"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." — Chinese Proverb

Papyrus fragment from the Book of the Dead; spell number 18 written for Nes-pauti-taui. Thebes, Upper Egypt: c. 1000 B.C.n

— from the Dallas Public Library

"Advances are quickly going to zero. Margins are going to zero for publishers. There’s no financial benefit for going with a publisher if advances are going to zero and royalties are a few percentage points. The publishing industry does minimal editing. The time between book acceptance and release is too long (often a year or more). That’s insane and makes zero sense in a print-on-demand world when kindle versions are outselling print versions."
— James Altucher

Read more...

Prose and Poetry Winners: 2011 Open Writing Competition

Here are the winners of the 2011 Elora Writers' Festival Open Writing Competition, announced at the Festival on Sunday, May 29th. 

POETRY (Judge: Keri-Lyn Durant)

1st Place

Sideshow

Becky Alexander (Cambridge, Ontario, Canada)

2nd Place

Canned Musician

Sarah McComb  (Cambridge, Ontario, Canada)

 3rd Place

My Father Should Have Been Here

Birgit Elston  (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada)

PROSE (Judge: Sharon Blomfield)

1st Place

Elora Gorgeous

Molly Layton (Elora, Ontario, Canada)

2nd Place

Hell Hath No Fury

Carole Kennedy (Elora, Ontario, Canada)

3rd Place

A Wet Right Hand

Alvin G. Ens  (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada)

Looking for the names of the winners of the EWF Young Writers Contest? You can find that information, and more, at the Contest blog, here.

Congratulations to everyone who entered, and please check back next year
for details of the 2012 competition.

Whither Books?

Photo: Arquitetura Pessoal

"They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books." — Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine)
Read more...
"But a new regime of digital technology has now disrupted all business models based on mass-produced copies, including individual livelihoods of artists. The contours of the electronic economy are still emerging, but while they do, the wealth derived from the old business model is being spent to try to protect that old model, through legislation and enforcement. Laws based on the mass-produced copy artifact are being taken to the extreme, while desperate measures to outlaw new technologies in the marketplace 'for our protection' are introduced in misguided righteousness. [...] As copies have been dethroned, the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work." — Kevin Kelly (New York Times Magazine)
Read more...

Local Coverage of the 2011 Elora Writers' Festival

Read an account of the 2011 Elora Writers' Festival in the Guelph Mecury: Writers’ festival a book lover’s delight

Pictures from our Young Writers Contest Event at 11:00 A.M. on May 29

Young Writers Contest Coordinator Jean Mills with Christopher Davis,
winner of an Honourable Mention in the Junior Prose category

Young Writers Contest judges Kira Vermond (on left) and Heather Wright
(third from left) with a clutch of avid writers

All I Want Is a Room Somewhere...

From: Wikimedia Commons

"Agatha Christie was 48 years old in 1938, gaining fame and fortune from her prolific output of short stories and novels, one series starring the dandified Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, another centered on the underestimated spinster-sleuth Jane Marple. [...] Christie longed for a vacation refuge. That summer, she heard of a handsome Georgian manor house, built around 1792, going up for sale; it was set on 33 acres, 15 miles from her birthplace, the village of Torquay. For Christie, Greenway—reachable only by boat or down a narrow country lane one and a half miles from the nearest village of Galmpton—represented, as she wrote in her autobiography, 'the ideal house, a dream house.' " ( Smithsonian.com)  Read more...

"She may also have felt the pull of the garden and the boathouse, built on the spot where, it is said, Sir Walter Raleigh, smoking tobacco, had water thrown over him by a servant who thought he was on fire." (The Telegraph) Read more...

Where Henry Thoreau Penned Walden
— a more modest version of Greenway

From: The Statement

What it cost him:
• Board's: $8.03 (½, mostly shanty boards)
• Refuse shingles for roof and sides: $4.00
• One thousand old brick: $4.00
• Two casts of lime: $2.40.
• Hair: $0.31. (probably horsehair, which was used to strengthen plaster)
• Laths: $1.25
• Two second-hand windows with glass: $2.43
• Mantle-tree iron: $0.15
• Nails: $3.90
• Hinges and screws: $0.14
• Latch: $0.10
• Chalk: $0.01
• Transportation: $1.40
• In all: $28.12
(The Statement) Read more...

Bernard Shaw's Writing Hut

From: An Honest Architecture 

"Vanity Fair advertised a Lazy Susan in 1917, but it took the creative mind of Bernard Shaw to see it's potential when combined with a writing hut. The idea was ingenious for a few reasons." ( An Honest Architecture) Read more...

See also here... and here...