Book sale!

books are very important possessions. some keep it as a collection especially if they are from your favorite authors or they are of your favorite genre. but books especially the new ones can be quite heavy on the budget especially for young students.

i had a great time scouring for bargains yesterday and i was able to purchase a number of books from a book sale. these sales can really give you big big savings. you should just have a great deal of patience and energy to search for books that would interest you. bestsellers and books from known authors or popular genre has more than 70% mark down on prices and nothing can beat that for savings. i got books for my self from the authors - amanda quick and hanna howell both romance writers and three childrens book from ladybird for my son. and guess.. it never even amounted to the original price of a single book. one had an 80% slash off in its price!

so next time, try and check out these book sales. you never know what you’ll find especially if you just have the patience and the energy to look for them. its all worth it.

Uh-Oh

Some Observations From Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door

by Robert Fulghum

Fulghum’s philosophical views on the dailiness of life never fail to enchant me. I like the way he talks to his reader, on a new light… from both sides of the fridge door.

“I believe in both Show and Tell. My attitude is that I’m always talking to one person, and if I am going to address you in any form, I ought to give you every advantage I can to understand what I have to say.”

Indeed I admire authors who use high-fallutin’ words to convey their preternatural talents. But sometimes, readers don’t get the gist. They get caught up in the barrage of novel vocabulary terminology that their cerebral cortex leaves them in frustration… and utter confusion.

I like simplicity. Of uncomplicating things… and to see them as they are. I emphatically do not mean to disparage one’s intelligence. But in my own opinion, one’s thoughts and ideas are well-remembered when his audience understands him clearly. Then again, these are just my two cents. It may or may not matter to you.

Character Mortality

After reading a friend’s work recently, I realized something. Killing off the characters in your novel is bad news in a number of different ways. Readers expect you, as the author, to help them build a rapport with the character. They expect you to give them everything they need to know about that character. The investment that a reader then puts in that character is what motivates him/her to finish the book. When that character dies, suddenly, in chapter six, just when the reader is really getting the hang of him/her, it comes as an irritating shock. If your characters must die, then kill them; but, don’t settle for the cop out: “I’m not really sure why I spent so much time on this guy. . . I’ll just kill him.” It may work great for eighteenth-century authors, but readers today aren’t going to stand for it. They’re going to throw down the book and walk away. Maybe, if you’re lucky, they’ll return to after they cool down a little. Most likely, your book’s going to be propping up the broken couch (that is if you can even get such a book published).

Anne McCaffery’s Moreta’s Ride features a heroine who is killed at the end of the novel, but it’s a bittersweet moment in the book that leaves you breathless with admiration for McCaffery’s prose (partly because the death comes at the end of the book).

Another thing you’ve got to take into account in trying to decide if you want to kill off your main character is whether or not you want to write a sequel or a series. Obviously, McCaffery couldn’t write a sequel to Moreta’s Ride using Moreta, because she’s dead. So, if you’re pushing for a series, throw your character a life raft . . . don’t let them drown because of a little writer’s block.

Selling Your Used Books, Part One: For the Love of Amazon

I have way too many books in my house. That’s not an admission a lover of the written word makes very often, but you haven’t seen my office. There are stacks of books everywhere (I can probably see about 200 books right now without really tuning my head) and I know some of these books I’m never going to read, or I’m never going to read them again.

So I’ve come up with a several-part plan for getting rid of these books, starting with the most lucrative way to get some of them out of my house and ending up with the plans that just get the books out of my house.

That means I started in the Amazon Marketplace. An account is free, and you can sell as many books as you like for whatever price you like. Amazon takes a commission when you sell a book, but reimburses you for shipping. If you ship media mail shipping’s pretty cheap anyway.

You simply tell the site what books you have to sell, what condition they are in and how much you’d like to sell them for. If a book sells, you get an e-mail and can print a packing slip and address label.

If the book doesn’t sell after 60 days, Amazon removes the listing, at which time you can repost the item at a lower price or go on to step two, which I’ll share in a couple of days.

Getting Past Writers Block

If you are a writer, you’ve experienced it. The infamous writers block… or should it be called writers wall?

There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank page, with a deadline (that you are someone else has made), and having nothing in your head.

Believe it or not, it doesn’t have to just be a blank page. There are plenty of little ways to overcome the block and to get back to the pen.

Typically, writers block isn’t really about being blocked, it’s about needing to gain perspective or change directions - or - just letting things set in for a while until you can process enough to say what you really mean. The number one rule that I always have with writers block is to get past the denial that I’m blocked when I am. Writing isn’t something that is easy or comfortable to do. In fact, it takes great pains - of the back hurting, the fingers being sore, and the un-comfortablenesses of everything being solitaire. Add that onto having to come up with continuous genius ideas, and you have a lot going on. Once you admit that, you’re half way there.

