Sauce fresh from the pan

In an open mood so here's a poem I wrote YESTERDAY - the italics should be tabed out one; nevertheless, put this in your pipe and smoke it. Now breathe deep.




New Righteousness (I Will Break Down)


I’m a winner, not afraid to lose,
loser,
unafraid to win –

Try 'n'

I dig
truth, the sky’s
blanket
all my desires; run

give my body

the best of them, know
too much
my own good. So I jest!

due process, don’t block

winding my way
back down
love
slows its roll:

my heart’s egress – laughter

I’m some kind
spectacular music,
in full effect, city’s
purple burning twilight,
can take ya
very far. . . Not

keep us alive.

designed
to make everybody
else
feel good about themselves.




-Jonas Kyle-Sidell

Podcast, yeah

Got my podcast, One Room Shack, going - two episodes, nothing special, but hopefully it's fun. I'm enjoying it. . . Here's the link: http://lesterattheoneroomshack.wordpress.com

Science vs. Writing, if I Were a Painter

An interesting thought inspired from discussion in Steve's fiction class tonight which I neglected to say out loud in class, so I'll express myself here: we were comparing arts, which is always a subject I love - something I do on a daily basis, as it seems always to give me some kind of perspective on writing, a larger context perhaps in which to see mysef as an artist.

What I was thinking in my mind during class - and then couldn't find an opening, I suppose, to divulge the thought - was how one would never go so far as to call a painter or a sculptor a scientist, you know? And we were talking, in class, about how writing is so fucking steeped in tradition and that often its merit is determined by an adherence to such. Anyways, so my dad is a scientist, so the comparison is fresh kindle in my mind - but the fact is it is less of a stretch to say a writer is a scientist, even though a writer is as much of an impressionist as a painter or sculptor.

Science and writing are both largely upheld, these days, in universities; writers and scientists both recieve grants for their work (scientists more often, though), publish in journals; and if you look at a poetry professor and a science professor my guess is they might look remarkably alike. All goofy and shit.

What I think this fact concedes is that writing, in my opinion, in its modern day parallel to science, is considered less of an action than it should be. This is sad. Though I think there are similarities in processing of science and writing, I'm more moved to be the equivalent of a painter or sculptor. Someone working, and where innovation is not just seen as a risk or artistic endeavor, but a necessity, simply a reaction to survive and keep going.

"Women and Country," and dirt

Is the name of Jacob Dylan's new album. He's got Neko Case - with her soaring voice! - as a background singer. She doesn't out do him (though I'm pretty sure she could). It's a fantastic album, spry and if you took a level to it, plum. It's frame is flush up against the world. No but for real, there's nothing like some tough music - really worked over so that seeds (mine) can consummate new beginnings, and old ones, reach strong into the parable of sky.

Things are happening

Having so much fun making these podcasts I can barely leave my house in the morning. Also, last week I reached my goal of 40,000 words on my "novel" - which is really a weird mix of poetry, memoir, and fiction, but it plays like fiction - and goddammit, if anybody asks, I can say I wrote a novel, which was really the whole point, just to be able to say that. Congragulate me. Thanks. Peace.

Dashed

Isn't it interesting when we dash our preconceptions of each other? For better or worse is irrelevant - I think either way, it's empowering. In other words, if you thought someone was strong or raw, this was your first take on them, then you realize later after talking to them more in a less organized setting, that their chains run just as long and thick as yours. Suddenly you feel less envious - but it could work the other way too, if you pitied someone, thought you had it on them, you were freer, less inhibited, in greater control of yourself (perhaps a key contradiction right there), only to find out that that person lives in a way that is surprisingly cool, they navigate their element with much more fluidity then you had first proposed. Perhaps their freedom, now, detracts from your own the same way the previous person gave you a little back, made you feel lucky. I think it's something we're all doing all the time, measuring ourselves against each other, and to deny ourselves indulgence in those preconceptions - calling them what they are - is when we get in trouble, and discriminations form, racism bubbles out of a false pretense of truth. When another person outsizes your assessment of them, whatever that assessment was and however it makes you feel now (all of our different levels of insecurity and appeals against them), it's humbling, and to quote a Brett Dennen song "the failure keeps us humble, and leads us closer to peace."

Website User Review: Roommate Approved

My website is pretty simple but I did redo it this week: fixed the two broken links by saving them as copies in Photoshop, made the text a bolder yellow, and spread two of the pages out, adding a black background, so even at my old PC computer here at home it looks alright. I then showed it to my roommate Norman, who was mildly impressed as to the technical aspects, but immensely impressed at the cool factor. After all, he's a dental student. He liked the black and white background against the sun-lit words, and the all around simplicity of the approach - being that he was looking at the desk which is the background and to his left is the coffee table which appears to the lower left as a link to my blog. He still found the yellow words hard to read at times, but I think it kind of plays with the mystique of poetry, don't you? Isn't poetry always teetering on the verges of our attention?

