A Writer's Edge

For the last six months, this blog has been "on sabbatical," but I have posted as the spirit moved me.

All ventures have a natural cycle, and I think this blog has come to the end of it's life. (I may start others and the reviews of writers' books continues @GLHancock Reviews.

There just aren't enough hours in the day to pound the keyboard for all that I want to accomplish. That and recurring tendonitis in my right arm combine to make regular blogging a less desirable activity. I've already given up designing websites for writers. I'll leave this account open on Posterous because it houses the last year of posts. If I can find a way to integrate them into my website, I will do that eventually.

The main archive of these posts is at http://www.writers-edge.info/Blog.html and will remain available  with it's infinitely more useful Google Search feature. If you receive the posts via FeedBlitz emails, please switch to the FeedBurner service: Subscribe to A Writer's Edge by Email - I will be closing the other email service and consolidating all account with Google's FeedBurner. If I begin a new blog, FeedBurner will automatically notify you. The RSS feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/writers-edge/EElx. I'll also use that feed as well as Twitter to notify you if/when I begin a new blog or service.

My deep gratitude to all of you who have remained readers from the beginning in 2004, and to all who have joined along the way. I wish you well in your writing endeavors. You can still contact me by mail, phone and email via "A Writer's Edge" website -- writers.edge@gmail.com

Georganna Hancock, editor/writer/publisher
10725 Escobar Drive
San Diego CA 92124
858-571-5390
A Writer's Edge  http://www.writers-edge.info
Amazon Author Page  http://www.amazon.com/georganna-hancock/e/B002X0CX50

Artists and other creatives often join together in craft guilds, so it is understandable that one would claim she "guilded" a piece of art. I don't think "guild" can be used as a verb, however. What the artist meant was that she coated the work with gold in some form, and that calls for the verb "to gild." Think of the cliché 'gilding the lily.'

To geld, on the other hand, requires little art and probably no gold at all. It is a synonym for neutering or castrating an animal. Ouch! There's a grammar error you don't want to make.

For example, "I belong to the San Diego Writers/Editors Geld."  Reminds me of a toothless lion.

Following an experience with breast cancer five years ago, I began to have curious thoughts.They started with joy at hearing an early morning bird's song.

"I'll miss that when I'm dead," I thought. The incongruity of the idea immediately followed. It was an especially unfitting response because I am agnostic, analytic, and well-schooled in psychology. In other words, dreadfully intellectual. Wow! It was a rare utterly emotional reaction to an unmediated experience of reality.

In the time since that first "What I'll miss when I'm dead" episode, I've noticed others. Everyone else seems to be creating a "bucket list" of experiences to have before death, so I thought I might chronicle these events. I don't have a bucket list, though I've tried diligently to come up with one.

The most pervasive reaction to having cancer seems to be to take a long trip or perform some outrageous action like parasailing or climbing Mt. Everest. There's nothing left that I want to do. Really, I just don't care anymore. All those experiences seem pointless if I won't be around to recollect and enjoy them again.

So, I treasure the here and now as much as I can. Illogical as they may be, what I'll miss most---if I can---are sensual activities rather than intellectual achievements. This will come as a surprise to most anyone who knows me. Nonetheless:

• I am dumbstruck by intensely blue skies, especially with contrasting puffy white clouds -- rare in SoCal.
• The satiny slide of  great chocolate on my tongue and upper palate is orgasmic.
• A tree viewed against the sky, limbs akimbo, still astonishes the artist within.
• Fragrances that evoke nostalgic memories bring tears, especially the smell of my mother.
• The feel and odor of a warm, milky kitten is the essence of cats I loved through the years.
• Losing my Self in a mystic moment is bliss enough for eternity.

Predicted growth of digital publishing--in four years digital sales will still be only half as much as printed book sales.

In the table below, the total numbers for both print and digital represent sales of hardbound and paperbound books in these categories: adult/juvenile/YA fiction and non-fiction and mass market paperbacks fiction and non-fiction. Future numbers are projections

Professor Albert Greco of Fordham University’s extrapolated the predictive numbers from U.S. Department of Commerce data.

Read the whole story in The Miami Herald

Many developments on the electronic publishing front happen at a breath-taking speed. Consider the latest Amazon data showing ebooks outselling tree books (my last post). And at Amazon, the new features popping up in Author Central pages (I'm struggling to get my publications listed in Shelfari where we can add material that will show up back on Amazon books' listing pages).

Just this morning I read in the LNJDawson.com newsletter: 

The new Big Six (Apple, Amazon, BN, Sony, Kobo, Google) are very very different from traditional book retailers.

"Big Six" is what we used to call the major New York print book publishers, of course. The new ones are almost all digital media only.

Meanwhile, I continue reviewing print books and publishing the reviews on the Amazon Kindle platform. Available just this morning is "Review of The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl" which I souped up just for this version.

Because Amazon does not automatically add a title to one's Author Page Bibliography, I began snooping the listings with the site's search engine. I was astounded to find different listings, depending on whether you search for material by an author's name (in quotation marks) in Books > "Author Name" or with Books > Advanced Search > "Author Name." Now the resulting pages display blurbs about the author as well as a seldom complete listing of publications.

In fact, in the result for searching my name just in Books, the second listing when sorted for Relevance (default setting) provides a link to "Amazon's Complete Selection of Georganna Hancock's Books" which is the advanced search results, but not quite complete. And what do they mean by "selection?"

Here's the interesting (to me) part: on the Books search results page, the blurb contains this paragraph with individual links to the cited material:

Bestselling Books: Review of THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH (Books Reviewed by Georganna Hancock), IRS & Writers (Be a Successful Writer!, Vol 3), Review of ARIEL RESTORED by Sylvia Plath (Books Reviewed by Georganna Hancock).

What's so great about that? It's the first time I can see which of my pubs are doing best in sales! Two of the top three are book reviews. This is as I suspected from looking at individual monthly sales reports (the only reporting KDP offers). People seem to prefer my opinions more than the information provided in my other publications. Can anyone explain this?