Read-in-One-Sitting ebooks

A regular novel of about 90 000 words takes about five or six hours to read end-to-end. That is, if you count all the time you spend reading, that’s what it will amount to, which means a lot of reading and a lot to remember. Unless you choose some Read-in-One-Sitting ebooks to load onto your electronic eReader.

Read-in-One-Sitting books are those you can read on one train ride, say. Or one visit to a dentist’s waiting room. Or one stand in a long queue, or at a bus stop. Continue reading “Read-in-One-Sitting ebooks”

How LinkedIn Can Change Your Life

Welcome to LinkedIn
Welcome to LinkedIn

When is a social network not a social network?

Give up?

I’ll tell you: when it’s a commercial, professional, academic, or business network, that’s when.

LinkedIn is all these things and more. People do use it as a social forum, to interact – no doubt about it – but its main reason for existence is its ability to connect people within the same commercial, academic or professional sphere, no matter where in the world they happen to work. Continue reading “How LinkedIn Can Change Your Life”

Why you need a computer-free day

Resting MouseThe concept of a computer-free day might seem like a no-brainer to a lot of people. We spend so much time staring at a screen. Still, it cannot be denied that a lot of our social interaction has moved online, most of our business is done on a computer, and financial transactions … is there any other way but the internet?

It’s all too easy. The whole world would rather do their banking in pyjamas, sitting in a comfortable chair at any time at all, including the wee small hours. Keeping in touch with global friends? Not a problem – it’s live, it’s casual and it’s almost free. Stocking up with supplies, getting the latest appliances, and holiday gift-buying are also easiest done at home on the desktop or notebook. Continue reading “Why you need a computer-free day”

Attached to life at all four corners by Rosanne Dingli

Fiction is a funny thing … that fiction authors take very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it can take over their lives, and depress, frighten, enthuse, or gladden them. Fiction has the power to mystify its creators; dash their hopes, fill them with wonder, and douse them with the kind of despondency that is hard to shake.

Fiction Stacks
Image by chelmsfordpubliclibrary via Flickr

For some it is storytelling; for others, a tool to incorporate who they are as people with what the world would like to hear from them. For a few it is a curse; for many, the only joy in their lives. Fiction, if it is in your life, can be the source of the whole gamut of emotions. It is a rare author who has no deep emotive life. There seems to be a prerequisite to be able to feel events, scenes and snatches from real life in a sensitive way, if one is to turn them into stories that will move readers. One must be capable of melancholia and ecstasy. Otherwise, how can one create them, to be felt by others? All stories are to do with life. Even the ones built on the most outlandish science, on fantasy, on improbability, need to be anchored in some way to human life as we know it. In fact, it is rather hard to move so far away from life to write something that is beyond the ken of even the most intrepid reader with the wildest imagination. Continue reading “Attached to life at all four corners by Rosanne Dingli”