So I’m helping Dewey, over at The Hidden Side of a Leaf, come up with a Book Bloggers Top 10 Books of 2008 and we’ve have about 333 nominations in 16 different categories.  The problem I’m running into is that I’m not entirely familiar with all of the novels.  So I’m asking for some help.  Can you take a look at the nominations and see if any have been categorized wrong?  I’ll be taking corrections up until Wednesday afternoon since I need to have the polls for voting up before I leave for Thanksgiving.

If you’re like me and have no clue, damn, but if you know of anyone who might know, could you please pass on my plea of help? Thanks.

If you want to help us determine the top 10, make sure you head over to The Hidden Side of a Leaf for Weekly Geeks on Saturday.  Dewey will have the post with all the links up then.

If you participate in any challenges, get organized! Update your lists, post about any you haven’t mentioned, add links of reviews to your lists if you do that, go to the challenge blog if there is one and post there, etc.

Towards the end of the week, write a wrap-up post about getting your challenges organized OR if you’re joining your first challenge, post about that any time during the week. Once you have your post up, come back and sign Mr Linky with the link to the specific post, not just to your blog.

I’m currently involved in about five different challenges and while I haven’t finished all of them, I’m doing pretty well.  Check out Literary Escapism to see which challenges I’m involved with.

Our Weekly Geeks #8 theme is SCAVENGER HUNT.

I’m going to list below several keywords for you to find in other weekly geeks’ blogs. Your challenge is to find as many of the keywords as possible, in as many Weekly Geeks’ blogs as possible. Fun times!

So there’s a total of 49 keywords to find and each weekly geek adds their own keyword at the end. So while there is only 49 words now, there are already 10 participants who have added words, so now we’re up to 59 words. I need to catch up. I’m going to post this now, but I’ll keep updating it all week as I find the words. As I find the words, I’ll link them to the blog I found them at. It should be interesting to see what I can find.

Since the list is so long, I’m only going to post it once. So if you want to see all the words that I need to find and where I found them, then head over to Literary Escapism and check out the list.

Decide what to illustrate and start taking photos: Most of you are book bloggers, so you may want to post photos of your favorite reading spot, your TBR pile(s), your local book store, your favorite librarian, your child reading, etc. You may want to post several photos of a certain topic (like all nine of your kids reading!) or a mixed bag of photos that are unrelated except that they’re bookish. Or you may want to post just one photo, it’s up to you. If you have a different type of blog, post photos of whatever you think is suitable.

First off, I should probably say I really don’t have a favorite reading spot. The one place I tend to read a lot is on the floor since I can get away with it with Ian. He’s not a fan of me sitting on the couch or in a chair where he can’t get to me. Yeah, he’s a little spoiled, but his an only child at the moment. I could take a photo of my TBR shelf, but there really isn’t anything special about it and it’s getting packed up tomorrow anyway (plus I can’t find my camera cable, so any pictures I do take won’t get on the computer in time to post this). I really don’t have any pictures that have anything to do with books. Well, I do have a couple from the LKH and Kim Harrison appearances, but they are not that special.

This topic is actually harder for me than last weeks. Afterall, catching up was easy for me; trying to decide on a couple of pictures to talk about when I literally have hundreds from this year alone is crazy hard. Of course I’m going to pick a recent one, but still, I go nuts when I get the camera out. I think what I will decide to do is talk about Ians’ favorite hobby….being outside. I know that really isn’t a hobby, but he loves being outside and he will drag me to the door so we can go outside any chance he gets. He lead Jesse there last night while it was raining and that didn’t even stop him.

At the moment, we live in an apartment complex, so letting Ian outside isn’t always feasible. We try to hit the parks at least once a week, and sometimes we’re lucky enough to hit it more often. This past weekend, Ian spent the weekend with his grandmother and she spoiled him rotten when it came to being outdoors. The grandparents live out in the country, so there was a lot of open space for Ian to run and play in. From the pictures I’ve seen, he had a blast.

We’re in the process of getting a house and I can’t wait until we get it. The backyard is a nice size considering we’re going to be in the city and Ian is going to have plenty of room to run around. I’ll be able to let him out more because I know what is on the ground. Plus I’m on the hunt for outside toys for him, so he should have plenty to keep him occupied.

