So, remember when I was lamenting the loss of some of my books in progress? I just found one of them again yesterday! It’s Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, and I have just finished reading it. I believe I started it quite a while back, I mean, perhaps as far back as September or October even.
However, I sadly lost it just as things were getting really exciting in the storyline, and here’s the reason why: I’m a book sleeper- I have always liked to read before bed, and in graduate school I developed a (bad? Or Good?) habit of keeping my books close at hand, piled on the side of the bed in heaps. That worked pretty well when I had a bed on the floor, but apparently it does not work so well when the bed is raised.
Very nice tree. I really just wanted to post a tree picture 😉
I found the book tucked away under my bed, amongst a few other items I have been searching for, some for months. Next time I lose a book, I am looking here first.
Will be back with a review for you soon about this novel! I am also curious to know your experiences with books before sleep. Do you leave your books piled on your bed? Do you have a bookshelf next to your bed? I am looking for some strategies for managing this better in the future, and will hopefully be able to continue my reading habits of many at a time, without losing more of my books.
Hello everyone! Hope your Tuesday/Wednesday is going well.
Lately I have been reading blogs that have “Wordless Wednesdays.” Have you ever heard of that? It’s when blogs have a series of pictures, or one picture instead of a prose post.
I do not think I’ll start doing Wordless Wednesdays, but I did want to share some fun pics I took of writing in Seattle yesterday with you. Nothing serious today- just fun Seattle sunshine and latte art from a place you should definitely check out- Zoka coffee shop.
The Space Needle with sun in Seattle
Love it when the sun comes out in Seattle!
With the flash!
Different angle- no flash.
Love the new pattern.
about 1/2 the way through
Ah, I love my coffee while writing. It makes me more productive, although I usually don’t order lattes. Just regular black coffee. I am also very glad to have finally found a few places that serve delicious lattes (although coffee is everywhere here, truly great coffee shops are bizarrely difficult to find in Seattle, which shocks me). Zoka definitely makes one of the best lattes I’ve ever had in my lifetime.
In other good news, these pictures were all taken with my cell phone camera, as are many of the ones I post here. If you have a larger screen, you might be grossed out by the poor image quality/ pixels. However, my wonderful friend gave me an old Nikon digital camera yesterday. As you might have guessed, I will use it to take pictures, and will then post those (way better than cell phone quality) pictures to the blog! I’m very excited about it, and hope that it will make your reading experience better.
Do you drink coffee while writing? Something else? Nothing at all?
I was nominated for my first blogging award! I always see these awards around, and have always been curious about them, so I am very glad I get to partake! Thanks to Laurissa at Lest Twenty Two for nominating me. Go check out her comics- they are very entertaining!
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Here is the list of rules, from her site:
1. You must tell 3 completely weird things about your habits. If you claim to have no weird habits, you’re lying and we’ll have to send an investigative team for further analysis.
2. You must tell why you look at the “glass half full” scenario and ask “what? No coffee?”
3. Complete any one of the following essay questions:
A. You find yourself in a desolate place when your car breaks down. You have no cell phone service, no stores, and only a candy bar for food. It is 150 miles to the closest town. What color are your pants and why?
B. You find yourself having to ride an elevator quite frequently. How do you pass the time to show off your creativity?
4. Then you are to nominate 5 random people and let them know.
5. Make sure to show proper gratitude to the person who nominated you whether that is to shower them with gifts, prizes, and cash or to see that they are put into a clown costume and photographed for internet mocking.
6. Make sure to post the award somewhere other than the underside of the toilet seat.
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Here goes nothing, except my attempt to answer them to the best of my abilities.
Weird Habits. This one was pretty hard for me, because I have a lot of odd idiosyncrasies about myself, but I also because I don’t really have a routine (I even took a facebook poll for this!):
I tell stories about people from my life, using their full names. My current friends tease me about this, because they are like, “we don’t know this person- why are you telling us about them and using their full name!?” However, I do it because I truly feel like someday my friends from various parts of the world will know each other, and it has even happened quite a few times so far- a lot of my friends from New Mexico have met my Seattle friends, and a lot of my friends from South Dakota have met my other Washington friends. Someone from Austria has met a London friend, etc.
I sometimes cover cans of food with saran wrap, instead of putting them in a Tupperware. Not only is that weird, but my roommate recently told me it may give me some sort of disease, which would be dreadful.
I pull on my earrings when I get nervous.
2. I don’t know if I fully understand the question for this one, but here’s my answer anyway: I look at the glass half full because when I say, “what, where is the coffee?” I end up having too much caffeine and getting the jitters.
