Looking for some end-of-summer reading material? Check out our latest Writers’ Project interview, where bestselling author JT Ellison talks about her research, her writing routines, and her new book, The Immortals.
You’ll also find plenty of food for thought in our archives, where we’ve stored our previous interviews with Jeff Abbott and Damon Young.
After a hot, sticky summer in the city, I’ve made it to the beach — I’ll be in Westport, MA through Labor Day, exploring the river and the marshes, the ocean, marveling at cool birds, and trying to figure out how to work my new camera.
Have a great week, everyone!
To celebrate “Back to School” we’re giving away a Quo Vadis academic year planner to 10 lucky recipients!
Academic year planners begin in August and end in July. Students and teachers use them, organizations and parents who plan around the school year, and people who prefer to start their planner in August instead of mid-December. Somewhat surprisingly in this age of cell phone and iPads, the sales of academic year planners continue to rise every year.
You can see all our Academic year layouts here.
To enter, just leave a comment on this post before Monday, August 30th at 12:00 EST. We’ll select the winners at random, and follow up via email to sort out mailing addresses and such. So please don’t forget to incude an email address when you comment. (Don’t worry, it won’t be published.)
Good luck!
Image via Juanjo Valverde
You’ll never catch me donating my precious homegrown tomatoes to La Tomatina, a giant food fight that’s held in Buñol, Spain on the last Wednesday of every August. Still, it must be a pretty bizarre and amazing experience, and I’d certainly rather be pelted with relatively soft, ripe tomatoes than with oranges, as they throw in Ivrea during Carnival.
Raw tomato sauce, anyone?
I’ve written about my Rose of Sharon bush before, but it’s blossoming again and I just had to share a picture… It’s a beautiful plant — a type of hibiscus, apparently — but what’s even more lovely, to my mind, is the transformation from how it looked when we moved in: a leafless, spindly shrub. (Granted, it was the end of November, but given the way the yard looked at that time I assumed there was no way it could be living.)
The name is from the Song of Solomon, one of the Old Testament’s most lyrical books. It’s typically interpreted by Christians as an allegory of Jesus’s love; in the Jewish tradition, it’s about God’s love for Israel. As a nonreligious person, I find the classic medieval interpretation more meaningful: an “ecstatic union of the human soul with God,” in the words of scholar Debora Schwartz.
At any rate, here’s the King James Version:
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
Ah, the last, precious days of summer… Guest blogger Kate Marshall is back with a recommendation on where to enjoy them: Ocean City, Maryland.
I have to admit that I prefer Ocean City, Maryland to the Jersey beaches (aka, “the Shore”). In my defense though, it’s primarily because my family started going there when I was child, so it’s partly nostalgic—after almost 20 years of going to the other Ocean City, I consider it my second home. In fact, whenever my friends and I play the “when I win the lottery game,” my answer usually involves some variation of “buy a condo in Ocean City, Maryland and live there full-time.”
Sporting ten miles of beach and three miles of boardwalk, Ocean City is a thriving resort town in Maryland’s Worcester County (mmm, Worcester County sauce).
So I recently spent two weeks at “my” Shore and once again, it was awesome: two weeks of sitting on the beach, reading on the beach, swimming in the ocean, walking along the beach… (there is a pattern here, yes). The boardwalk is full of shops (including more Candy Kitchens than is humanely possible, so if you’re into candy, Ocean City has you covered). A variety of hotels, condos, cottages, and bed-and-breakfast homes provide plenty of options for lodgings, although my personal favorite is the Our Place at the Beach condos on Old Landing Road, with gorgeous views of the Assawoman Bay (…yes, that is it’s real name. Yes, it is). The beachfront Atlantis also gets points for resembling a tower of Jenga pieces and being on the beach.
And yes, I’m already planning next year’s vacation. Why I don’t just move to a state with a coastline, I don’t know. I’d probably save money in the long run.
Ooh, this looks interesting: the Sharpie liquid pencil. Made from “liquid graphite” and introduced on the company blog earlier this month, it’s been making its way through the Internet at a fairly rapid clip.
