Tag Archives: book bloggers

What books…

…do you want to see on bookshelfbattle.com?

Let me know so that my 3.5 regular readers might benefit!

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FYI

For your information…I just wanted to make my 3.5 regular readers aware that I am so dedicated to them that I trudged through 571 miles of arctic tundra and punched a Yeti in the face just to get to a computer in time to complete the latest installment of the one post a day for 2015 challenge.

So please keep this in mind when you’re choosing which blogs to follow.  Many bloggers are great.  Few are willing to punch Yetis in the face for their 3.5 regular readers’ benefit.

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Bookshelf Battle – An Origin Story?

As my 3.5 regular readers are aware, the name of this blog is “Bookshelf Battle.”

The original jokey premise?  Books are fighting each other for the limited space on my book shelf.

Lately, I’ve been sort of eeking my way into a similar premise, namely, that the characters from the books are fighting each other on my bookshelf.

Because, honestly, how can books fight each other?

Yes!  You thereI  I see your hand up!  What’s your question?

“How can characters from the books fight each other?”

That’s a good question and it leads me to the crux of today’s post.  For the past week, I’ve been internally debating the idea of writing my own origin story.

PROS:  It would finally answer my 3.5 regular readers’ nagging questions:

  • “How did you go from Joe Average to become the noble and mighty Bookshelf Q. Battler?”
  • “How did you come to be in possession of a magic bookshelf where book characters come to life and battles take place?”
  • “Will you ever write a book review again?”

I don’t want to give too much away, but needless to say, the story would involve the characters on my bookshelf assisting me in some type of quest against evil.

It would be good self-promotion.  It might boost me up to 7.5 regular readers.  I might pass the 10 mark.  Part of me hopes I don’t.  I don’t want to change.  I don’t want to get a big ego.  I don’t want to become a jerk and forget the little people who knew me way back when I only had 3.5 regular readers.

I’d serialize it right here on this site, with a new chapter every day for, I don’t, a week I suppose.  I can’t imagine it would be longer than that.  It would help me meet my one post a day challenge for awhile.

Moreover, if I put it out there, I would ask my 3.5 regular readers (yes, even Aunt Gertie) to be brutally honest.  I’d want answers to:

  •  What are your thoughts on my writing style?
  • Can you picture someone who writes fiction the way I do producing something that people would pay money for?
  • How can I improve?
  • Should I just give up on writing and fill my free time with more noble pursuits, like binge watching The Blacklist and collecting seventeenth century thimbles?

CONS

You’re a guy claiming to own a magic bookshelf.  75% of people will have a good sense of humor.  They’ll get it and go along with the premise.  25% will think you’re an idiot.

Personally, “I likes them odds!”

But before I waste too much more time, I’d like to know what my 3.5 regular readers think.  Even Aunt Gertie.

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Fifty Shades of Blech

I try my best not to make fun of the work of others on this blog.  And let’s

50 Shades of Grey - 20 Percent of Off

50 Shades of Grey – 20 Percent of Off

face it, make fun of Fifty Shades of Grey all you want, but the author, publisher, and now movie studio behind it are raking in the dough.

I just can’t help but scratch my head though as I try to make sense out of why today’s modern, empowered woman would be into this thing.  But that’s a slippery slope I don’t want to get onto, lest I be accused of trying to tell women what to do.

Here’s the hypothetical Hollywood pitch meeting as it plays out in my head:

HOLLYWOOD SUIT 1 :  OK.  We’ve got this great movie idea.

This mousy woman goes to interview a man, but discovers he has a secret room where he tortures women!

HOLLYWOOD SUIT 2:  Oh my God!  Sounds terrifying!  So what, I guess we brand it as a horror flick and release it on Halloween?

SUIT 1:  What?  No!  Sorry, I forgot to mention the guy is handsome and rich.

SUIT 2:  Handsome and rich?!  Well, why didn’t you say so?  Sounds like a surefire Valentine’s Day blockbuster to me!!!

Admittedly, I’ve never seen the book nor read the film.  If you have, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the main theme basically, “If you’re handsome and rich, it’s ok to abuse women?”

Eh, what the hell do I know?  I’m just a humble book blogger.  Y’all have fun at the movie.  I’ll be at home lamenting the decline of Western civilization as we know it.

In conclusion, let me be clear.  I’m not telling women what they should or shouldn’t like.  I am saying that Susan B. Anthony is rolling in her grave.

