When She’s Right, She’s Right

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a lovely woman named Megan who is connected with the upcoming Wisconsin Book Festival. (I love hearing from readers and new fans.)

Thanks so much for providing a comprehensive list of literary festivals around the US and around the world.  I would like to place a link to your lists on the Wisconsin Book Festival website but I noticed when I was setting up the international link that you have your International Festivals divided by alphabet into Africa-England, France-Wales.  The problem is that Africa is not a country, like England, France, or Wales, and you don’t list any of the other continents that way (Asia, for example, doesn’t get its own listing).  Thanks for hearing me out and thanks again for creating such a great resource.

I do know the difference between a continent and a country, but in setting up BiblioBuffet I made a few decisions that go against . . . would I call it common sense or accuracy? A bit of both, I guess. I made the decision to use this particular continent rather than the country because there were so few festivals. (I also made the decision to use “A” in “A Reading Life” (Nicki Leone’s column title) ahead of “BibliOpinions”—a technically incorrect editorial decision because I did not want a guest column to come ahead of a regular one on the home page—and I can live with it. It is not an error, but a deliberate choice that puts my reason for its choice ahead of Strunk & White’s. In this case.

So it also was with the decision to use “Africa.” However, Megan’s comments made me re-think that, and I decided she was right. Other countries had only one festival so why shouldn’t African countries get the same consideration? Well, now they have. Our International Book Festivals pages are divided into Australia-England and France-Zimbabwe.

I agree with Megan “that Africa and the countries in Africa are misrepresented and lumped together so often, I think it’s important to be careful about it.” And I hereby apologize to South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. They now have their own listings.

In addition, I have updated most of the festival dates (a few even went back to 2009) to reflect the newest information. It took hours yesterday, and I am still not finished. I need to finish the dates, remove defunct festivals, add new ones, and then check every link to be sure it is still live. I hope to finish this afternoon.

If any of you know of a festival I am missing, please let me know. I would like this resource to be useful. And to that end I will be updating as I go. It’s tough because it takes a lot of time—but it’s worth it to know that it can be a reliable source of information for all book lovers. Thanks to Megan for caring. And I promise there will be no September 32 ever again. I still blush at the thought I never caught that.

It’s Not Rockgut?

Once upon a time . . .  actually about a dozen years ago when I was enrolled in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, I started what was intended to be a novel. It might have turned out to be a pretty good one had the characters and situations I developed at the beginning kept going. But I am better at beginnings than at whole books so within a few chapters it fizzled out. Nevertheless, I still have an affection for the opening, which took place in MacArthur Park near downtown Los Angeles. A homeless man had awakened with his empty bottle of what I then termed “rockgut” beside him on the sidewalk.

It was only later than I learned the term was “rotgut,” something that at least in my own mind I have not been able to live down because it leapt from wherever it had been lurking into the forefront of my mind when BiblioBuffet’s web developer, Frank Nilsen, used the term “link rot” to describe links that were no longer working. We were talking about the frustrations of having BiblioBuffet’s recommended sites—all those pages under the Books & More Books and About Us sections—go wacky when the URL changed.

When BiblioBuffet was still in the original development stage I knew I wanted to include pages of links that would be of interest to our future readers. Eventually, I came up with Book Donations, Books Festivals (both U.S. and international), Bookmark Blogs & Sites, Book-Related Blogs, Book-Related Sites (these latter two were split when they became too large for a single page), Literary Humor & Games, Places We Like, Shopping for Booklovers, and Writers’ Resources. Under About Us is (no surprise) About Us, Meet Our Contributors, Submit Books for Review, and Write for Us.

It’s the former one that drives me crazy at times because each of those pages is filled with links. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to check them as regularly as I’d like  so when I do I invariably discover sometimes one but often more dead links. Excuse me, link rot.

Bloody thing sounds like a mold invasion. It’s just about as bad too. I dislike the idea that our readers click on something only to find it dead (rotted out?) because it’s probably a natural assumption that maybe the rest of the links are dead too. So every once in a while I go in and clean it out. Spit and polish the descriptions. Verify the addresses. See if a book festival’s URL has been taken over by a porn site. (This actually happened once, though I won’t name the festival to spare them embarrassment.)

So the last week during the final phase of our platform upgrading I spent two days hunkered down at the computer, forcing myself to look at link after link after link. It was hard not to get distracted by the computer’s Solitaire games or by the Internet or the cats. And sometimes I did. But I did stay with it until the end. So as of  . . . well, not today but at least last week, we have fresh, shiny working links.

Plus, we have more pages in the works. These will take longer to get up as I have to write descriptions for each link, a time-consuming task. And while I don’t want to give away the ideas until they are ready, I think we have some new and damn good goodies for you. Not a shred (bottle?) of rockgut in the place. I promise.

The OMG! Day

Literary agent extraordinaire Janet Reid stunned me by posting a link to this blog last night. Now Janet and I are casual friends. I met her online several years ago in . . . uh, circumstances which must go unnamed due to privacy issues. Then in 2008, the publishing industry’s trade show, BEA, was in Los Angeles. She came out, and I met her then. I liked her a lot. She seemed to like me too.

Anyone who reads her blog knows that Janet takes pride in presenting herself as a curmudgeon, but what her curmudgeonly persona hides is a beautiful person who simply does things in her own time and her own way.

Last night was one of those. I checked her blog as I do every day for a good laugh or a raised eyebrow. And I nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t do that, but I did end up knocking the cat off my chest as I gasped at her latest post. Where did that suddenly come from? I have no idea. But it made me burst into tears before I recovered myself and promptly e-mailed all of BiblioBuffet’s contributors to tell them of it.

I also sent Janet a very enthusiastic e-mail thank you, but haven’t yet received a response. No problem. She’s busy. And thank-you notes don’t require acknowledgment. Anyway, I will have the opportunity to tell her how much we all appreciate it when she comes out to Los Angeles in March for the Left Coast Crime Mystery Convention and, maybe, comes to visit for a few days. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Janet, if you come I promise to have the whiskey on ice and the Godiva on the nightstand.