Apology is due.  While scraping spam from our grill here at AuthorScoop, I inadvertently deleted a legitimate comment or two.  It’s sad when the eye and the cursor do not line up.  I’m sorry.

So, if you left a comment and it’s no longer here and you weren’t one of the fools talking random rubbish to trick us into clicking irrelevant links, send a complaint about me to William Haskins, just up there to the right of your screen, and you can rest assured you’ll hear the screams all the way from here, wherever you may be.  He’s like that.

Either way, I shall try to be more careful.

I read.  Sometimes I love it more than others.  And today is a very, very good day.

My access to the control panel here at AuthorScoop means I can blurt out my distaste for Elvis Presley in revamped headlines for other people’s book reviews.  (Having said that, it was a positive review of that book, and my sensibilities on pop music are utterly irrelevant.  I was only trying to be funny, both then and now.)

But I can also log in here at AS and crow.  Stand by.

THE LACUNA, by Barbara Kingsolver is one of the best books I’ve ever read.  It’s a gorgeous, moving novel that succeeds on both the small, personal level and also in the reach for overarching truths about history and about human nature.

I was fortunate enough to see Ms. Kingsolver launch this book here in Asheville, North Carolina, where the second half of THE LACUNA takes place.  During her presentation, she defined the word ‘lacuna’ for us - it’s a missing part of a story or manuscript and, also, a hydro-geological formation, a hole in a cliff wall formed by tidal pull.

The novel makes brilliant use of both definitions in chronicling a young man’s life through servitude in a number of intriguing Mexican households, his association with the art world, his ascension to success as a novelist in the United States and, finally, to his scrutiny in 1950 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, as Senator Joseph McCarthy geared up to draw the lines that still linger under and over our subconscious crosswalks.

If you’ve the time and inclination, I can’t recommend it enough.

Technical difficulties and apologies fill the space where Friday’s features should have been.

Please stand by and we’ll all soon forget the gap.

From the always fun McSweeney’s:

It would be apathetic for me to just hunker down and “go with the flow.” So by stepping down as God I’m avoiding the flow, which makes me a better God. This makes sense for a lot of reasons, reasons of which I will not go into now for fear of giving in to pressure. And I am not one to “give in to pressure from other people.”

Numbers are nice when they’re round, and like a 50th anniversary or a 10 year reunion, they give us a chance to pause and reflect.

In the 16 months AuthorScoop has been going, we’ve made 2,000 posts—not bad for what is essentially a two-person operation. So I definitely want to thank Jamie first and foremost; her assistance and encouragement has provided much of the fuel to keep us going.

I also want to thank our faithful regular readers and commenters, in addition to our new friends and even those who just pop by every once in a while. We hope you find some value in your visits and appreciate you taking the time to read.

Brigid Delaney says you do:

The act of creating a character and creating a world for them to live in is so involving, generous and intense that the only analogy available is that of giving birth and being a parent. But once the book is out there in the world — available at airport gift stores and in bookstores — the nurturing has stopped and the author should step back.

Of course, terrible things can happen to books out there — and authors are right to fret. They can be used by murderers as a prop in their crimes (John Lennon’s killer was holding a copy of Catcher when he approached Lennon with a gun).

They can be made into bad films, awful radio plays and boring mini-series. On the net people may pay homage by writing dire fan fiction. Earnest PhDs devote the best years of their life to studying the minutiae of the book, feeling around for a sub-text when there is none. But as parents must learn to let go — often with sadness — so should authors.

I’m speechless.

AuthorScoop’s friend, Kim Michele Richardson, is roaming the country, promoting her memoir, THE UNBREAKABLE CHILD, and she asked me to stick my pen in over at Writer in Waiting to hold her place.

So I did.

Luckily, something weird had just happened, and we all know there’s no better inspiration than the odd bit of oddity.  Take a peek, if you feel like it.

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In the lead up to Valentine’s Day, author Kim Michele Richardson is featuring a week of guest bloggers at Writer in Waiting, musing on the nature of love.

Naturally, I’m an expert on such matters and, as such, was invited to participate.

So head on over for some helpful tips in how to dazzle your lover, even as the economy crumbles.

Merry Christmas to all celebrants!

And for everyone else, we hope that having most everything closed is more peaceful than boring and inconvenient.

Season’s greetings and thanks so much for peeking in, throughout our inaugural year, to keep up with literary news and book reviews.  We hope that these, along with our other daily features, have kept current your love of the written word, as they do for us as we compile them.

Jamie’s Friday Evening Book Reviews is the 1,000th post at AuthorScoop.

I’d like to thank her and Rob for their hard work in bringing our readers a wide variety of literary news and content, and also express my gratitude to our faithful readers.

Here’s to the next thousand.

-William

I just finished the documentary series, BORN INTO THIS, the biography of poet and novelist, Charles Bukowski, that was featured most recently as our Afternoon Viewing selection for the past two weeks.  Life being what it is, it took me far longer to finish it than I would have liked.  It seems lately that the things I want to do are finding themselves further and further back in the queue of what I aim to get done on any given day.  I should probably do something about that, but realizing it is progress at least.

I’m surprised I started the film at all.  I had long ago written off Bukowski as vulgar, obnoxious, and one of the reasons I had decided that poetry wasn’t for me.  Worse than all of it, I had concluded that he was a bare-assed Emperor, making fun of everyone who pretended to be something other than chronically discontent.  But things have changed in my leaping tendencies.  I’m older and more careful of my bones, and am blessedly less spry to conclusions than I used to be; more flexible to reexamine the bricks in my foundation.  I’m so very pleased that I did in this case.

What I learned was: a) that I hadn’t read enough Bukowski to have bolted such a rigid opinion in place and b) that it was a bit arrogant to imagine that everyone affected by his work, and his acquaintance, was delusional.  Learning of his life and times, the work makes sense and I heard more than a few lines that were very beautiful and very real.

I guess the weightiest lesson I gained was that reality, captured in plain words, is valuable.  It doesn’t mean to be (or need to be) the last word or the bottom line, only one way to slow life down and let you keep it a bit longer.  I think that’s what the arts do – stretch and inflate and warp our small experience of something infinite, as a gift to us.  Bird’s eye, mouse’s eye, God’s eye views are all valuable, but so is the bleary, angry, desperate eye of a person who is paying attention.

I still think Bukowski was often vulgar and obnoxious, but am content to know that I am not less because his work doesn’t always speak to me personally.  I’m only less if I cannot imagine that it would ring clear to someone else.

Thank you, William, for finding and posting that.

Sex is funny. It just is. Procreating is even funnier and best yet, sci-fi’s jousting with contraception, as Lauren Davis of i09.com points out.

In a universe stocked with sentient robots and faster than light travel, you’d hope that science would have mastered something as mundane as the human reproductive system, yet the fictive cosmos are littered with unplanned pregnancies, bastard children, and all manner of unpleasant critters bursting from one’s internal organs. Is any form of contraception safe in world of science fiction?

Check out the whole piece for a laugh. Then go think up something that will work. It’s money in the bank.

Just a note as a mea culpa.  In my overzealous blazing of spam comments, I accidentally deleted some legitimate commentary.  I’m very sorry and have bitten all of the offending typing fingers to bleeding.  It looks like the shower scene from ‘Psycho’ in here.

I’ll be more careful in the future.

After a short (long) haitus, Author Scoop is back—now in blog form!

Many thanks to Kirk Brown for getting it all set up and for hosting us and for all his support and encouragement during the transition.

Now, on to the news.