about Mr. and Mrs. Bird's search for a new house. They try out a few places per Mr. Bird's suggestion, but none are right. So Mrs. Bird takes matters into her own hands with disastrous consequences. I also have a DVD animation of the book, and I always hear the grizzled nagging-wife voice when Mrs. Bird says at the start, "This is not the best nest. I'm tired of this old place. I hate it!"I know how Mrs. Bird feels, really I do. I'm tired of my house. I have no driveway. It snows here. A lot. And I must fight neighbors with zillions of cars for a spot on the street. More often than not, I have to haul three children through the snow from a spot half a block away (uphill both ways!). The house also has "character" which is just the nice way of saying no insulation, breezy windows (but only when they're closed), and three phone jacks in the entire house, none of which are anywhere Read more:Change
Female or Shemale: Can You Guess? 1970-01-01 00:59:59 For your Friday entertainment, see how many you can guess correctly.I did "worse than average" - got seven out of sixteen. Call me clueless.Thanks, Kerry, for the diversion. Read more:Female
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The Curtain is Up! 1970-01-01 00:59:59 So? I'd say this is a change. Who knew CSS and HTML could be so FUN? And don't let anybody tell you Blogger Beta is poochpoo. I'm in love.Would you do me a favor? If the layout looks funky to you, or buttons don't work as you think they should, or anything really, would you leave a comment? Tell me what browser you're using, what version (if you know), and what the problem is. I only got to test it in Firefox and Internet Exploder 6 and up. And while you're at it, think about switching to Firefox. Built-in spell-check, tabbed browsing, great plug-ins and themes, fewer security issues. What are you waiting for? Read more:Curtain
Carnival of the Blogging Chicks: Laughter 1970-01-01 00:59:59 From tender to hilarious, find a remedy to the pre-holiday blues with this week's Carnival
of the BloggingChicks
.In the order of submission:1. Find the Not-So-Perfect Holiday Photo at An Island Life from Local Girl. Mahalo!2. In Dreaming What Ifs ... Karmyn R tells how her nephew earned his new nickname Uncle Bunny.3. LeftCoastOnlooker & her siblings might be the only ones to laugh over this one, but they'll sure laugh hard. You can leave snide comments. 4. Pamela at The Dust Will Wait laughs about the time Santa (her brother) left his clothes on the bathroom floor.5. My own submission, Female or Shemale. It has nothing to do with holidays, but it is funny. Tell me I'm not the only one who can't see the difference.6. You could be next! Email me your entry.
What Freud Never Told Us: Potty Envy 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I am coming out of week one of Potty Boot Camp. This would be with Pavarotti, my middle child. I've done potty before with his older brother, so I should have been prepared. But as with all big changes, like having a newborn, that first week is horrible. Nothing but emotion, adjustment, exhaustion. I'd forgotten about that. There was one thing I could not have known because I'd never done it before. Captain Intensity was an only child when he went through PTBC, and he switched from diapers to puppy pants (his phrase, I have no idea why) with little complication. But Pavarotti, with Captain and the baby? Complication, indeed. The baby is as reasonable a seventeen-month-old as one can expect. Slightly jealous when I hold a friend's baby, but not yet in the terrible twos. Until Potty Day. She cannot get over the potty. It is her throne, her private chair—strange for a child who is not yet walking and who ignored the potty for the past six months, when I had it out "in Read more:Freud
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