B. I’d make up songs about the predicament and sing them to myself, and dance around the elevator.
4. Who to nominate? Do you guys know how many blogs I visit every day? Literally hundreds, on a slow day. There really isn’t criteria, but I will chose 5 of the text or art-based blogs I read the most, whose blogs are king of my “feel good” sites, and who post more than once a month.
My first nomination goes to Little Wolf, an illustrator in Portland who portrays every day Portland characters in fun and quirky drawings.
The second goes to one that really cracks me up, Kate, Cracking Up. She’s funny!
I always read Hour of Gold as well, for her personal and entertaining recitations, stories of vegetarian adventures, and some doses of sarcasm. I appreciate her conversational style.
The blog Mile High Healthy gives me a daily dose of inspiration for healthy living and has a lot of tasty salad recipes. I love salads, and have a not so secret love of both the Colorado Rockies and food blogs, so this one kind of combines a bunch of my favorites.
I am constantly surprised that the blogger of The Last Classic is young (17ish). She is very eloquent, and the style of her site is really fun. I always enjoy her posts, especially about reading and authors.
Other recommendations, and close contenders who deserve some link love: The humor blog Cereal with a Fork is definitely a go-to for me on writing days. One of my favorites is the 3/28 post. I love the blog Diatribes and Ovations, and it was one of the first sites I followed here on WordPress. The site Masculinity U is also very good for masculinity studies and gender topics, although I am not sure who would answer these questions since they have multiple authors. And, last but not least, the young blogger over at Operation Equality is very impassioned and it is fun to watch her learn about and take action for social justice issues.
What is this, you ask? A creative fountain of chaos, of course.
I had some adventures this week with “Flat Ruthie.” She is like Flat Stanley, if you have ever heard of that trend.
Check out the post (mostly pictures) over at Cardboard me! *(There is a link to Flat Ruthie Info here!)
She has a great idea, travelling the world and having adventures with all kinds of people in all kinds of places. Pretty fun!
Cheers,
Miss E
****So, after getting a few reader questions, I have posted links to more info about the Flat Stanley and Flat Ruthie for you all 🙂 This was my first experience with a “Flat” anybody, and I would highly recommend trying it- twas a lot of fun!
I bought Ammon Shea’s book, Reading the OED a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. It looks pretty good, and is about one man’s experience reading through the OED (Oxford English Dictionary).
Instead, I found my housemate’s dog curled up with the book and sleeping in the sun. It was too fun not to share!
Curled up with "Reading the OED"
She is a beautiful Great Dane, but still loves to curl up with a book occasionally.
I wonder how this is comfortable, but I definitely know what it’s like to fall asleep while reading 😉
Because of the incredible amount of encouragement that Looking for Pemberley has received lately, I finally decided to take a step forward with it.
This morning, I bought the domain for this site!
Posting here and developing my writing has been a dream come true!
I have been considering it for a while, but was not sure that many people would be interested in what we talk about here, or that I would have the stamina to continue posting on a regular basis.
Honestly, this blog was kind of an experiment at first, to see if I could really do it. I’ve made it this far, but I would love to continue this journey.
Your support and feedback really have inspired me, and I feel like I’ve been inducted into a community here on WordPress.
I have enjoyed my blogging experience here, and feel that even though I do not post as frequently as I’d like, I do have something that interests me in the finished posts. Usually, I have a hard time getting to 30 site views per day.
Yesterday was pretty amazing though. I had over 200 site views (Looking for Pemberley Record)! Plus, I got over 300 more followers!
Thanks to you all!
This is how I feel right now- hyperbolic joy explosion.
I feel a renewed sense of purpose in writing, and a revitalized dedication to not only making more regular posts, but also to seeking out new and interesting contributors so that we can produce dynamic and interesting points of view.
Today I am celebrating! Probably with a bottle of one of my favorite wines, Molly Dooker’s Blue Eyed Boy.
A photo I took of this incredible wine (and also one of my favorite labels).
I made that reading queue a little while back, if you recall. If you do not, you may find it here.
Well, I’m reaching out to my readers, because I honestly haven’t been flying through that list like I thought I would.
Despite the fact that I have wanted to read some of the books in my queue for a while, I still am having a hard time motivating myself to read them.
There is definitely a part of me that would rather make chex mix, because it is not on a list, than read a book that is on a list.
Lists may not be my thing.
So far, I have read about 3 or 4 books from that list I made and then published, and about 5-7 books not actually on my list at all, but that have just intrigued me in the meantime.
I keep finding other books that make me say, “shoulda put that one on the list.”
I’m pretty sure that I’m also, on some level, using those other books as a way of procrastinating the reading on my queue.
It’s not that I don’t want to read the books on the list anymore, but only that they are in list form, and hence somehow less appealing to me.
