I haven't updated on my running lately but in case you are on the edge of your seat about it - yep, I'm still running. My new pair of snazzy shoes have kept my ankle in great shape and so far it hasn't hurt much at all. I am following a starter program in Running Magazine which is based around increasing the amount of time you run in a 20 minute period vs walk/run. Today I ran ten straight minutes, walked a couple then ran 5 more. None of this is earth shattering for "real" runners but if anyone had told me two months ago I'd be able to run for 10 minutes I would have laughed at them. Back then I was still trying to bend my foot without pain. So, although I continue to not enjoy running, I have gotten better and do enjoy how I feel afterward. At the end of the day, it's an accomplishment and I do love that.

The Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys continues to roll on and blows me away on a daily basis. I think in the end we will hit around 300 books which is triple our initial goal. One of the more interesting things about this project has been the number of people I do not know who have linked to the fair and bought books. I understand that the internet is a vast thing but it's not until you start to hear from so many previously unknown corners of it that its size is exposed. The fact that all of these people dwell in just the lit blogophere itself makes this all that much more interesting.

Which brings me around to how the internet should really be used to enhance the world of books and reading. Jo Walon had a post up at Tor last week asking people where they found out about books. It was interesting to read how many people get them from magazines (online or print) like Locus or the SF site and didn't mention the lit blogosphere at all. I get ideas from Bookslut all the time - and also from a least a dozen different lit bloggers who I regularly read. I don't know why you wouldn't use lit bloggers for reading ideas. Granted, it does take a little time to find bloggers with a taste similar to your own but once your find them it's gold. (I know of what I speak - hence my continued reading of Gwenda, Jenny D., Leila and on and on). It's a mystery to me why the publishing industry isn't encouraging readership of the blogs - touting the reviews from established bloggers (and I'm talking five years or more of reviewing/writing about books) as solidly as they do reviews from newspapers most of us have never heard of. And why isn't the lit blogosphere more committed to touting other blogs? Why don't we work together on things all the time? How can we cover the publishing industry itself without giving equal time to what our fellow bloggers are doing?

I mean really - do we need to know about every NYC book signing as they happen or Maureen Dowd's one paragraph steal from TPM but pointedly ignore or seriously under report blog news. And I'm not griping about the Book Fair for Boys - what about the Teen Book Drop? Why wasn't that covered to a major extent everywhere? The Readergirlz spearhead an effort to get thousands - THOUSANDS - of books to kids who most of the population don't think twice about other than a cursory, "glad it isn't me" and they had to bend over backwards to get four or five lines in a post. Why aren't we creating a lot of noise about what we do - a tidal wave of noise? Why don't we control the conversation to the point where the newspapers and magazine come to us?

Am I missing something?

I enjoy blogging here about what I've read or what I'm interested in reading or what I'm writing about. That's all fun and it's good. But sometimes I reach out and do something more and a lot of other bloggers do that extra effort as well. And we need to spread the word when that happens. We need to make news in the lit blogosphere; that is how the internet will transform publishing - by forcing everyone else to notice.