A project in the UK is cataloguing books that will never be written. Two librians are, with the help of a converted shopping trolley (yes, we included this detail because we remain fascinated by the oddities of British English), are soliciting stories from people for their Library of Unwritten Books. Understandably, some people run away when approached to participate; but, not surprisingly, there are many more willing to share the book they’ll never write. Of course, …not all concepts could or should be turned into full books, Mr [Sam] Brown says. “Unwritten books are different to the books that they […]

We’re still working our way to our notes (the suitcase remains in the same position it occupied yesterday, minus the cats — even they realize this unpacking project has gone on too long). There are lots of conference updates and postings and general advice to keep you busy in the meantime. Rather than bore you with our thoughts, we point you to David Thayer who explains, well, not the secret handshake, but the important concept of color-coding. Seriously, you gotta understand conference badges. It’s critical — sometimes the badges are tough to read, but it’s pretty darn easy to tell

How come nobody told us we were supposed to approach the New York Times Book Review in the same manner we approach, oh, really good Chinese noodles? We will work harder on this, but doubt our efforts will carry over to our arch-nemesis, the book review section of the Los Angeles Times (okay, it’s not really our arch-nemesis, but we’re not fond of it). MediaBistro interviews Sam Tanenhaus about the new direction of the NYTBR — we predict serious backlash no matter how brilliant the new design. How do we know? Well, we once read a letter to the editor

We are still working our way to our notes (as of this moment, we have half emptied our suitcase and piled books by size on the floor), but thought we’d share a few random thoughts because the best way to make more room in the mind is to empty a few hills and valleys. In no particular order:

This isn’t an article we’d normally link to, because, frankly, it’s not saying a lot that’s new. There are lots of cliches repeated, reinforcing our belief that for each genre of fiction, there is a journalistic template. Except…yes, there’s always an except for us…one line that leaped out and made us choke on our Luna bar. Not to mention that we love paragraphs containing two disparate comments without any sort of substantiation. Critics argue that romance novels reinforce traditional gender roles. They say it is a woman’s genre, whose content excludes half of the population. We are not going to

Spending a week surrounded by women tends to make our inner feminist a bit more sensitive (just as we are reclaiming the synopsis from its “dreaded” appellation, we are reclaiming the word feminist from its militant connotation). We are in a hotel filled by women who are pursuing dreams and goals — and achieving success on many levels (not just writers, as we note below). Yet for every doctor, lawyer, astrophysicist, MFA, educated, professional…okay, we’ll stop now…woman we see in the elevator, we also see a world that hasn’t grown up as we’d dreamed. The reason the Romance Writers of