In its continuing quest for publicity, lulu.com has announced a new contest. We report, you decide: The website Lulu.com, which enables amateur authors to publish and sell their own books, is sponsoring the first literary prize for “blooks” — or books based on blogs or websites. In, uh, related news, Susan Gable informs us that lulu.com has also added to its product line. They have moved into useful items. Meanwhile in the U.S., the Blooker Prize is born Rejection Toilet Paper

There is a thing called “the heat of the moment”. We’ve all encountered it. It happens when you get all worked up about something and engage in rash behavior. It is often a moment one lives to regret. Either that, or you wear your moment as a badge of honor for the rest of your life. We are not one to question the heats of others moments, but surely you all recall that the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, give or take, a year ago. For many reasons, Elfriede Jelinek’s selection was a controversial — or at least

The first annual Quills Awards has come and gone. Except we think there’s going to be a televised special. We will continue to puzzle over the lack of suspense airing a show after the awards have been announced will create*. We swear that sentence made sense before we typed it. We will also puzzle over this: But the Quills can hardly claim a broad mandate with readers. According to comScore Networks Inc., which tracks the Internet, the Quills site attracted so little Web traffic during the voting period, fewer than the threshold of 25,000 unique visits a week, that it

We will warn you in advance that we are feeling disagreeable this morning*. And we will admit we read Brenda Coulter’s post on romance novels and reviewing while in this mood. She started her post with this statement, quite possibly certain that someone would take exception to her position: The world of published romance writers is a small one, and many of us have forged some strong friendships within it. Also, it’s disloyal for an author to trash the books of someone who writes for the same publisher she does. But although nobody can spot the faults in a romance

Laila Lalami (known to many as MoorishGirl) has written as essay for Powell’s about the strange relationship American fiction has with poverty. Or rather it’s about the lack of relationship. She asks: And yet, despite the increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots that affects the entire world, where is the talk of the state of fiction in the age of poverty? Where are the novels that address class divides? Why aren’t people wondering whether fiction can truly reflect a reality where the richest monopolize media attention while the poorest are seen only in times of crises? Since reading

We have never fully understood why the fine folks at National Novel Writing Month chose November for their annual endurance test — clearly someone in charge didn’t fully study the complext negotiations and processes involved with preparing Thanksgiving dinner. After dealing with family issues, who has the energy to write 50,000 words in a single month? Other than the thousands of NaNo participants, we mean. So it’s not quite game on, but it’s game ready. Time to sign up, make your excuses, learn to work the crockpot (our helpful tip: put the plug thingy into a nearby outlet). National Novel

Okay, not really. Others have far more energy for following the Wild World of Awards, and we leave the analysis to them. It is our job to find those nuggets of useful advice in the swirl of news. For example, Ron Hogan continues his guest stint at Galleycat (at what point does a guest become a permanent resident, if only by apartment-dwelling standards?) with a few observations about the Orange Awards, mainly relating to unfortunate photo moments. His final note, however, is the most important: I could also observe that the Orange Prize is black, and the Orange of Oranges