William and I are going to take a couple of days off to cozy up with our people, track Santa on Norad, eat too much, and enjoy what’s on offer for the season.

If you’re celebrating, whatever you’re celebrating, we sincerely wish you a wonderful time of it.

And we thank you for clicking into our efforts here at AuthorScoop. See you soon!

We’ll be taking today off for food, fun and family. As always, we appreciate your readership, and we’ll be back in full swing tomorrow.

To our editor-in-chief, William Haskins, and to all the dads in our readership, Happy Father’s Day 2011.

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Please stand by.

It’s Mondayed all over Wednesday here at AuthorScoop and technical difficulties are the order of the day. By all accounts, we should be back full-strength tomorrow.

The typing cogs of AuthorScoop were neither hatched nor grown in secret laboratory tanks, so we’ll be on a short hiatus for this weekend to tend to a few Spring-and-Mom duties.

Wishing all our readers who are mothers (and all our readers who have mothers) a lovely weekend.

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AuthorScoop is on hiatus until the weekend so that we may count our blessings and likely eat too much.  We’ll be back on Saturday with more news, reviews, quotes, and videos, and possibly larger pants.

As we sign off for the holiday, the obvious thing is to remind you that we’re very thankful of you, our readers.

Happy Thanksgiving from AuthorScoop and we hope you have a wonderful holiday.

Today, I like the scoreboard.

Other days, not so much.

Thanks for your patience. I think we’re all sorted out on the display issues.

We’re getting reports of a display error in Internet Explorer (version 8 for sure; possibly older versions as well) on certain portions of the site.

If you’re reading this and have the time and inclination to let us know if the links below are displaying properly, we would surely appreciate it.

http://authorscoop.com/category/kill-your-darling-babies/

http://authorscoop.com/category/authorscoop-exclusive/

http://authorscoop.com/category/writers-resources/

We’re not hearing of difficulties with Firefox, but please let us know if that’s not the case.

Thank you for your help!

Never has it been more apparent why it’s called The Web.  AuthorScoop is getting quite tangled up in it all, and as far as I can tell, that’s good news.  But it’s early yet.

We’re already squawking Tweets about what we’re up to and just today, we’ve launched a page on FaceBook with updates on our articles and galleries of our staff and featured guests.  Of course, every bit of this is linked, for maximum tail-chasing, with our Twitterfeed.

So if you just can’t get enough AuthorScoop, click that button over there in the sidebar to the right of your screen, and then try getting this spider’s snare off your face.

I’m begging the indulgence of Willam, here, and of the AuthorScoop readership, to post a link that isn’t really writing-related at all, except for that I wrote it.

A branch of my family is hurting.  Today is the three year anniversary of the loss of Theresa Vasold.  The thousand-and-some days in between these markers is feeling quite long and, for some, she feels very far away.

When I came home from her funeral, I wrote an essay on what I’d learned there.  Here’s the link to Past Tense for anyone who might be interested, and I’d thank you for reading it, if you’re so inclined.

But mostly, I thank you for allowing me to hijack this little moment from you, wherever you are.  In the thirty seconds you read this, you cast a thought for a beautiful girl you’ll never get to meet.  As part of her family, I appreciate it.  Thank you.

This week marks the second anniversary of AuthorScoop, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank our contributors, interview subjects and our readers—who visit us daily by the hundreds and, on a good day, by the thousands.

Most of all, of course, I would like to thank Jamie Mason, my partner and right hand, for a lot of hard work and a lot of patience, most of which is consumed in putting up with me.

Thanks everyone.

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.