Singalong
songbooks
now online

Price slashed on
easy sheet music
for 365 favorites

$24.95*

Plus electronic templates
for singalong lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for 365 oldtime favorites. Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences – and we're finding that a lot of folks want them for their own use at home.songbook(A great help for beginning piano students.)

(To see a sample song page, click here, then right-click on the sample (several times, if necessary) and ask to 'view image.')

We now market and distribute our songbook, Sing Along with Ease, exclusively online: You order online with a credit card and we send you the book online via email for you to print out at home. While that requires a little work on your part, it eliminates the delay in mail delivery (often a week or more) and cuts the price by about half.

And we continue to offer a 100 percent money-back guarantee as well as unlimited technical support via email. If you're not completely satisfied with what we've sent you or how we help you via email, we refund all your money promptly.

The songs have been collected and transcribed over the past 20 years by the Hat Band, a family foursome of string players and singers who for those two decades have held singalongs at area nursing homes and senior residences as volunteers.

Marketed for years in printed and bound form, the songbook is the same one that has been used by the Hat Band in its volunteer singalongs. Any additional songs the band adds to its collection – it does so slowly – are sent out free to those who already have the songbook.

We also send out electronic templates of words to more than 240 songs that can be formatted into lyrics sheets. For volunteer singalong leaders, it's a great way to get audiences involved. For home use, it's a great way to help your guests sing along as you sit at a piano or with a guitar playing an old favorite.

To order Sing Along with Ease, use the PayPal button below. As soon as we are notified of the order (usually within 24 hours), we'll email you the songbook and lyrics templates.

Our money-back guarantee is based on the same sales philosophy we used when we marketed the songbooks by regular mail. Please see our entry entitled We trust you. (And please note that our attitude toward online financial transactions has evolved. We've found that PayPal has a gold-edge reputation for security.)

For any questions or assistance, email our site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com.

* The old price of the songbook that we printed and shipped by regular mail was $39.95, and the shipping, because the book weighed about three pounds, was an additional $5.79 in the continental U.S., pushing the total price to $45.74.

(To Canada, limited to air mail only, shipping was $12.85, plus a $10 bank fee for processing international checks. That's a total of $62.80.)

The new price of $24.95 is complete, no extra charges.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

To upload...

Sorry, we're not accepting any new works right now.

To comment...

Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

This site is owned by Readersandwritersblog LLC, which is solely responsible for its content.

Meta

Awash in words

April 13, 2008

waves

Wow, I’m rolling in waves of words — so much to read, so little time to do it. And even as I verge on sensory overload in this literary sea, it’s not an unpleasant sensation.

I’m basically a nonfiction guy, due no doubt to all those years I spent writing and editing newspaper copy. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction — mostly as a young man and mostly the classics of either antiquity or the 17th through the 20th centuries. As I grew older, my reading tastes gravitated to nonfiction — history, memoirs, trade stuff.

Now I administer this website-weblog where we’re serializing three novels and one nonfiction novel, all of them well-written, and it’s like I’m a young man again.

Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about — it’s the final paragraph in our first installment of J. Cafesin’s novel Disconnected that we began serializing on Thursday:

I angled the gun so it pointed toward my brain and fingered it until I found the trigger. Every microscopic movement of my fingers registering in my head, but it felt unreal, like it was happening to someone else and I was just watching. Or like I was playing a game and even if I pulled the trigger and the bullet ripped the back of my skull out, it would only be temporary, like in a dream or cartoon, and after, I would get up, go into the kitchen and get a Diet Coke while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening. I squeezed the trigger very slowly. I could barely hear my intuition screaming at me to stop, but I didn’t. I never listened to my intuition anymore, anyway, why start now. . .

Man, that’s good writing. And it made me want to read today’s installment, Chapter One.

I should also mention today’s other installments:

Chapter Ten of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel, The Unearthing, subtitled “First Contacts,” in which members of a scientific survey team begin deciphering the language of an alien ship unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

Chapter Three of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction work, Ginny Good, in which Jones talks about his early years in Michigan, including confrontations with a couple of teachers and the beginning of a steamy liaison with . . . well, you’d better read it for yourself.