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Romance Advice from William Shakespeare – Part Four

Shakespeare was an intense dude.  Most people were intense way back when.  They put on twenty pounds of clothes just to go out to eat and they used twenty words to say things where one would have done just fine.

The Bard’s words are beautiful, but they aren’t as easily understood by today’s modern English speakers.

So first, study Shake’s immortal love sonnet below, and after that, I will translate.

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?  (Sonnet 18)

BY: William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

OK.  And now for the translation.  Are you sitting down?  Good.  For I will now translate this masterpiece of old English into modern language:

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?  (Sonnet 18)

BY:  William Shakespeare

TRANSLATED BY:  Bookshelf Q. Battler

Damn baby, you be fine!

And there you have it.  The Bard’s words brought forth into modern times.  ‘Tis a beautiful thing.

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Fake It Till You Make It

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write.  Let them think you were born that way.”

– Ernest Hemingway

No commentary necessary.  This one speaks for itself.

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Your Favorite Romantic Books and Poems

Valentine’s Day is around the corner.

What are your favorite romantic books and poems?  I am not asking so I can use them on women.  I just legitimately want to know as a literary connoisseur.

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Asked and Anticipated Questions Re: One Post a Day Challenge

Blogger/Author Tommy Muncie posed this comment, so finely crafted, that I felt it merited an entire post:

Respect to you for doing this…I couldn’t write a short post if I tried (you’ve probably noticed) and trying one per day would probably give me an aneurysm. On that note, I reckon you’ll achieve the goal but I’m wondering how you’ll get past the day you get sick, as in the kind of sick where you’re bedridden and narcoleptic and running the kind of temperature the Sahara Dessert would be jealous of and thinking ‘Must…get…to….wordpress!’ and then your body knocks you out when you try. I read your random questions post tonight as well, so here’s a question: could you get past a day like that and still post?

– Tommy Muncie

ANSWER – I’ve been scheduling posts in advance, in the hopes of avoiding this very scenario.  However, should I fall violently ill, I will use my last bit of energy to make a post.  It won’t be anything fancy or spectacular, it will just be “post” or I’ll just bang on the keys and click “post” just to meet the once a day requirement.

Further, if, say, I am hit by a bus or otherwise left incapacitated, I have engaged a team of individuals to post in my stead, mimicking my subtle nuances and character, so that you will not even notice I am gone.

Actually, I haven’t done that, but now that I’m worried about illnesses and bus attacks on my person, I will have to do so.

Thanks a lot, Muncie!

Now that I’ve answered that question, here some others I anticipate you, my audience of three readers, may have:

QUESTION:  Suppose you are cornered by a team of robot ninjas who stand between you and your computer, preventing you from making a post?  Will you yield on your promise to us, the readers, to make one post a day?

ANSWER:  Absolutely not.  I scoff in the face of danger.  Few are aware of this, but I was trained in the martial arts by Chuck Norris.  I payed it forward by training Steven Seagal, teaching him all the moves he displayed in his movies from the 1980’s and 90’s, though I take no credit from his later films where he got fat and teamed up with Tom Arnold.

QUESTION:  An asteroid is careening towards Earth.  You have one minute to save the world and you have not yet posted on this particular day.  What do you do?

ANSWER:  I make a quick post, then I frighten the asteroid back into space with a glare so fearsome that it clearly communicates to the asteroid my disapproval of its tiresome behavior.

QUESTION:  A grizzly bear demands to fist fight you in a steel cage UFC championship bout.  The prize?  Your computer.  If you win, you get to post.  If you loose, the bear eats your computer.

ANSWER:  My post will be a selfie of me wearing the bear’s oily hide as a coat.

QUESTION:  Aliens invade.  They detonate an electromagnetic pulse that renders all electronic equipment useless.

ANSWER:  It’s fine.  I scheduled an advance post.

QUESTION:  You didn’t.  You were too busy watching Game of Thrones, that show that Tommy Muncie is not impressed with.  Blasphemy, I say.

ANSWER:  I did post.

QUESTION:  You didn’t.

ANSWER:  Well, if your computer is taken out too, then how can you be sure I didn’t?

QUESTION:  Well played, sir.  Well played.

QUESTION:  You are kidnapped by Russians, who want your blog down because it is too awesome.  They throw you, your computer, and a parachute out of a plane, but separately, not together.

