My article on Lyme disease, which ran in the North Bay Bohemian, was reprinted in Metro Silicon Valley. I guess the article is getting quite a bit of positive feedback from Lyme disease sufferers. It’s always nice to know people like your work.

In other news, Kyle and I are going to Seattle for the next five days to visit his Dad. From there, we are going up to Victoria BC, which I have always wanted to see. Canada, ho!

Last weekend, Kyle and I went to Monterey to celebrate our anniversary. We stayed at the Way Station Inn on the north end of town. Although the hotel is by Monterey’s tiny airport, it is very quiet and surrounded by a veil of pine trees. Our room felt like a private bungalow. It’s a good place to stay if you want a hotel that is less touristy and more affordable.

During the rest of the day, we walked around downtown and Cannery Row, looked for otters and seals in the ocean, tasted wine in a wine shop, ate an excellent dinner at Passionfish Restaurant in nearby Pacific Grove, and went to the beach to watch the sun set.

Pictures:

I was disappointed the sunset wasn’t more spectacular. However, while we were there, we noticed a couple wandering near the surf. Suddenly, the man got on his knees and took the woman’s hand. She must have said yes, because they hugged and hugged afterwards.

Of the three panels I went to at the San Jose Book Group Expo, which I attended with Marcia, I got the most out of the one titled “Exploring the Writer’s Imagination,” with ZZ Packer, Sara Gruen, and Andrew Sean Greer.

Along with describing how they got their ideas and how ideas evolve, the writers also discussed choosing the details that make up a piece of writing. When researching his novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Greer went through old newspapers picking out vivid items, like an advertisement for gloves with embroidered birds on the palms (Get it? Bird in the hand?), some of which he used in the novel. “Writers have to have a kind of magpie’s eyes that picks out all the glittering things,” he said. Very true. The crafting part of writing depends on what details you pick, and how you arrange them on the page. The more the details catch the mind’s eye, the more interesting the writing becomes.

The writers also talked about procrastination. Sara Gruen’s case of procrastination was so bad, she had repainted her living room five times and organized her rubber band collection according to size. Finally, she decided to move her desk into the walk-in closet. She covered the window, shut off the phone, bought noise-reducing headphones, and went in there every day with nothing but her manuscript and her tea. She figured that if she stayed in there long enough, something would happen with her book. And, of course, it did.

I have actually tried writing in a closet. I have also tried driving to the beach, sitting in freezing libraries, and writing in coffee shops. Here is what I have learned: you can take away everything from me but a piece of paper and a writing implement and I will still find a way to procrastinate. Concentrating for me is a choice–if I don’t decide to do the task at hand, I won’t.

But Gruen’s determination did inspire me to simply sit with the novel I’m writing and not allow myself to be distracted. So every morning this week, Kyle has been turning off the Internet and I’ve been forcing myself to focus on the novel alone. So far, I have seen some progress. Let’s hope it continues.

In keeping with the wedding theme, my article on wedding tourism was published in the June issue of North Bay Biz Magazine. As anyone who has been through one knows, weddings are big business. This article looks at the financial impact of weddings in Sonoma, Napa, and Marin counties.

Four years! You are the best thing to ever happen to me.

(Joy and Kyle in Napa, two days before their wedding)

I have a new article in this week’s North Bay Bohemian. Did you know that Lyme disease has tripled in the last year in California? Read all about it.

I am planning to write a post about the Book Group Expo that I went to with Marcia last week, but work keeps getting in the way. In the meantime, read Marcia’s take on the Expo.

And while you’re at it, consider donating a book to the libraries in Harrison County that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Biloxi Library, for example, had 3 feet of water and lost 39,000 titles. Gulfport Library lost its children’s, adult fiction, and audio-visual collections.

Plus, you get to pick which book you want to buy from the library’s Amazon wishlist, which is pretty awesome.

My husband Kyle Rankin’s fourth book Ubuntu Hacks is out. He co-wrote it with several other people, including his boss Bill Childers.

Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux. According to Wikipedia, a rough translation of the African word Ubuntu means “humanity towards others,” or “I am because we are.” The Ubuntu distribtution wants to bring “the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.” I’m just glad it’s not Windows XP.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Update: Ubuntu Hacks got 9 out of 10 points on Slashdot!

Update: Ubuntu Hacks is now the number 1 top seller for Computer and Internet books on Amazon!

For the second time this week, I’m stuck on my laptop because my main computer is refusing to boot. So that means that not only am I stuck on a much slower machine, I’m stuck using Windows XP instead of Linux.

Windows is making me insane! It has brought up “Automatics Updates” 10 times so far this morning asking if I would like to reboot my computer. In fact, it just did it again! Why yes, Windows, let me stop everything I’m doing so you can randomly do a bunch of updates. Sure, shut down all my programs. I wasn’t doing anything. In fact, why don’t I just step away from the computer and you can use it to bring up ads and restart every few minutes?

Windows also refuses to play a surprising number of Mp3s and other files that work fine on Linux. I am not 4 years old, so I don’t want little cartoon dogs and paperclips flashing every time I use a program. Somehow AOL got installed, which is making everything worse, since it repeatedly brings up an AOL window asking if it should be my default browser. I’m pretty convinced there is a ton of spyware on here now because it is taking 500 years to load, and because, duh, AOL, but Search and Destroy and AdAware say otherwise.

Yes, I know I can spend two hours looking through all my programs to figure out how to turn all this off, uninstall AOL, etc. But–oh look the Automatic Update came up again!–I just want my computer to work. I want programs to open when I say and I don’t want to be constantly interrupted by stupid updates. I want me to be the boss of the machine, not the other way around. Why anyone would use Windows XP when there are other options out there is a mystery to me.

By the way, Leona has pictures of last Friday night’s Karaoke. I’m the one with the mouth that opens really wide.

The NYTimes wrote an article about product placement in books. Apparently, Cover Girl has a deal with the young adult novel, Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233, which is coming out in September:

As it turns out, Lipslicks is a line of lip gloss made by Cover Girl, which has signed an unusual marketing partnership with Running Press, the unit of Perseus Books Group that is publishing the novel [Cathy’s Book].

Cover Girl, which is owned by the consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, has neither paid the publisher nor the book’s authors, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, for the privilege of having their makeup showcased in the novel. But Procter will promote the book on Beinggirl.com, a Web site directed at adolescent girls that has games, advice on handling puberty and, yes, makeup tips.

Also:

But such deals are not unprecedented. Five years ago, Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, paid Fay Weldon an undisclosed amount to feature the brand prominently in her novel, entitled — what else? — “The Bulgari Connection.”

The book industry is definitely going in this direction. I don’t like it. In a TV show, you can have an actress drinking a coke without drawing attention away from what’s going on around her. In a book, you have to describe the coke, thus spending valuable words explaining why the coke is there. So, simply by virtue of how writing works, it would be difficult to put a product placement in a book without affecting the creative content of the story.

Books are one of the few sources of entertainment that are relatively untouched by commercialism. On TV, the threat to pull advertising rules the content of many shows. Do we want that kind of thing getting into our books?

Also, I wonder what product placement would do to the relationship between writer and reader. Reading someone’s book is a kind of trust–you’re trusting that the writer can be entertaining, can take you through a story, and has something to say. So what happens if your storyteller starts folding advertising into her story? How does that change your trust in that storyteller, and, if it happened enough, all storytellers?

I just think it’s a dangerous trend. Once publishers find a successful way to do product placement and start getting a taste of the kind of money advertising can generate… well, it’s only a matter of time until Breakfast at Tiffany’s II: Diamonds Equal Love makes its way onto a bookshelf near you.