However, in a roundabout way, the list has inspired me to read. I have been buying more books than I was before, and I have been reading more frequently, which was the whole point of the list.
So, at least I have part of it down.
Part of me feels embarrassed, but another (larger) part feels excited to be reading anything, and to not have to follow or be tied down to a specific list, to instead read whatever I feel like. To read outside the numbers and lines I set up as guideposts.
I still would like to read those other books eventually, but may not get to them in any specific time frame or order.
I am a firm believer that to be a writer, one need only to write.
The past year, I have written about completely disparate subjects in almost every genre, from relationship advice, to composting tips, great wineries in the Northwest, and both fiction and non-fiction for different clients. I have written about reading academic and literary and casual novels, Ryan Gosling, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bollywood/ Kollywood movies, and painting on this site.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point.
I’ve written a lot of different stuff lately.
And you know what? It has been really fun!
A picture I took a few years back in the Black Hills, South Dakota.
Waiting around for inspiration and writing only when a brilliant idea knocks you over the head will produce little, and will also not give you much practice.
That is how I used to write. I was worried that my everyday writing was too mundane, that nobody would ever read it, etc.
Although it’s tough for me to admit, my identity as a writer has been tenuously forming for years.
Even thought I have always identified with writers and have always enjoyed writing, I never had much confidence that I could be a really good writer. I have that confidence now, but it is because of the daily practice, and the feeling it leads to, rather than coming up with something “groundbreaking” or “great.”
That being said, I now write for a few various reasons.
The primary ones are as follows:
I like to read, and I like to create a “finished” product to share with others.
I feel compelled to do it, to express myself through words.
I enjoy talking, (as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m sure), and writing is another form of speaking to me.
Like I said before, my identity as a writer has been tenuously forming for years, but I have always wanted to write, to “be a writer,” and to produce written works.
However, it is only recently that I have felt confident in calling myself a writer. That is because lately, I have really dedicated myself to writing on a regular basis.
I took a fiction writing workshop in graduate school, something I’d always been terrified of. Having other readers was empowering. I wrote and edited for a living starting this past summer, (2011).
Now I write all the time. I write articles for you all and for an online magazine, for example. It makes me feel amazing, but I was always afraid of writing before. I think I knew that it would make me incandesantly happy.
I’m ready for that happiness now in a way I wasn’t before.
Some installation art I came across one day in Pioneer Square, Seattle. Loved the paper hanging from trees!
I write to write, but I also do get inspired, and some days I definitely need a push. So, I’d like to share what pushes me to write:
Reading. I feel there is a strong connection between reading and being a good writer. When I read the words of others, it is inspiring to me. I feel connected with their psyche, with their way of painting the world around them or around their characters. I find reading endlessly fascinating, and it’s what inspired me to write in the first place.
Artwork. When I am looking at art, I feel inspired to create. To draw, to paint, and to write. While living in London for a semester and taking primarily art-based classes, I journaled more than I have in my entire life. Looking at pins on Pinterest and pinning to my boards there is also part of this inspiration for me, as silly as it may sound. Love that site!
The feeling that comes from finishing or sharing a piece of art or writing with an audience, for example, with you all here. Not going to lie, it feels great to publish, even when the publishing happens on my own blog.
Beautiful scenes in nature, like the above photo from Custer State Park in the Black Hills, one of my all time favorite places for inspiration.
To move beyond writing for myself in my journal has been really rewarding. Audience matters. Readers matter. Thank you all for reading my posts- I truly appreciate you!
As many of you are also writers, I’d love to know- what inspires you to write?
I have been posting pretty frequently this week, primarily because all of Seattle was shut down in what you may have heard termed the “Snowpocalypse.”
Yeah, it snowed for a while, and it was cute.
We actually had skiiers going down our hill because the city doesn’t have plows (or very many of them). Also, trapped inside with what could only be equally dramatized as the absolute the worst cold of my life for the past week, I have gotten a lot more time to rest and be online.
When I was looking for pictures to post onto my blog background, I came across a fun picture that I wanted to share with other Literature Nerds out on the internet.
A few years ago, I painted this on my closet door, in devotion to one of my favorite novels:
Needless to say, it was an art project born of boredom and no regard for how much doors actually cost. However, I still quite enjoy it to this day whenever I visit my parents. Not sure they quite do, but I suppose it may have been better than some things you can put on a door.
The lower panel has a picture of Pip falling upside down in the multitudinous depths, and the door itself has quotes from the text all around the perimeters.
I believe one of my favorites is still the one I painted in the center underneath Ishmael who is floating on the coffin life-buoy.
“Dissect him how I may, I go but skin deep; I know him not, and never will…” Oh yeah!
Anyone want me to paint scenes from Literature on their doors for them?
Looking for Pemberley 