Category: personal

Could You Spare Some Money for an Improv Theater?

On By Ryan HarveyIn personal

The current plan for the release of Turn Over the Moon is to have the book out in November, with a Kickstarter during October for people to pre-order both print and ebook copies, as well as extras like signed copies, other books from Dream Tower Media, and prints of the cover illustration. The Kickstarter isn’t a charity: it’s how we’re offering Turn Over the Moon pre-orders.

But I’m going to ask for a bit of charity now anyway; not for me directly. It’s for a local theater here in Costa Mesa, the Improv Collective, which has a started a Patreon account to raise money to pay the rent through the remainder of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

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Personal Library Compression: Learning to Let Go of Books

On By Ryan HarveyIn books, personal

book shelves book stack bookcase books

There’s been a bit of a row, a kerfuffle, a hullabaloo, a hurlyburly, a brouhaha recently over a woman named Marie Kondo and a meme spreading that’s raised the ire of a few book lovers. I’d never heard of Marie Kondo until this event. She’s a lifestyle writer who has a Netflix show about organizing and decluttering your home; of course I hadn’t crossed cultural paths with her. I only use Netflix to watch terrible anime Godzilla films and whatever old John Hughes movie just got drawn from the archives.

What’s the Kondo Crisis? I don’t want to rehash it, so here’s a brief explanation of how Marie Kondo’s book-tidying advice and a gag about book-hoarding clerics turned into the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. For my part, when I first saw the meme with a photo of Marie Kondo and the quote “Ideally, keep less than 30 books,” (without the lower half that constitutes the joke) I was skeptical about it. Meme skepticism is always healthy. And some of the anger directed at her misunderstood advice quickly turned ugly, so I was glad I took the time to find out the context of what was happening. 

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A Website Keeper’s Journey; Or, Why This New Site Exists

On By Ryan HarveyIn personal

This may go long, but I need to get a few things into the open to explain why I’ve started a new website and blog.

Re-launching my author website was a long-overdue project. I had to say goodbye to a crusty, cranky old friend, the Blogger site I started 2007 but have hardly touched since 2014. It wasn’t even my first website: I’ve toyed with personal websites and blogs since the early 2000s, almost from the moment I even knew what a “blog” was. (Yes, Angelfire was involved.) Over those nearly twenty years—something honestly terrifying to write—I changed as a writer and discovered what I wanted from an author website and blog.

The first time I created a blog was with (shudder) LiveJournal. It was crude, and I wasn’t a published author yet with any clue about how to represent myself. When I started the Blogger site, I was more ambitious about publication, but the blog remained a wandering thing of shreds and patches. I’d ramble about bits of my life, haphazardly review a movie or book, post photos of my newborn nephew, and fill posts with more random blather. The site was a combination of a lark and a someone trying to hone his skill as a nonfiction writer. Not a combo that could work for long.

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