Sheila's Guests and Reviews

Have you heard the buzz about nings closing down? Probably not unless you ended up belonging to lots of nings back when they got popular. I was trying to hard to "network" then - it seemed like the thing to do. Somehow I ended up with a list of "my pages" as long as the screen (though at least it wasn't as long as my arm ) in "my favorites." Rumor has it those nings aren't going to be free to their owners anymore, so some of them have started to migrate. One of the first I joined was Carol Denbow's "Book and Author Event Center," so now I'm creating a page at her new networking site, the aptly named "Book Event Centre" - http://bookeventcenter.spruz.com . Spruzzes seem to look remarkably like nings. They gives you a place to post pictures, blog, interact, join groups, chat, advertise... Though I must admit that "blogging" bit kind of got old once I started this blog - who wants to post the same thing several ti...

Most of the nings I’ve joined are for readers and/or writers, and on one of them I found myself volunteering to write some book reviews. I’d done a few reviews on gather before ( www.smd.gather.com ) but this time I was asked to post my reviews to Barnes and Noble and Amazon… Yeah, I know. It’s no big deal. But I’d never done it before. Should I use my real name or stay anonymous? How much or how little should I say? And how on earth do I rate something when I’m seriously ratings-averse? …and on Goodreads? I’d never even heard of Goodreads. So I went there, signed up, and in a spurt of unaccustomed energy ending up posting all my reviews at once, new and old. You can find them at http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2039269 , though it’s not a representative selection of books that I’ve read – just of ones I’ve reviewed. Maybe I should write a few more, just for completeness. It’s on my to-do list.

Once upon a time, I promised my sons I would never visit Myspace or Facebook. It’s a privacy thing—-I wouldn’t go messing with their stuff; I wouldn’t barge into their rooms without knocking; I wouldn’t search their files on the computer. And it’s trust—-I have three sons, and they care about each other: they let me know if anything’s wrong. But it’s also a generational thing—-Myspace and Facebook just looked so strange, I wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway. Then came Gather. To be more accurate, then came the first ever Gather First Chapters Competition, just as I finished writing my novel, so I joined ( www.smd.gather.com ) and entered. I wasn’t sure what all these groups and connections were about—“It’s just like Myspace,” said my sons—-but it was a fun place for me to write and make friends. There was something on the Gather front page about blogs back then. Yes, I’d heard of blogs. I wasn’t quite sure what one was, beyond a public private diary, but I’d heard of them. Still...