Review: Nightlight

Nightlight
The Harvard Lampoon
Vintage Books
$13.95, trade paperback, 154 pages
Release date: Nov. 3, 2009

It seems everyone on the planet has some level of familiarity with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Devoted fans eagerly awaited the next installment of the lengthy books. When the last book in Meyer’s series appeared in August 2008, the books’ fans switched their anticipation to movies based on the books.

Thanks to a parody from The Harvard Lampoon, Twilight devotees now have something new to read, although Nightlight’s humor may be better appreciated by Twilight’s detractors.

Brief note on reviews

You may have heard the FTC issued guidelines for bloggers to disclose when they receive payments or free products to prevent unfair and/or deceptive practices. The guidelines take effect Dec. 1. Both the blogger and the company who sends him a free product could be subject to fines if the FTC decides the transaction leads to unfairness or deception.

While the likelihood of small blogs like Small Pond being noticed by the FTC are, um, small, I’m adding a statement to my “about me” page stating that all book reviews headlined “Review: [book title]” are a result of receiving a complimentary advance review copy (ARC) from the publisher.

Some bloggers I know are refusing all free stuff. That’s very noble. And i agree with the FTC’s guidelines in principle. Unfortunately, to post reviews before or on book release dates, I need to read the books before I can buy them. ARCs are necessary.

I don’t believe the content of my reviews have been affected by not having to pay for the book. Or by receiving vampire teeth or other PR goodies with the book. So I’m going to continue requesting ARCs.

Just wanted to put that out there.

Crunching Leaves and Umbrella Guns

Memory is a weird thing.

One day you can suddenly remember the Eagles game you went to at Veteran’s Stadium. You can see your view of the field, feel the chill in the air. You can see friends and family there with you. You remember the idiot a couple rows back who, upset at something the Eagles had done, threw the remnants of a soft pretzel at the field, but hit you instead. You clearly remember the piece of pretzel had mustard on it.

Even though it never happened.

More Links

As mentioned in the previous post, I fell behind on posting interesting links. I’ve been collecting them, however, and storing them in my cheeks for the winter. No, it’s not winter yet, but here are some links to explore while you prepare for hibernation.

I hate the rampant abuse of quotation marks, and so do the people who run this site. Quotation marks do not indicate irony, and they certainly don’t belong in many places you see them. In my opinion (and 8 out of 10 grammarians agree), quotation marks should be used when you’re quoting someone, to set off titles or when you need to indicate you’re writing about a word as a word.

Long Overdue Links

Eek. Life and my innate laziness kept me away from the blog for far too long. The monthly posting of sites I find interesting hasn’t been updated in what seems like forever.

So, without further delay, here’s part 1 of what I’ve been doing online lately. Warning – no theme or rhyme/reason here.

NaNoWriMo is getting close. Essentially, it’s a challenge for yourself, a contest where the only prize is finishing. You write a novel in November. Start on 11/1 and finish on 11/30. Novel is defined as 50,000 words. I did this last year and won. Okay, I wrote over 60,000 words so I met the requirements for winning, but I didn’t finish the story and haven’t touched it since. Maybe one day. Not sure what I’m writing this year, but I’ll be blogging about it as a distraction from actually doing it. Why not join me?