The idea, one gathers, is that it’s initially erasable, then becomes permanent with time. How much time is unclear; some sources are saying 24 hours, others give you up to three days. (“But unlike a Sharpie permanent marker, you will always be able to erase it to some degree,” according to a company update.)
The liquid pencil will be available in the US in September, though there’ve already been a couple of sightings at Office Depot. Have you tried it?
I’ve got technology on the brain this week, it seems… my latest source of reflection: my RSS reader. It’s a godsend, of course, when it comes to keeping track of all the blogs I like to read. But, like my email inbox, it has to be managed daily or it quickly gets out of hand. When I go to a specific website, I don’t feel compelled to read everything that’s on it. When I see a long string of unread articles from, say, the New York Times Books section in my RSS reader, however, I feel like I can’t ignore them — I have to at least scroll through and cast an eye on each piece. If I don’t have time to do that, I let things pile up while I wait for the right moment to go through and take care of it once and for all. Once and for all!
This is madness, of course. Also crazy is my gradual desensitization to logging on and seeing many hundreds of unread items — a coping mechanism, surely, and a temporary one at best. Sure, I could cut back on my subscriptions, but then I might miss something good. I need some sort of personalized Reader’s Digest software… or else I need to get over my aversion to occasionally clicking “Mark all as read” and starting fresh every once in a while.
How do you manage your RSS reader?
I have a complicated relationship with vacation time. I long for time off to read, putter around the yard, write, walk on the beach, go explore a different place. In short, to do the things I don’t have time or opportunity for during the week, or energy to do on the average weekend.
On the other hand, I dread the backlog of work that starts piling up when I take some time off. I get so exhausted trying to “catch up” that the benefits of vacation have evaporated within a day or two of getting back to work. In addition, the week before vacation I usually work like a manic to “get everything done” and in the process get even more tired and stressed.
Sound familiar?
So how to make the re-entry less stressful? I am going to focus on the immediate–answer retailer and customer email and calls, and handling that week’s deadlines. I am not going to “catch up” and do more besides. The work of the week will simply be to get back in touch and field any urgent request.
One way I make my job more interesting, but also a lot more work, is following up on opportunities. This could be new business relationships, or P.R., or product innovations or ideas. This is partly for my own stimulation and competitive spirit, but it is also from fear–because of the economy I am afraid to miss something that could make a difference.
Readjusting my perspective, it seems passing over two or three weeks out of 50 is not a big impact. The gain in energy and clarity from vacation time offsets any missed opportunities.
Do you struggle with “taking vacation” vs. staying in touch with work constantly? Is “vacation time” truly possible in this economy?
Image via Marcin Wichary
Last week, Art Decker presented some excellent research into the neurological benefits of writing. It made me wonder if there’s not something similar going on with maps and GPS devices. My parents visited earlier this summer, and they stayed in a hotel that’s about a 10-minute drive from where I live. I offered to give them directions, but my dad, ever the gadget geek, told me he would just use his new GPS.
To get here, you have to follow 9th Street under the BQE, where it makes a little jog to the right and then the left. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot going on at that intersection: the entrance to the Battery Tunnel, the ramp to the Eastbound BQE, truck traffic, other roads joining up and veering off at awkward angles… If you haven’t looked at a map and/or been prepped for the madness, it doesn’t do much good to hear your GPS tell you to take a slight left in 30 feet. My dad ended up on the on-ramp to the tunnel, and had to stop and ask a cop how to proceed from there, because of course his GPS was already calculating the route he would need to take if he continued through it. I’m not saying my directions would have eliminated the possibility for error, but I definitely think they would have been easier to follow!
There doesn’t seem to be much scientific data on the topic, though a Canadian researcher has suggested that “overreliance on gps… will result in our using the spatial capabilities of the hippocampus less, and that it will in turn get smaller.” She’s not the only one who’s worried — anecdotal evidence suggests that plenty of people are afraid of losing their navigational abilities.
No issue like this has to be either/or, but I’m curious: what do you think? Is GPS making us stupid?