Beginning of a new poem, or maybe it hasn't started yet

Dismiss alarm. Go on, be strong; sleep, need be. Do nothing new. Do / everything new. But give creed this Deity's crush / on you. See. Fight. Write. Hold tight to / Desire's elastic, ecstatic grace, like a new word. It's written all over / your fucking face - my / cue. . .

Thrash

I can talk about the book I'm reading: James Baldwin's Another Country. I've read two more by him previously: Just Above My Head and Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone. My mom and my brother introduced me to him and my brother left me this one the last time he was here. I got the cheap paperback version of Tell Me How Long. . . for like 2 bucks at a used bookstore in Salem, Oregon a couple summers ago and read it soon after. He's fuckin' ridiculous. A black guy born in Harlem in the 20s - of the same era as the beats and Bukowski, notably, but Baldwin was black, and gay. He makes any of The Beats' or Bukowski's resistance seem whiny. Their personal and/or cultural revolutions peddly. He was, and through his writing, is, impossibly transcendent. His stuff is ahead of our time. Nothing is dated in his writing, which is so amazing. On the back of Another Country there's a quote by Langston Hughes which is perfect: "Baldwin uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing. . . The thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates the thought." This book is an ocean, each paragraph a wave, and the weather changes, but Baldwin never strays far from the hurricane of how terrible love can be, never quite forgiving us, not letting us die, either.

N-i-c-e

Hey everybody: blah blah blah! Sun came out today in Baltimore. . .

Link to my new website

Here's the link to my new website: http://home.ubalt.edu/students/ub99o50/jonastheartist.html although depending on what computer you're using, it might look rough.

Chronology

I just woke up dreaming prose so I don't feel guilty about blogging. Perhaps it can be a guilty pleasure, a way of flushing the drainpipes. I'm trying to find the breeze here in my room, tonight, drinking tea at five in the morning - it doesn't seem that cold outside, but I'm trying to feel whatever it is. I'll tell you what's been on my mind, lately - and to the folks older it will definitely sound trite, but it always does. It's being 29, I suppose. I'll always remember 28 as a rough year. I was 27 when I came to grad school, 26 when I left Long Beach; 24, I believe, when I spent a magically rejuvinating summer in NYC; 22 when I left the girlfriend of two and a half years I was living with. Broke up with her on an U-bon train in Berlin. The ride back was not fun, but necessary. Right now I can imagine her reading this (it's actually possible through facebook), and not being so comfortable with me saying that, out loud. But we always did have differences in discretion. It's my story, too, and it's full of weakness - too. I can tell you a lyric that's been rolling through my head by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, their album Cardinology, their song "Evergreen:" be more like the trees / and less like the clouds, stop / roaming around. . ." Let's just keep letting ourselves in, and out, huh, how 'bout that?

Mr. Mosley

For anyone doubting the validity of using Wordpress to make our websites - though I'm going to try and do dreamweaver - check out Walter Mosley's website. http://www.waltermosley.com He's bigtime and you'll see at the bottom it says powered by Wordpress. He's also a hero of mine, my favorite living author - he wrote Devil and a Blue Dress, which was then the Denzel Washington movie, and he's written about 28 other books. He's pure fiction, says he couldn't write a passable poem to save his life, but he adores it nonetheless, and says - for all you straight fiction writers - even if you're half a poet, it will make your novel twice as good. Walter Mosley is a poet though, even though he says he isn't, and if you read something of his you'll see what I'm talkin' about.

Excerpt from beginning of novel I'm working on (sorely lacking in post ideas):

***My name is Devin Morning. I’m writing this in an attempt to describe what happened to me, and how I found my way back, because if it happened once, can’t it happen again? And what protection or fortification do we have as people and animals and humans, besides these abilities to process pain, even joy? To save it; make something out of it worth keeping – that which, with any luck, might stave off future relapses of the stuff we’ve worked so hard to throw out.

Among the first obsessive behaviors I remember was a fixation on other people’s shoes. Eighth grade, and my eyes were coming off the ground at a forty-five degree angle, and I knew to look up and see it was my friend Tak Ishi when I saw that vicious pair of brown Reeboks.

“What up,” Tak said.

“Aye,” I replied, coming back to the world of peoples’ eyes. Tak and I were good friends. The thing was we had six out of seven classes together that year. So we ended up traversing the halls and breezeways, eventually becoming tight in an unspoken sort of way. Just then Nathanial Weber came whizzing by with his massive head and clocked me right on the shoulder. Oooouuuww. He must’ve had his middle knuckle stuck out a little. Then he faded off, weaving through the human traffic and laughing, his big fucking head seemingly going up in smoke. I clutched my right shoulder and winced a bit. It was purely my lack of retaliation that egged him on, and I knew it. He punked me ‘cause he could. But should I have to stoop to his level?

