I have a ton of links and interesting things to read. Isn't it awesome how the internet is full of words to read and things to look at?
From Janice G. an online game based on Pride and Prejudice, wherein you role play your way through several different options.The game is called Matches and Matrimony and, among other things, it promises “Emotionally stirring Music!” The fact that it's emotionally stirring AND that music is capitalized gives me much curiosity, I confess.
From Jennifer B comes an article that details the history of banned books in Australia – what was banned and why few people knew about it – from a book by Nicole Moore titled The Censor's Library:
Intrigued by rumours of a censor's library, literary historian Nicole Moore went searching for the old customs archive of banned books. In 2005, she tracked down the collection seven storeys underground in a huge repository in western Sydney. Thousands of banned books, all neatly covered and catalogued, filled 793 boxes. As Moore shows, such secret collections have accumulated in many parts of the world, often carefully tended by censor-librarians. Private Case, Public Scandal, the book that revealed the contents of the British Library's secret collection, was itself banned in Australia in 1966. Not surprisingly, the 20th century's largest and most notorious repository of forbidden literature was in the Soviet Union, with more than 1 million items.
Having uncovered this long-buried Australian archive, Moore set about the daunting task of charting its history.
From Andy W, creator and publisher of BadDollar.com comes an innovative method of selling short stories: matching the length of a story to one's subway or underground commute. There are short story recommendations for New York commuters coming in and out of Brooklyn, and London commuters on the underground. The stories cost a dollar, and are all “short stories about the terrible things that could happen if you spent your dollar less wisely.”
Over at Kirkus, I've been talking about romance cover art, and why photographs for historical romance covers confuse me – but ultimately work for me.
Now that I've ruminated about the cover change on the Noble book, I realized that, despite my not liking it, it's worked. I've looked closer at the book, I've read the back cover and reserved a copy to read. The name of the author might have grabbed me first, as it's a name that's known to me—and boy did I like her previous books!—but the cover also caught my attention longer than most, and that's definitely the job of the cover art.
If you're in LA, there's a play you might want to go see: Lights Off, Eyes Closed is running at the SkyPilot theatre. The play has received some good press already, but what caught my attention is that the playwright, Liz Shannon Miller, is also the daughter of Ellora's Cave novelist Cricket Starr. The play is about a young woman whose romance novelist mother dies, leaving an unfinished outline and a request that her daughter finish her work:
LIGHTS OFF, EYES CLOSED is the story of an inexperienced young woman, cynical about relationships, who has to take her mother's work seriously when her mother passes away, leaving only an incomplete novel as her inheritance. But LIGHTS OFF isn't just about romance, or a mother and a daughter — it's a play about romance novels, and how as much as the books might raise our expectations, they do also inspire people to believe in true love.
I kind of wish I was in LA so I could go see this play. I'm so curious. If you go, please let me know what you think!
