Readers and writers blog

What a difference a day makes — the day, Thursday, that I didn’t have to post a blog entry for the first time in two years.

Cutting back our posting schedule from twice- to once-weekly freed up a lot of time — my mathematically keen mind makes it about 3½ days — and, friends, I used it.

• I played so much guitar this week that, as I told a blogging colleague, the fingertips on my left hand have become thimbles. It’s an odd thing about calluses and guitar strings. When you first start playing, the strings leave painful dents in your fingertips (especially steel strings, which is why I play a classical guitar with nylon strings). Then the tips of your fingers toughen up and form calluses, sometimes so thick that you lose sensitivity. But then, mysteriously, they seem to soften back a little and you can feel again.

One of the best guitarists I know — the guy plays hours on end — has surgeon-soft fingertips. I think it’s got something to do with technique, the ease with which he plays. In my case, the calluses are back. And headed nowhere.

• I’ve been experimenting with some new sound equipment. My wife, Bonnie, and I spent a few hundred bucks on a small amplifier and a studio microphone that picks up both our voices and our guitars for our weekly singalongs with our friends at a local senior citizen residence.

We used the new gear last Sunday, and guess what? For the first time in years, I think, some folks in the back row actually heard us.

• I caught up on my blogroll reading. I hate to admit it to my colleagues on our blogroll, but there have been times when I got not days but weeks behind in reading those 45 sites.

So, welcome back, Robert Lashley, previously known as The literary thug and now the brother who has to write. Congratulations, Bernita, on weaving lyrical prose about the Ides of August so beautifully into a discussion of weapons used to dispatch vampires, zombies and the like. Best wishes to Don Croner out there in northern Mongolia at a festival at the Amarbayasgalant Monastery. Not to mention a great interview with one of our featured novelists, R.J. Keller, on another site to which she contributes her expertise, the Movie-Fanatic.

• I got a chance to watch several Yankees games in their entirety. Not that I haven’t done that a lot in the past, but now it’s without guilt that I should be working here. Unfortunately, this year, the Yankees suck. And to R.J. in Maine, sorry, but the Red Sox aren’t doing so hot, either. Of course, they are close on the wild card slot for the playoffs. Who would’ve thought — Tampa Bay in first?

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters Two and Three of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter Two: Cassie and her friend Leila, surburban teens who have survived a pandemic virus that has killed the world’s adults, go into the city with two members of a gang they hope to join for food and protection. On the way, Cassie has to shoot one of a group of dirty children confronting them at a roadblock.

Chapter Three: Cassie, now a member of the Regents, has impressed leaders of the gang with her survival skills and is recruited for a foray to a library to find books on plants that could add to the gang’s food supplies. Leila, still on probation with the Regents, is given menial cleaning duties.

• Chapters 26 and 27 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 26: Tess takes a long drive to Portland with Brian’s sister, Rachel, pregnant from her drug-dealer boyfriend and now heading to a clinic for an abortion. The women try to agree that it’s not a baby but a fetus. But even Tess, who never wanted children, is haunted by the procedure.

Chapter 27: Rachel has agreed to stay with Brian and Tess to try to straighten out her life. But then there’s still the drug-dealer boyfriend, a sadist named Tim who may kill Rachel if he finds out about the abortion. So Tess hatches a plan to kill Tim instead, a plan so carefully worked out that no one would ever know.

– Sid Leavitt