Readers and writers blog

This is a day of mixed feelings. It is a sad day — sad because we post the final chapter of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. And yet the day has its up side, too — a new chapter of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected.

I knew since we started serializing Ginny Good in April that I would hate to see the last installment. Sure, I finished reading the book long ago, but posting two chapters a week — and writing blurbs about them — gave me a chance to review and enjoy them again.

I’ve always had a special feeling about the book because Jones and I are about the same age and temperament, and I was living in California, courtesy of the Army, during some of the years Jones writes about.

Of course, the book will remain on R&W Blog, so that’s a good thing. But if you’re like me, you hate to finish a good book. And Jones has written a good one. Thank you, G.

Well, buoying our spirits is Cafesin’s latest chapter of Disconnected, an e-book-in-progress about a young woman in conflict that has a vivid, almost cinematic narrative style. Cafesin, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, also sets her novel in California, but in the star-struck Los Angeles area.

I got caught up in the book from an opening scene that introduced the protagonist holding a gun to her head.

Actually, we’re getting more than a new chapter. Cafesin also has made revisions to the introductory and subsequent four chapters, and those have been incorporated into our text here.

That’s the wonderful thing about e-books. You don’t have to go collecting all the ones in print in order to make changes. They can be made on a website at the speed of electricity.

Posting e-books does require a little extra time here at R&W Blog because we usually have to reformat submitted text into our page styles. But we do it gladly.

As we told Cafesin, she’s the one really doing all the work. Once our little formatting is done, we just sit back and enjoy the fruits of her efforts.

And let’s not forget another author whose work we’re serializing — the talented R.J. Keller and her novel, Waiting for Spring. Like Jones’ book, Keller’s is a finished work that she has allowed us to post in chapters.

And so, this seems like an appropriate time to present:

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 35: I-5 of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard, back in the present in Oregon, says his goodbyes to Ginny, Elliot, Melanie and others from his chapters — and to us.

• Chapter Five of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected. After an exhausting Thanksgiving with her family, Rachel reconnects with Lee for an evening at a posh Malibu restaurant where she learns more about him than their mutual interest in marijuana. But she resists her attraction to him and continues to dismiss him as nothing more than a ‘charming distraction.’

• Chapter 23 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess learns from her father that he and her mother are divorcing after nearly 38 years, then finds out from her mother that she’s already sold their house. Tess warns her mother that she’d better split the proceeds with Dad — or else.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

So how did you like the Beatles video? Didn’t watch it? You’d better. I spent hours on the Internet trying to learn how to embed videos within blog text. I succeeded here only by writing a hellacious pile of html code at the beginning of this entry, probably half of it wrong and the other half redundant — enough to make a real computer programmer gag.