Tak barked at Nate as he disappeared down the hall, half defending my honor and half laughing with him at me, chiming in with the gesture of the punch. He was playing the neutralizer – but I knew he was with me. He was the peaceful sort, so he and I proceeded on and out of the building into the explosive California sunlight. Sunlight in California is a way of life, and everything caters to that. The asphalt schoolyard had thirty-five basketball hoops – sixteen full courts and three half courts – which, to a thirteen-year-old who had grown up in the golden state, was both archetypal and radical. It was awesome. There was nothing better than being out there, sweating and competing, talking and taking shit.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” one dude yelled as he laid one in the hoop, keeping his shooting hand up long after the fact, and even going so far as to shove his limp wrist in his opponent’s face, so he could smell it. After three minutes of this unbridled bragging, he took off down court to play some defense. It would come back – even if he was wearing those prized new Nike Air Jordans.

Tak and I made our way to the court we regularly played on with the rest of our friends – guys I grew up with – and counted ourselves in. We got picked up right away. Lunch was only half an hour so the games were intense. Tak was short and stout but bulldozed his way around while playing. You couldn’t catch him, and if you did, don’t stand in his way. It wasn’t a long distance between him and the ground, I guess, so he seemed to dribble a mile a minute, and the rest of his movements somehow reflected this phenomenon. I – on the other hand – was tall but liked to play point guard, opting, rather, to head up the flow and pass it off. But this time, I decided to try and take it inside, managing to juke the guy out guarding me! but blowing the lay-up. It was really a foul, but I was content to hustle back. Sometimes my lack of competitiveness got on people’s nerves, because they didn’t get how I was just enjoying myself either way. My teammates looked at me, frustrated. Still, I let it go.

The bell rang and game dispersed just as quickly as it had formed. Tak and I intersected pathways, almost literally bumping into each other, and headed to history class together, talking about was a dumbshit Nathanial Weber was.

And then there was always that sky, there, hanging over us like a tarp to keep out rain – and it didn’t, much. It was Los Angeles. The sun was like three feet of brand new fresh snow. No, like a blizzard! It was everywhere, on everything. Caught in the spirals of our attention; clear sheets twisting on a sumptuous breeze.

Back in fourth grade, now, and it was a minimum day. We got out at 12:30pm, but the school buses didn’t know this. My friends and I and my twin brother were usually bused to another school about ten blocks up where they had an after-school program. Well, on this day the buses didn’t come so three of my friends and I (my twin brother, Jared, was already learning to use his left brain and, turning back, I remember him jumping up and down like a baboon, flagging desperately for me to call the whole thing off) decided to walk it. We knew the way, so what the fuck?

The sun was too bright as we ambled those twelve blocks up Airdrome Ave., four ten-year-olds along the grid-gripped streets of L.A., the wide sky and those manicured lawns, with – most likely – high tops on (three years later I’d know exactly what kind). When we were not far from the destination, my three friends decided, unanimously, to venture into the 7Eleven on the corner to play the few arcade games they had wedged inside the store. This seemed like a bad idea to me. We’d come this far already, and by now I’d picked up the notion that this probably wasn’t such a good idea to begin with, a realization which, a few blocks back, had begun bursting into worry. “No! Fellas,” I said, “Let’s stay on track!”

“Just for a minute, Dev,” they moaned in unison, not really giving a shit whether I was coming in or not, and dipped inside the convenience store.

I kept going, at odds.

When I got to our after-school school, a lone, canoodling kid, the principle pulled me into her office and called my dad and put him on speakerphone. He replied benignly out of sheer shock and disbelief – the emotional incursion of it all – “That’s not good.”

And though they were mad and disappointed and worried, my parents were relieved I hadn’t gone into that 7Eleven. That part showed good judgment. Either way, they were well aware, by this time, of the disparity evident in my nature. Once they saw me kicking my feet to my own ass, as if I was playing leap-frog with the air! out in the middle of the soccer field during a game. And over and over I was doing it; it was some tension in my knees combined with an implicit urge in my buttocks, which led me to want to keep bringing my heels up to them, so I did. Over and over. This one didn’t last long, though. More prominent was when I was sitting at the kitchen table bucking my shoulders to my neck – shrugging, basically, except to the opposite effect.

What the hell is wrong with this kid?

Later, one Nathanial Weber, the bully of my eighth grade year, imitated me as I flickered my eyelids constantly. To his credit, I might not have known otherwise the extent it was depicted – how crazy I looked, like a butterfly losing its wings – but to mine, I was already aware enough to know I couldn’t stop. Fuck him, he had some cheesy flatfooted Converses on anyway.

