BrightMeadow.co.uk has risen, like a mythic-creature, from the rubble of what turned out to be a hack.

Yes, someone thought that Bright Meadow was worthy of hacking! (For the intrigued, it turns out that this was the problem).

Anyway, thanks to the sheer glory of that marvelous personage known as karmatosed, who spent this morning fingertip deep in sql databases, order has been restored to my blogging universe. I cannot begin to tell you how great that feels! Plus, I am now running WP2.5 on that domain (about bloody time too) so have access to all sorts of shiny new stuff and features. The one I am currently loving is the ability to tinker with my template from within the admin panel. No need to mess around with ftp!

Yay!

There are lots of other lovely benefits, but before I totally geek out, just take this as notification that life is back where it belongs at Bright Meadow. I will be posting there/here from now on, letting brightmeadow.wordpress.com retire into the background (though I expect I might have to return to it if/when my server gets wiggy again!). I have done sneaky things with the feeds once more, so if you read through RSS, you shouldn’t notice any change.

If, however, you aren’t sure, the correct feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrightMeadowFull and this is the correct comments feed.

At some point I am going to see if I can merge the databases so posts from wordpress.com will be folded into the archives here. If I can’t do it automatically, I’ll do it the old fashioned way and copy/past across!

That’s it! Thank you SO much everyone for sticking with me through this debacle (yes, it rates being called a debacle)

So it turns out I might have been hacked. Let’s see if things are back to how they should be…

(This is a cross post from here as it was originally posted in the midst of an epic server fail).

What is it about notebooks that makes them appeal so much to me? I have this weird obsession for all stationary in general — to this day my mum finds it incomprehensible how I will spend happy hours browsing round Paperchase — but notebooks in particular just seem to do something to me. I see a notebook and I just have to have it.

Which might go some way to explaining this little pile, to which I have just added another one to the collection (a soft cover, squared large moleskine).

Yup, I have a problem.

So what is it about notebooks that gets me so silly? Partly I think I blame Anne Frank. I can’t put a finger on exactly how old I was when I first read “The Diary of Anne Frank”, but along with the horror of the Holocaust, I also got my first introduction to the world of diary writing. Plus the idea of someone, one day, reading my words was seductive even at that young age.

Soon after that, my life started to go to hell in a handcart and I fell in love with the idea of writing as escape. Stories started to churn out of my fingertips into the computer with my hopes, dreams and fears thinly veiled in god-awful fan fiction. I still kept at the paper journals though and I stopped/started so many diaries full of the traditional teen angst that I hope to all things holy no one ever finds them! (I believe the really early ones have been destroyed. Thoroughly!)

I have, in my life, finished just one journal, one with a brown leather wrap-around cover which appealed to my traditionalist tendencies. It documents some of the lowest six months of my life, from July 2002 to February 2003, tells tales of three boyfriends, two New York trips, and… oh, so much more I want to remember and forget at the same time. I opened it up just now for the first time since I closed it five years ago and felt pride at the constant, close-written pages. I accomplished this. It served the purpose it needed which was to give me an outlet. If nothing else it gave me a loose structure when I needed it most and proved that yes, I could stick to something and see it through.

Notebooks of all shapes and sizes fill my draws, some stuffed with quotes, others with story ideas, still more with abortive diaries. I am always on the look-out for the perfect notebook. Every one I find has the wrong sort of paper, or the cover is to thick or bendy, or too garish, or the lines are too big or to small. It might lack a ribbon to mark the place or something to hold it closed or… Who knows. I think I will always be on the search for the holy grail; the perfect notebook.

There is something about a fresh page in a notebook that just begs to be written on – I have a brand new moleskine sitting next to me, just screaming at me to get out a decent pen (another quest) and despoil the cream pages. But there is also something intimidating about the blank page, especially the first page. What to write? Always at the back of my mind is the thought that someone else will read the words that I have put down and I don’t want to be embarrassed. Which might be why I have so many; the really good books, those closest to the ideal, I want to save for something really worthwhile, but I don’t want to write the crappy ones as they are just… crappy!

I still feel an urge to write a journal, though the urge is a lot lesser now I blog so much. There are things however that need to remain private, at least till the dust has settled on them and I feel ready to expose them to the public gaze. So now my notebooks fill with more with story bits and pieces. One holds character bios, another plot points, one more chunks and pieces of inspiration that strike when I am away from the computer. It is certainly easier to scribble out the bare bones of a scene on a notebook curled up under the duvet, than it is to get out of bed, stumble over to the computer, wait for it to boot up and tip-tap on the keyboard with RSI riddled wrists at 2 in the morning! One teeny one stays in my bag at all times and is perfect for everything from shopping lists on up.

