My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Book Memories 01 | Guest Post Series
An Example and a Call for Submissions


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It has been quite a while, but the time has come again to reach out and ask others to share their memories with us. We've done Video Game Memories, TV Memories, and Movie Memories. What should we do this time around? Book memories of course! This is a blog about my journey of writing, narrating, and reviewing books I've read after all. I think it fits nicely. So here's what I want from you:

  • A guest blog post sharing memories of reading a book or books
    • 250 - 2,000 words
    • share the experience of reading not a book summary
  • A very brief bio
  • A picture of you (optional)
  • Links to any of your websites you'd like to promote

More details, or listen to or read my example and start writing:

Share your fond memories about reading a book or books. It should be more about the experience you had of reading the book. I'm not looking for book summaries or reviews here. To start things off I've posted my example below which you can also listen to. As far as word count goes, you can shoot for at least 250 words and maybe start to cap it off if your getting near 2,000 words but there are no hard and fast rules here. I'd say just write it down, let the words flow, and it will be the length it needs to be. If that's only a few paragraphs that's great! If you're like Justin MaCumber and the words spill out of you like water from a fountain then go ahead and push towards 2,000 words. That's cool too! I'm just looking for you to share your fondest memory or memories of reading books. Why you enjoyed it, or maybe the first time you really started to love reading. 

Thanks for contributing to this guest post series. It will be a lot of fun. I'll take care of recording, editing, and formatting the posts with photos before they go live here on my website. If you really want to record your guest post and you have a decent setup - go for it. Just read the contents of your guest post and I'll record an intro and outro for it. The last thing I need is a very brief bio, links to any of your websites you want to share, and if you're comfortable with it a picture of you to go next to your bio. It's not necessary but it adds a nice personal touch to the guest post. Thanks and here's my post to give you an idea of what I'm looking for:


The First Time I Read Past the Required Pages

by Dan Absalonson


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I've always loved reading. In my teen years I could usually be found with a book and if there was a spare moment I'd whip it out and get to reading. Sitting in math class during our homework time I'd finish the assignment and pull a paperback from my backpack. I remember one time I was reading the massive door stopper The Eye of the World, the first in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, and when a classmate saw me pull it from my bag he was like,

"Woah! What the heck are you reading Dan? I didn't know they even make books that big. Why would anyone want to read something that long?"

It made me smile.

The story I want to share about though is about an experience I had reading an assigned book for school. The first amazing part about it is that I liked it in the first place. Not even someone who loves reading enjoys most of the books they force you to read for school. This time though, it was different. It was my freshman year of high school and our teacher assigned us to read The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Most of you have probably seen the movie, it's a classic, but if not there will be spoilers. I figured it's okay because as I wrote this the movie is 27 years old and the novel is 41 years old. I highly recommend both as they are awesome.

So we were assigned to read a certain amount of pages every night and we'd talk about what we read in class the next day. I think there may have been a quiz about the assigned reading, but what I do remember was what happened one night while I was reading the assigned pages. The main character, the awesome pirate captain sword fighting mans man who was coming for the girl and they were going to be together forever because they had true love, died. I stopped reading and said "What?!" out loud. I could not believe it. I read it again. This can't be right! There is just no way he can be dead! I kept reading until I got to the end of the assigned reading, but I couldn't stop. I had to find out if just somehow Westley, the Dread Pirate Roberts, Buttercup's beloved farm boy could still be alive later in the book. So I read on, my pupils pounding the printed pages. I stayed up late and I grew tired but I had to keep reading. I couldn't handle the truth. It had to be that the hero was still alive so he could save the girl from marrying a jerk. Their true love just had to win out in the end!

Finally my eyes flicked across words about Miracle Max making a resurrection pill which Fezzik and Inigo give to him and it worked. The tension fell from my shoulders. I could finally close the book for the night and get some sleep. It was an awesome experience to read beyond the assignment and stay up late because I had to know what happened next. Finding a book like that is rare, but in a book I was assigned to read for class? Shoot, I did not expect that. So of all the books I had to read for school The Princess Bride stands high above the rest. The most enjoyable, the funnest to read, and the best adventure. There were a few other books for school that I liked, admired, even enjoyed - but I loved reading The Princess Bride.

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