Saturday, May 24, 2008

An Unintentional Hiatus

I didn't intend to take a three-week break from blogging. But a number of academic deadlines converged (a conference paper and two book chapters), and while I worked madly to meet them I found myself bereft of energy for anything else, at least anything else that involved sitting at the computer and writing. I don't feel too badly about not posting here. For, of course, there are plenty of fine blogs where you can get your fix of book talk regardless of whether or not there's anything going on here. But I do feel that I've rather let the side down where the various reading groups and challenges that I run are concerned. Here's a quick update on each of those:

A Curious Singularity: Regular participants will have noted that no new short story discussion commenced in May. I'm just going to let that slide and turn my attention to June. To that end, please send me your nominations for our June short story and I'll compile a slate of them for us to vote on in short order.

The Short Story Reading Challenge: Over the last month several people commented or emailed requesting to join the challenge and I was very slow to respond. I think I've caught up with all of the requests now though. If you expressed an interest and didn't receive an invitation to join the challenge blog, let me know and I'll rectify the oversight. We're up to 75 participants now who have collectively posted 118 reviews of short stories or short story collections since the beginning of the year. Not a bad show of interest in a genre that we're forever being told is dead or dying! Thanks to all those posts, I've been introduced to a number of authors and collections that I hadn't come across before and I'm very grateful.

Blogging Anne of Green Gables: Our group read of Anne of Green Gables, in honour of the 100th anniversary of its publication, is scheduled to begin on June 1st. I've sent out invitations to join the Anne blog to the eighteen people who have so far expressed an interest in participating. Again, though, if you ought to have received an invite and didn't, let me know and I'll send you another (and please make sure to provide me with a working email address for this purpose). And of course there's plenty of time to sign on even if you haven't yet communicated your interest. Just let me know. I'm looking forward to reading a multitude of different perspectives on this enduring classic.

A Modest Poetry Challenge: Several brave souls took up my April challenge, writing one or more critical posts about poets, poems, or poetry collections during National Poetry Month. Before the end of May, I will post a proper roundup linking to all of those very thoughtful and interesting posts and then I'll perform the promised book draw.

I think that's me all caught up in the blogging realm. Hopefully now I'll be resuming regular posts here. I've missed sharing my reading with you!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back! I look forward to hearing about what you've been reading while you were gone. If it's any consolation, I've taken many hiatuses from my blog, and not one has ever been intentional. :-P

I think I'll go dig out my copy of Anne of Green Gables now...

Anonymous said...

LOL - Welcome back! :-D

Anonymous said...

It's lovely to have you back, Kate! Real life is so annoying, how it gets in the way of the important things like blogging :) I've been reading short stories but because I've been lumping all my reviews together into one post, I haven't been crossposting. I must think about how to rectify that. Oh and I'd love to read Raymond Carver's Cathedral with the ACS group.

Kerry said...

So glad to see you here again!

Anonymous said...

I understand how real life can get in the way of blogging having just finished my school semester! Welcome back! And I would LOVE to join the Anne of Green Gables group read!

Danielle said...

I wondered where you had disappeared to. I hope you'll be back to posting again, though I know how busy real life can get! I've been reading a short story every week and thoroughly enjoyin it, but I admit I haven't been posting to the group blog. I try and cut and paste from Typepad to Blogger and the formatting always gets messed up. I tend to run out of time (and patience), so my posts can at least be found on my blog.

Anonymous said...

Good to have you back Kate! I'm a bit behind with the short story challenges as well.... oh well, life goes on regardless, doesn't it?

Anonymous said...

Welcome back, Kate! I've taken an unplanned blogging break as well in the past couple of weeks, due to too many things going on at the same time. I've even hardly had time to read, except for a couple of pages or a short story in bed before I'd turn off the light (or, more often, being unable to keep my eyes open).

All that is now over and I plan to come back to blogging after the weekend. I am going out of town for three days first to see some friends and just relax, before I will catch up with blogging. I think I have deserved that! :-)

John Mutford said...

Welcome back Kate!

It'll be a tough sell, by I nominate Laura Bork's "Mama Loved Patsy Cline" for June's Curious Singularity. I'm guessing most people don't know who she is, but I stumbled upon her story and absolutely loved it.