All my notebooks have a purpose. Some I use more than others, and I tend to find a purpose for a notebook once I have brought it instead of buying a notebook because I need one, but each and everyone is needed. The insides aren’t as pretty or as well planned as some, but they are still interesting to flick through. Will they help the police solve the mystery of my grizzly murder as notebooks always seem to in Numb3rs or CSI? Doubtful. One day will they be enshrined in some library vault for students of English Literature to pour over as they research my masterpieces? Even more unlikely. But do they bring me joy? Without a doubt. Like all obsessions it is really inexplicable, but it keeps me happy, so why worry. There are worse things I could be doing with my time and money…

I have been using the Net and screen-reading for many years now and I don’t think I am alone or unusual in this. I have been reading books and physical print media for an awful lot longer. I cannot remember being taught to read, it is just one of those skills I have always seemed to be able to do, and I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t avidly devouring every piece of printed media I could lay my (often grubby) little mitts on. Mum went through a phase when we were kids that there was to be no reading at the breakfast/dinner table. The phase lasted all of a month or so till she got fed-up of us reading the back of cereal packets – clearly conversation wasn’t on the cards, so why not let us read something proper if we were so insistent?

So it surprised me when I was in the library the other day looking for something new to read that how I read (at least pick the books I am going to read) has been so influenced by the Internet.

When I read on the computer I have become used to scanning and making snap judgments on websites. A blog, for example, has very few lines to capture my attention and make me want to read more, let alone subscribe and visit again. When I read longer content such as articles, again my attention is more likely to wander and I need regular prompts or section breaks to keep me hooked. I found myself doing this at the library as well. I would browse, my attention would be grabbed by a title or pretty cover (yes, I am seduced by pretty things), I would scan the blurb, and (if still intrigued) glance at the first page.

This is in and of itself is nothing new. I have always tended to graze for new authors that way if I am not going on recommendations. What is new is that I am much more impatient and have to be grabbed much quicker by either the blurb or the introductory lines. It used to be I would read through at least the first page to get a sense of whether I would like the writing — and, hence, the book. Now most books don’t even make it as far as the first paragraph.

I am not sure why, nor could I really quantify what grabs me about some books and not about others, but whatever it is I base my judgments on, it has become a lot more impatient. I am harder to please and I think it is a direct response to all the web browsing I am doing now.

There is simply so much out on the web that is constantly yammering for our attention. We have had to learn to filter all the noise out and our inherent “spam filters” are getting pickier by the minute. When I started blogging I would subscribe to anything and everything that came my way, sucking it all into my giant bookmarks collection. I was at an all-you-can-eat buffet and getting fatter by the second. I quickly found myself in overload and, much trial and error later, discovered that for my own sanity I could only deal with about 200 feeds. More than that, I just wasn’t giving things my full attention. Less than that I got bored — which is bad for everyone. But with so much great content out there, how do you decide what to keep and what to send to oblivion? It is hard, deciding what does and doesn’t get your attention and you have to be ruthless. A blogger hasn’t said anything interesting lately? Her/his style of writing annoy you? Out in the trash they go.

Conversely it has meant that when I find my favourites I am so much more of an avid fan. I relish every word they write, greedily guzzling everything and everything they say. If they recommend something, I am so much more likely to trust what they have to say. Once they have my attention, we can start to build a relationship, and we all know how hungry for love I am.

How does this tie into my book reading?

I have already mentioned how I find myself browsing for new books in the same way I browse for new websites. If I am feeling like putting some energy into the search, I will chase down links (recommendations from other authors I enjoy, reviews and so on), but mostly I am lazy. I will wander around the store or library till my eye is caught by a pretty cover or title. I will scan the blurb and, if I am further intrigued, flick to the front page. It seems that very few books get further than that but, as my groaning bookshelves will testify, clearly I end up buying lots. My bookshelf space however, like my imposed limit on the number of RSS feeds, is finite. Once I have a book I very rarely let go of it so only books I want to read over and over tend to make it as far as my shelves.

Bookshops must be aware of how I shop, because they put those tantalising piles of books on tables near the door. I rarely make it as far as the shelves themselves, or if I do it is because I am looking for a particular author. Because If I find an author I enjoy and they have written other books then it is pretty much a given that I will chase down those other books and buy them without recourse to the whole ‘scanning’ process. They get a free pass through my spam filter because the author already has my attention.

I am not actually that happy with this state of affairs because, lately, I have found myself at a loss for new books to read. I know great books are being written, I just never seem to get my hands on them. All I seem to get presented with when I walk into bookshops are the same fifty “best sellers”, including the celebrity biography de jour. The gems and marvels pass me by because I am caught in a loop of impatient grazing I cannot seem to break. I beg for recommendations and occasionally I will stumble across a gem, but that is so rare as to leave me caught up my current backwater of fluffy chick-lit.

Help me? Rescue me from my current diet of Jill Mansell and Freya North. I used to read books by brilliant authors who stretched my mind. I used to have a fairly decent literary taste. So I enjoy fluffy chick-lit but time was it would take me a few days to read a book because I was savouring the words and digesting multi-faceted plots. Now I am on a book a day, gorging myself on happily ever afters, and it isn’t exactly what I should be admitting to.

P.S – a little note to publishers – I like the ‘lists of books already written by this author’ you sometimes find on the fly pages of a book. It is a great help, but can you please make it clear which order series books are to be read in? This especially holds true with fantasy/sci-fi. For genres rife with trilogies and multi-book-sequences, sequels and prequels, character reuse and mulitverse-crossing storylines, you’d be surprised how often a simple “read in this order…” list is omitted. Grr.