These days I'm probably happiest when I see my two daughters loving one another.Collection: Daughter
In researching literary agents I did what the books tell you to do: I looked at the acknowledgments page of a book that was similar to mine. Happily, that author thanked his agent. I looked up the agent on the web and found out that he not only represented authors writing books similar to mine, but I knew some of his clients! So, I sent in the manuscript, and they decided to represent it.Collection: Book
My book review site and first blog, which I started in 2003. I started it because I was lamenting that while I read so much, I could hardly remember any of it. People would ask me what good books I'd read recently, or what I thought of a particular book, and my mind would go blank. At the same time, I'd just heard of blogging and found the idea interesting and thought I'd give it a try.Collection: Book
I discovered Twitter, as I remember, and the idea of watching a global conversation go by immediately struck me as a fantastic thing. So I suppose it's not TwitterVision per se that excited me, but Twitter itself and its implications.Collection: Ideas
Every now and again your life's course can turn on one simple thing, some small decision the import of which isn't at all obvious at the time.Collection: Simple
I'm always impressed that as we go through life most of the stuff we do doesn't matter that much, at least not ostensibly: you go to the grocery store, you work, you go to school. If any of that were omitted, most days, it wouldn't matter much.Collection: School
My life has been sadly lacking in snails. I can't clearly remember any first-hand encounters. The best thing I can come up with is second-hand, a passage in Jacques Pépin's autobiography (The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen) in which he describes prying snails from the terrace of his vacation home and cooking them up for dinner.Collection: Home
Research is all well and good, but I definitely enjoy writing the most. I will happily sit at my computer and work on a single paragraph for hours. And there's no better feeling than when your writing is going well.Collection: Writing
I started to write book reviews as a means of recording my thoughts about what I'd read before all memory of them vanished.Collection: Memories
I don't understand the mechanics behind things, so a site that I find impressive may not really be more technologically advanced than something which is ostensibly uninteresting.Collection: May
What I find amazing is how sometimes ideas will just click, seemingly without effort.Collection: Ideas
When I post a review to book-blog.com it probably takes me - apart from writing the review, of course - 20 or 30 minutes to finish all my related tasks.But that's irregular, depending on how quickly I'm reading.Collection: Book
If you neglect your blogs they don't take up much time.Collection: Neglect
What did it for me was a blurb on the back of a book I was reading. The blurber wrote - I just looked it up - that "Trials have provided some of the best examples of 'micro-history' or the 'new narrative'...." And that was it.Collection: Book