What’s also been fun is following all of the hoopla over in the UK. The Guardian newspaper launched their own “official” Charles Dickens at 200 mini-site late last year as a place to aggregate all of the pieces they’re putting together. It’s worth checking out, but only after you to their archives section to see how the paper covered Dickens way back in 1912 on the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth. It’s neat to be able to compare the thinking and statements.

In keeping with the self-published push, they have also invited Liz Reed, of the Birmingham Arts Journal, to lead a 90-minute discussion/orientation for people wanting to get published. The event is called “Every Writer Needs an Editor“. It is free, but they’re asking that you click through that link to reserve a spot, so they can make sure they have enough seats.

These letters run from the 1960s-1990s. Harper Lee seems to be one of the most curious and sweetest of famous Southern authors. But then I know a lot of our senior ladies down South would probably fit this bill as well. They should all just put pen to paper.

Even if you never get the chance to bid on one of Lee’s letters, it’s worth a couple of clicks and some time to read through the text of each.

But I honestly am beginning to think that he has amassed such a following simply because he supports both sides of any idea. Granted, Godin always presents a clearly defined side each time… but here’s the latest that I saw, just the other day:

February 9, 2011 Godin posted Autarky is dead. A very concise post that states:

All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.

Just two months earlier on December 8, 2010 he posted about his Domino Project, where very logically he outlines eight reasons why he’s going solo in publishing his next book, cutting out publishers, bookstores, “middle men”, etc. It seems all that community was getting in his way.

Isn’t that hundreds-of-years-old ecosystem the kind of community he’s plugging this month? Or to Godin is a community simply a streamlined process between his customers and himself?

I fail to see the communal in one man cranking out a series of books to his flock of followers. That seems to be more of an echo chamber than a community. It seems that if the goal is to build a better product, then you need the expertise every step of the way.

Now, having said all of that, I totally get what he’s doing with the Domino Project. If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I have no problems with new platforms, leveraging new technology and adding effiencies to the publishing system.

This is really just about Godin’s ping-pong of a message and how it often leaves me confused. Am I being unfair?

If you want to keep up you can follow the festival on their site, Facebook, blog or Twitter feed. I’ll try and share some pictures throughout the day, while we’re there. Hope you can make it!

The Alabama Book Festival launched a new website last weekend. This year will be the 5th year for the state-wide literary festival. It scheduled to run 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. Saturday, April 17th, in the Old Alabama Town section of Montgomery. The full line up of speakers and authors is listed here and includes notables names Rick Bragg, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines and a gazillion more. The book festival also has a blog and Facebook page.

Are you going?

David McKenzie won this year’s contest. You can click through to read his entry. But I actually preferred the runner-up, so I include it below, plus a few others. If you do click through to their site, you can read all of the winners and runners-up in all the various categories.

This year’s Runner-Up was by Warren Blair:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Greg Homer’s “Vile Pun” category winner:

Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.

Eric Rice won the “Detective” category with:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

One of my favorite “Dishonorable Mentions” this year was penned by Dan Blaufuss:

As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.