After that point, you can start thinking of ways to remedy yourself. Writers block could be a simple way of saying that you need a break. One of the things about living a writers life is that you are pouring a lot of information onto the page. You need to get it filled back up again. Give yourself permission to do something different, go to a spa, take a nap or go and get the cramps out of your back from sitting for so long. You never know what material you will run into.

If you are really set on writing, try looking at it from a different angle. Give yourself permission to make a complete mess of whatever you are doing. Let go completely of what you are trying to say, and instead, let the writing say what it wants to say. Don’t worry - you can go back and take it out later. One of my best examples of this is when I was stuck a while back. There’s a completely blank page, and on the next one are huge letters. “This really sucks! I can’t think of a damn word to write!” Of course, that cleared it, and the next two pages were filled with things to write about.

The idea is - let yourself go. Let yourself get filled up again and let yourself be where you are in order to write. You can break down the blocks to writing if you allow yourself to fly over them.

Grammar for the Rest of You

I’ll have to admit I’m a bit of a grammar geek. I usually refer to myself as a word nerd. I’m a professional editor as well as being a writer, so words, and the correct usage of words, are my business.

Because I’m more than a little obsessed with all things wordy, I can’t resist reading books about grammar and usage. I came across a fun one yesterday that even those who aren’t word nerds will enjoy: Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies by June Casagrande (Penguin, 224 pages, $14).

Casagrande, author of the “A Word, Please” column that appears in several community sections of the Los Angeles Times, offers a guide to usage that’s mostly based on doing what feels (or at least sounds) right. She’s not big on rules, and she is big on cheesy mnemonic devices to help you remember the rules you do need to know.

She hopes that people can learn to strike a balance between being clueless about grammar and being a “grammar snob,” someone who delights in his or her knowledge of grammar and will use that knowledge to humiliate others who do not know as much.

If you haven’t had the pain of running into a grammar snob, Casagrande elaborates:

Unlike normal people who get giddy about things like love, sex, money, free beer, and classic REO Speedwagon, these guys have the hots for things like punctuation marks and syntax rules and the excavation of lost words that were lost for a reason.

Like a lot of ‘happy’ drunks, these people can turn on you in an instant, transforming from Jekyll-like, playful nerds into bloodthristy grammar Hydes.

Some grammar snobs, Casagrande points out, give truth to the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They think they know the rules, so they think they have license to correct what they see as gaffes in other people’s writing and speaking.

But the truth is, these people often don’t know the rules any better than the average person. Or they know rules that are no longer considered rules, like the “rules” against splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions or starting them with conjunctions, all of which this book trashes, once and for all (we hope).

Casagrande also tackles more ticklish subjects like use of the subjunctive (was vs. were), saying “literally” when you mean “figuratively,” how to punctuate and why, and why rock stars can’t spell and what to do about it.

This entertaining and funny book is also educational if you don’t already know the basics of grammar and usage or are always getting rules confused. If you’re a grammar geek already, you might not learn much from this little book, but you should take it as a warning never to become one of the grammar snobs Casagrande takes to task, even if you think you really do know it all.

Hard Cover Novels $9.95 at Zooba

Hard cover novels can cost $20 even $30 dollars a book but good news here’s a site called Zooba that allows you buy hardcovers for $9.95 plus free shipping. You can also create a personal reading list.

They have the latest in bestselling novels plus many fiction, non-fictions, cooking, and even books on current events. It works almost like an online dvd rental in the that you get your books.

You create that personal list I told you about and you put the books in the order that you want to recieve them. Then every month they send you out whichever book is in the number 1 slot for only $9.95. You can add more books or remove those you no longer want to recieve.

Zooba

50 Writing Tools

It is not recent news–these have been online since quite a couple of years–but since they were recommended to me by a fellow writer, I’ve never stopped checking these Fifty writing tools by Roy Peter Clark on Poynter Online. Perhaps they’ve been most useful to me due to English not being my mother tongue. Regardless, I think they may be of interest to anyone wanting to perfect their use of this language, and not only in the domain of journalism. Beware of adverbs? Why, it’s amazing, how irritating to the eye they now seem when I proof-read my texts and find a handful of them in the same sentence! This series of articles was a treasure chest for me, and I hope it can be one for you as well.

Expensive Books That Shouldn’t Be

I am still in the process of trying to find old children’s novels I loved and have been doing a good job. My biggest problem besides not being able to find the books on a certain website is the price.

I can find the book I’m looking for and I can see it on sale for $0.01, yet I can also find it for more than $30 elsewhere. This is a good reason to shop around because especially for older books that are hard to find, people will not hesitate to screw you over big time.