Daily Thougts 5/2/2099

Poster by John Cecily Clay 1905

Daily Thoughts 5/2/2009

I walked up to my local library. It is very nice outside. It was refreshing. I picked up a manga by Hideo Azuma called Disappearance Diary. It is about a manga artist who has a habit of wandering off from his family, becoming alcoholic, becoming homeless, and acting a bit wild. The manga won the Grand Prize at the 9th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2005. It reminds me a bit of On the Road in a way and other accounts of wandering artists. I finished reading it tonight and will write a review tomorrow.

I also finished reading Good To Great by Jim Collins. This is a very interesting book. It will take me a while to think through what it says. There are a lot of implications about what it is saying that are quite relevant to what I am doing. I also finished reading the companion monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Steven Barnes has a mass market paperback of Great Sky Woman out. The book is about a prehistoric tribe in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. He is an African American writer of science fiction. He incorporates many historical motifs in his novels. Steven Barnes was nominated for the Hugo award for Novelette, The Locusts which he cowrote with Larry Niven. The sequel, Shadow Valley is coming out on May 5, 2009.

I finished watching Sidewalk Stories on dvd by Charles Lane. Charles Lane lent it to me to watch. I found it rather interesting. He acted, produced, and directed in this film. It is a silent black and white film set in New York city. The musical score is what makes the film exceptional. It takes the place of the dialogue. He also lent me another film, True Identity which is a comedy. He both acts in and produces this film.

Web Bits

Thomas Nelson has a book review program for bloggers. They give a free book to people who review their books. http://brb.thomasnelson.com/

AALBC, Search Engine Submission

I am going to mention the African American Literary Book Club because I like the site design. One of my colleagues found out about it at Book Expo America in 2005. It has since grown to be one of the largest and best sites for reviewing African American literature. http://www.aalbc.com/ .

There are a few very good black science fiction and fantasy writers. A few good books which I can recommend are Steven Barnes, Zulu Heart-- An alternate America where the Moor's settle America and enslave the Irish and many Europeans. Europe has suffered an unrecoverable plague. Maryse Conde-- Who Slashed Celinare's Throat A Fantastical Tale-- a magical realistic fantasy which is set in Guadeloupe which combines political and social intrigue with vodun. The third novel is I am going to recommend is Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler about an alien plague that changes people into carriers of a mutated virus. A deeply dark book about our basest desires and what it means to stay human when you no longer are.

A lot of the patrons who come to the library like urban fiction. It is not my cup of tea, but because it has been asked for so much I can list a lot of authors even though I don't read them. I can even guess what people might like because the same people tend to choose a specific set of authors. Some of the authors which are being asked for are Zane, E. Lynn Harris, Chunichi, Karl Weber, Terri Woods, Omar Tyree, Noire, and others. I took the time to read Omar Tyree and I find him to be a very good writer. He is better than Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines the old school street authors which people sometimes ask for where I work in my opinion. I am not that fond of Eric Jerome Dickey, I don't like his writing style, but a lot of people love it. Most of the books come in soft cover trade paperbacks.
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Hello, I have been thinking about search engine submission. I retried submitting my site to different search engines through http://www.submitexpress.com/ . I also put the search engine into a variety of directories, selecting a variety of them from http://submiturl.nu/ . Hopefully, this will start getting me some results from search engines. I have not gotten a single result from search engines according to hit counter, or from keywords. Everything has come from specific blog searches, forums, and blog sites.

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Another site of interest has come up when checking where hits to my site were coming from. It is Google Reader, a blog reading tool put out by google. http://www.google.com/reader/view It looks mildly interesting.