ANSWER:  I dive myself to the computer, post, then put on the parachute.  Note that my first instinct was to post, not to save myself.

QUESTION:  Katy Perry and Katee Sackhoff, two of your favorite Katies in the entire world, barge into your domicile, each wearing their customary garb.  Perry is in her California Girls video costume, while Sackhoff is in her Battlestar Galactica pilot gear.  They offer to have their way with you, but the price?  You must not post for one day.

ANSWER:  Define “have their way with me.”  I understand the classical connotation, but it is an open ended term that can be taken a variety of ways.  Thus far, in my experience, a woman “having her way with me” means she sucks up all my money, provides me with a longwinded speech about how we should just be friends, and then said friendship inevitably requires that I console her while she, with a cat in one hand and a pint of ice cream in the other, whines to me about how the men she wants to be more than friends with aren’t nice to her.  I feel such a situation would not be worth sacrificing the respect of my three readers for.

QUESTION:  The classical connotation.

ANSWER:  Ah.  Wow.  That is a tough one.  They won’t even allow me to post just so I can brag about it?

QUESTION: No.

ANSWER:  Well, I made a promise to all three of my fans, so I would invite the Katies in for a rousing game of Parcheesi, perhaps build a few jigsaw puzzles with them, then send them on their way in time to make a post.  That’s just what a selfless man who has made a commitment does.

QUESTION:  Would you resent us forever for it?

ANSWER:  Yes.

Do you have questions about what I would do in a potential scenario that would make it difficult for me to post?  Ask away in the comments.

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Random Thoughts…

…that plague the mind of Bookshelf Q. Battler, in no particular order:

1)  Why does Elsa view her magic freeze powers as a curse?  Why does she not use them to control the world and rule her subjects with an icey fist?

2)  Why do they put braille on restroom door signs?  Do blind men rub their hands all over the walls of public buildings, find a braille door sign, go, “Whoops! That’s the ladies room!” and then feel their way around again to the men’s room?  And would it matter if he went into the wrong room?  Because, you know, he’s blind, so it’s not like he’s going to see anything.

Yes, noble readers, who have followed me on my year long quest to post once a day, these are the thoughts that fill the deep recesses of my mind.  Trivial, absurd, ridiculous minutiae that few bother to even consider.

Thoughts like:

3)  Why do aliens only abduct people from the South?  And why do aliens abduct humans at all anymore?  One would think at some point, their skilled alien scientists would reach a limit as to what can be learned from probe related experiments.  I dare say, somewhere in outer space, an alien scientist has published an article entitled, “Stop Probing the Humans, We Figured Them All Out” and yet, it’s being ignored, because he only posted it on alien wordpress.

4)  If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  Yes –  KKKKKRRRRRRRRRACCCCCK BOOOOOOM!

5) Why does Hollywood ugly up good looking people so they can play ugly people?  They did it to Charlize Theron in Monster and Christian Bale in American Hustle.  Somewhere, there is an overweight man with a combover who would have been perfect to played the lead role in American Hustle.  The poor guy probably ignored advice from countless friends and family members – “No!  Don’t move to Hollywood and try to be an actor!  There will never be a part for a fat man with a combover!”  And finally, finally!  There’s a part for a fat man with a combover and what do they do?  They take a handsome man, stuff his shirt with a pillow, and give him a fake combover wig.

Damn you, beautiful people!  Don’t you already have enough?  Why must you steal parts from the ugly?

6)  If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day.  If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.  If you take a man to Crazy Larry’s All-You-Can-Eat Discount Fish Nugget Bar, he will get food poisoning.

7)  How was it possible for the A-Team to evade justice for so many years?  How was the government not able to find a team that included the handsomest man in the world, an old man who smoked a giant stogie everywhere he went, a lunatic who inevitably broke out into loud and boisterous songs, and an enormous bodybuilder who was dripping with solid gold chains?

8)  Was Stonehenge an ancient druid singles bar?

9) Is the Yeti little more than Big Foot’s Arctic cousin?

10)  When Santa delivers a kid an X-Box, does he have to pay Bill Gates a royalty?

Join me tomorrow, I was will bring you more…RANDOM THOUGHTS.

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I Like Waffles

I do.  I really do.

God this is going to be a long year.

And to make it book related – I like to eat waffles and read books…at the same time?

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