I think that’s all I’m going to right for now about Ian and being outdoors.

1. Dreams Made Flesh by A. Bishop
2. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
3. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
4. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

I have been told for months that I needed to read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I had bought the book last fall, but I ended up returning it for some reason without reading it. Yeah, that was a big mistake since I’m now going out and buying the books again. I’ve really been enjoying the series, but I am starting to get nervous about the movie coming out in December.

There is one thing that I did play catch up with. Packing. Our apartment lease is up at the end of the month and we’re getting ready to move. Hopefully into our new house, but we’re still waiting on the bank to give us an answer. Once we close, though, we want to be able to get right into the new house. Not that there’s anything wrong with our apartment (aside from the oh to occasional mouse), we’re both just really ready to have our own home. So this past weekend, our son was off visiting grandma and we went to town getting the apartment packed up. We’re now living in a sea of boxes, but at least we’ll be ready to move once we get the house.

With television, you basically get an ongoing novel. Instead of reading about a characters life and their society, you get to see it visually. I am a visual person and I also try to give my novels a 3D image in my head. Plus, you’re not given everything up front. You watch each hero/heroine grow and you’re not allowed to skip to the end of the story to see what happens. You can’t, it hasn’t been written/shown yet. Not that I would ever do that, of course, but it can add more suspense and empathy to a story when you’re not sure what is going to happen and you see what the characters are going through.

The same can be said for movies, but on a much shorter scale. Instead of watching ones life, you’re watching an event in that persons life. Look at the Indiana Jones series (since it’s on everyone’s mind), each movie shows the events it took Indy to find the lost artifact. We don’t really know what is going on in his life, but we still becoming invested in him because we want to see how he gets out of the hidden traps and other obstacles that are thrown in his path. By being able to see the character and their surroundings, we don’t have to concentrate as much on the descriptive so we can become entrenched in the story.

Another form of storytelling, RPGs, allow you to become entrenched in a story on a more intimate scale than any other form. There is a set story line you must follow, yet you are in control of how the character navigates it. For instance, if you take Final Fantasy X (since I know it so well), Tidus is lost in Spira and is trying to get back to Zanarkand. That’s his objective, that’s what his story is about, at the beginning. During his travels, he meets new characters and grows as a character and you’re with him through it all. While this can be said of novels as well, the difference is that you become more emotional involved in his failures and successes because he becomes your character.

Take Warcraft as another example, there you’re giving a character to do as you will. You’re set down in his native environment, but you have tasks that are a part of a story line to complete. You can chose to do the tasks or go off and do a completely different adventure. The story is there, but how it’s told becomes your responsibility. You’re not writing the story, but the way you proceed through the story can be different from someone else’s. How you react to the fights, how you fight, what you wear, it’s all yours and nobody is telling you that it’s wrong because there is no right or wrong. Your version is unique and completely yours. However, if you don’t want to take command of it, there is a set linear arc that you can follow. You’re given a choice and that’s something far different than what you get out of novels.

Another RPG that gives a reader even more choices is Dungeons and Dragons. I’m not a player myself, but my husband is and I would watch him prepare for each new campaign, imagining new monsters to fight and new circumstances so his friends would have fun adventuring. There are a ton of books out there that can help you set up a campaign, but they don’t create the story for you. You’re the author and you (and your friends) get to decide how the characters will interact with other NPCs, how they try to get past goblins and other obstacles. At the same time, you can also find books that set up an adventure for you. They give you the tasks that need to be completed, the monsters to face, the places you’ll need to go, but you’re still in charge of your character. The story is never finished because you could do something the book doesn’t take into consideration. You can’t anticipate another character move because you’re not controlling that character. My husband’s old DnD group had this problem a lot. They also loved to throw in something off the wall just to have the fun of fixing it. Sometimes it was intentional and sometimes it was a result of something they did. Either way, they ended up having fun while still going through a story.

To some, RPGs may not be considered a form of storytelling, but I think they can be. At the least, they are a loose form of storytelling. I’m interested though, what do you think? Can RPGs be considered a story or are they more fun and games than anything else?