Grabbing nearby books instead of napping...

[fenchurch]

Gakked directly from rosiewook, though it seems like it's been popping up everywhere lately.

So, the instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that cool or intellectual book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag three people

First, let me say that I'm currently in my bedroom... I was going to check my email quickly before taking a nap and for some reason finally decided to be a sheep. What this means is that the nearest books are in my Teetering Pile (i.e. the nightstand bookcase, crammed with the books that are on my To Be Read list) and some of them have been there for awhile, though I do intend to get around to them all eventually. So, blindly grabbing the first book I could reach, here are the results:

Your outline can help pull you out of the rewriting trap. After you've written the book, let your outline show you how much you've gotten right. You thought deeply about all kinds of questions related to your characters, their story, and their world because the outline made you think about them.

ETA: The title and author are in the comments...


I'm not going to tag anyone, because I really don't remember who has already done it. If you'd like to give a try, go for it! Consider yourself tagged!

Also, I'm not sure what's supposed to happen at this point. Is everyone supposed to guess what book it is? Should I make another post with the answer? Hmmmm.

Comments

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

Obviously some sort of "how to write fiction" book. I don't have any but Orson Scott Card's book on writing SF and Fantasy, and this ain't it.

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

Yep! It's actually one for a subject I'm not normally interested in, but the author is a friend, which ups the interest quotient by quite a bit.

The book is Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies by Leslie Wainger. And, really, I think it's got plenty of good advice regardless of the genre you're wanting to tackle. It's still on my Teetering Pile mostly because I'd like to finish reading it at some point, but since it's not information I'm in immediate danger of needing, I keep getting distracted by other books (who throw themselves at me with beautiful cover art and science jargon in the summaries on the back).

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Bwa-ha-haaaa! And that's all I'll say. *g*

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

OK. For the nearest bookshelf at least a dozen are from O'Reilly and Associates. I have my programmer mind back (first time in the longest time) and I'm hitting it like a strongly hit thing. And y'know, that's not counting the books set around my wife's computer that are really my core library. So, when I did mine, it was a techie book. In a language I don't really want to learn. B)

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

I didn't want to try it down on my regular computer... it's surrounded by computer books, computer game books and our whole SF&F library. Finding the nearest one wouldn't have been easy, and it would have likely been a technical manual as well.

I do find it a bit funny that I'd decided to try it upstairs in the bedroom to avoid those types of things (figuring I was much more likely to come up with fiction), and still wound up grabbing a "technical manual" of sorts.

Ah, O'Reilly... I'm afraid the only O'Reilly book I currently have near any of the computers is my old copy of Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell (aka the first compilation of "User Friendly" comic strips) -- the others are all on the backup bookcase of computer books across the room.

[zotel.livejournal.com]

Maybe I shouldn't have disqualified user manuals and such from mine... =)