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Imagine how the world appeared to the ancient Greeks and Romans: there were no aerial photographs (or photographs of any sort), maps were limited and inaccurate, and travel was only by foot, beast of burden, or ship. Traveling more than a few miles from home meant entering an unfamiliar and perhaps dangerous world.

The post Geography in the ancient world appeared first on OUPblog.

When I first considered becoming a writer, storage was not an issue to which I devoted much thought. Now that I've become a writer, it 's something I think about regularly. I'm amazed at the amount of writing stuff I need to keep---research material, drafts, maps, CDs, interview tapes and the myriad of other bits and pieces that accumulate during the writing of a magazine article or book. I can't just throw it all away once the book or article has gone to press. Most of it needs to be stored. . . somehow.

The "somehow" isn't a problem for magazine articles. A few file drawers full of file folders, one article per folder, and yo. Done. But books! Yeesh. There simply ain't no folder big enough.

While a book's in progress, I like to keep everything in zippered binders with several rainbow's worth of page dividers. Easy to use, easy to find info, easy to lug to the library. But once a book has gone to press, storing binders is a pain. They don't fit well in a file drawer and they don't stack neatly on a shelf. What's an author to do?

Last week, as I was blurfing---blog surfing, dontchaknow---I found the answer. Author Barbara O'Connor has the coolest idea for storing the materials for each of her "done" books. Boxes. Not just any boxes, though. These spiffy containers are sturdy and functional, and come in uniform sizes and colours, so when stacked on a shelf they look organized and. . . nice.

And hurrah! They're available locally. We actually have some at our house already. Fabteen#2 uses them to keep entropy at bay in her bedroom. Before now, though, I'd never thought of them as a way to store my "book stuff". Of course, I'll need a different colour, but I can already see that wall o'boxes in my mind's eye. Hey diddle-de-day.

Thanks, Barb!

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First Law of Electronic Equipment:
Electronic equipment works because it's full of smoke.

Second Law of Electronic Equipment:
If you let the smoke out, electronic equipment doesn't work anymore.

I let the smoke out of my paper shredder today. I have just one question: If a paper shredder is designed to handle a maximum of 7 pages at once, why is the slot in which one feeds the paper wide enough to generously accommodate 12 pages?
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Each snail mail submission I send out is securely paper-clipped together, yet time after time, all I get back is a sheaf of papers minus the paper clip.
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At first I thought editors were nipping my clips because, well, to be honest, my clips are pretty darn cool. On top of that, they are the best, the crème de la crème of paper clips.
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After talking to a few writer friends, though, I realized the situation goes beyond paper clip style. It's not just my fancy schmancy clips that are going AWOL. Paper clips of all shapes and sizes are missing from around the globe. No submission type is spared---fiction or nonfiction, beginning readers to novels, rhyme or prose. Paper returned, paper clip not.
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Do the math, people. Publishers receive thousands of subs each month. Holy Cadiddlehoppers, Batman, that's one heckuvalot of missing paper clips. Where are they going?
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Then it struck me: the paper clip is the editors' equivalent of notches on the bedpost. Imagine, if you will, a NY pub full of editors every Friday after work, comparing their paper clip daisy-chains to see who has the longest one. I can hear them now:
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Editor #1 [dangling a paper clip chain that reaches to the floor and curls around the barstool leg]:
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____Oh-ho! You think your slush pile was big this week.
____Feast your eyes on this baby.
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Editor #2 [wrapping a paper clip chain around her neck, necklace-style, 17 times]:
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____Aw, that's nothin'. Look how many rejections I sent
____this week.
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Next time I'm in New York, I'm checking out editor watering holes to see if something other than peanut shells falls under the table. Those paper clips have gotta be somewhere.
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