As a result of all this good stuff, I’ve been spending a lot more time at this computer, doing a lot of type conversion and proofreading and whatever small amount of editing is required to adapt these works to R&W Blog’s general style — mostly punctuation.

And, as I said, I’m reading a lot more fiction these days, which is good, but it has made me realize how much my horizons narrowed over the years. Now that I’m retired, they’re broadening again.

A fellow blogger, Kevin Dickinson of Words, one of our blogroll listings at the right, talks in his April 3 entry about how much more he wants to read and how little time he has to do it: “I’m a dish sponge trying to be a car-wash sponge,” he says.

It’s a familiar feeling. And according to a recent newspaper article, it’s not just shared by me. The article cites the increasing pressure that bloggers put upon themselves and lists two of them, men ages 60 and 50, who died of heart attacks and a third, age 41, who survived his coronary.

Well, I’m older than all of them, but I don’t worry about keeling over at the computer. For one thing, I can’t worry about it — I’m in my late 60s where death shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. For another thing, right behind this space I use as an office is a treadmill where I walk for 20 minutes a day — about a mile — most every day. And I do get out regularly.

And finally, what I feel as I sit here blogging is not pressure or dread but excitement and satisfaction. And if that kills me . . . well, I can think of worse ways to go.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is “River over Yin and Yang,” a 2005 painting in acrylic by Max Riggs, whose website is at http://www.maxriggs.com/.

Posted in Uncategorized |

7 Responses

  1. Kevin Dickinson says:

    People die blogging!?

    It’s a whole lot different than traditional publishing: “regular” authors can sit at home for years, writing a masterpiece, and even publish it posthumously. Bloggers tend to feel that eight days is too long between posts, and some of them think that even 25 hours is pushing it. The Internet is an instant place.

  2. Sid Leavitt says:

    True, Kevin, and certain subjects may induce more pressure than others. For example, your main subject — words — and our main subject — writing — may make regular blog entries more difficult to produce than, say, politics or news, where stuff develops on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, or a personal diary where the writer can post the equivalent of ‘Well, not much to report today, but here it is …’

  3. Gerard Jones says:

    I think I’ve sent emails to or got emails from this Cafesin person but I forget when or why or what about. I think she’s a girl but maybe not. The writing looks pretty good, either way. G.

  4. Gerard Jones says:

    Oh, man, I should’ve looked at the stuff from the other day. She IS a girl! Well, unless she’s just telling people she’s a girl. G.

  5. Sid Leavitt says:

    I think you’re right on both counts, Gerard — gender of writer, quality of writing.

  6. J. Cafesin says:

    Wow! Thanks guys.

    Gerard, you are the infamous one. I’ve read and used your site many times, for many years, to many laughs- with humor and cheers, irony and tears. As I’ve said to you before, you vindicate me.

    JC

  7. Gerard Jones says:

    JC: I’m gonna send this email to all the people at the zeroland link on your site. Thanks! G.

    Here’s Ginny Good in its entirety:

    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn1.html

    Here are some sample chapters from The Audio Book of Ginny Good.

    Chapter 7: New Year’s Eve, 1962
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch07m.mp3

    Chapter 13: San Francisco, Tijuana, Mississippi, New York, Summer, 1964
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch13m.mp3

    Chapter 19: La Honda, May, 1965
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch19m.mp3

    Chapter 23: Haight-Ashbury, Fall, 1967, Part 1
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch23m.mp3

    Chapter 24: Haight-Ashbury, Fall, 1967, Part 2
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch24m.mp3

    Chapter 32: Hillsborough, CA, Summer, 1982
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch32m.mp3

    Chapter 35: Ashland, OR, February, 2003
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch35m.mp3

    Here’s the index:
    http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn.html

    If you want a copy of the whole huge fifteen-hour extravaganza on .mp3 CDs for free, give me an address and I’ll send you a copy. There’s a bunch of other stuff on my little website, too. Click some links and see. Thanks. G.

    Gerard Jones
    everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com
    http://www.everyonewhosanyone.com

    “…they’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt
    have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am
    whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any
    kind o’ thing than a fool: and yet I would not be
    thee, nuncle…”

Leave a Comment

Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.