Ninth grade my friend Tak Ishi moved away to go to some other high school I’d never heard of. Ah well. At the beginning of that year I forgot all about it and fell in love with the first girl who ever liked me, and this is where the story really begins.

More importantly, the only way we can experience love is if we feel we deserve it, so this is another stab at that.***

Following in the Footsteps

After seeing a couple other people post poems they love, and feeling jealousy snipe at my bones, I'd thought I'd do the same. This is probably my favorite poem by Charles Bukowski, and I love tons of his; he's probably the reason I'm here - alive, and well, approaching happiness. It's long, but what the hell, I feel like a giant just typing it out. Thanks for listening.

one for the shoeshine man, By Charles Bukowski, from "Love is a Dog from Hell"



the balance is preserved by the snails climbing the
Santa Monica cliffs;
the luck is in walking down Western Avenue
and having the girls in a massage
parlor holler at you, "Hello, Sweetie!"
the miracle is have 5 women in love
with you at the age of 55,
and the goodness is that you are only able
to love one of them.
the gift is having a daughter more gentle
than you are, whose laughter is finer
than yours.
the peace comes from driving a
blue 67 Volks through the streets like a
teenager, radio tuned to The Host Who Loves You
Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum
of the rebuilt motor
as you needle through traffic.
the grace is being able to like rock music,
symphony music, jazz. . .
anything that contains the original energy of
joy.

and the probability that returns
is the deep blue low
yourself flat upon yourself
within the guillotine walls
angry at the sound of the phone
or anybody's footsteps passing;
but the other probability -
the lilting high that always follows -
makes the girl at the checkstand in the
supermarket look like
Marilyn
like Jackie before they got her Harvard lover
like the girl in high school that we
all followed home.

there is that which helps you believe
in something else besides death:
somebody in a car approaching
on a street too narrow,
and he or she pulls aside to let you
by, or the old fighter Beau Jack
shining shoes
after blowing the entire bankroll
on parties
on women
on parasites,
humming, breathing on the leather,
working the rag
looking up and saying:
"what the hell, I had it for a
while. that beats the
other."

I am bitter sometimes
but the taste has often been
sweet. it's only that I've
feared to say it. it's like
when your woman says,
"tell me you love me," and
you can't.

if you see me grinning from
my blue Volks
running a yellow light
driving straight into the sun
I will be locked in the
arms of a
crazy life
thinking of trapeze artists
of midgets with big cigars
of a Russian winter in the early 40s
of Chopin with his bag of Polish soil
of an old waitress bringing me an extra
cup of coffee and laughing
as she does so.

the best of you
I like more than you think.
the others don't count
except that they have fingers and heads
and some of them eyes
and most of them legs
and all of them
good and bad dreams
and a way to go.

justice is everywhere and it's working
and the machine guns and the frogs
and the hedges will tell you
so.

Guinness on Me

This is my third blog for the week for class - it's been a free week, write whatever we want to write. I must say that anybody who attempts to not be self-indulgent on these blogs is kidding themselves. C'mon man, this is a fucking diary, you know what I'm saying? And honestly, if I went to a blog of an author who I was digging, it would be to hear him or her talk about THEMSELF. I wouldn't be searching for benevolence - although I always LOVE to hear about their influences - I'm looking for insight into THEM. They're the person who's, so magically, making me feel less alone. Like last semester when I took a class by Marion Winik, my favorite parts which were priceless were when she rambled on, graciously, about the craziness and/or beauty of her own life.

That being said, I read my first fiction piece aloud ever in my life tonight. It was a lot of fucking words - for Steve's workshop I'm taking this semester. It felt pretty damn good, though, too. The title of this blog came from the piece, called, Rusty Gold - and it's such a beautiful thing when you read it, you know, 'cause then you come home and it's not yours anymore. You've given it away - and so I read it again when I got home and it was kind of like (a little) I was reading someone else's work, you know? I had an objectivity that was a relief. I was happy not to own this thing anymore. Other ears had heard it so I couldn't just look on it as my own supple creation anymore; it was now prone to the rigid fibrillations of the earth. I couldn't guard it like that anymore. As has been the case when I've read other poems and pieces, it's like part of my body is now reconciled to be free again. I'm open.

Cheers!

And That's That

Funny story. I'm sitting here at my computer in the morning, drinking coffee and rustling leaves and - since today's trash day and there's a heap outside our's and our neighbor's door, two weeks worth - a homeless man starts going through it. I can see him clearly through my window in the brightening sunshine. He's humming a loud tune, alternately singing it, from his throat, shouting it, at times, telling the world, the brick, the botched sky, "hey, I'm here, I exist, baby, whether you like it or not," but this pride may be the last thing on his mind - or perhaps not.

Anyways, so he's rustling through the trash, as I'm going through my computer, looking for a way to make progress in my life. I need a new job; I need to be published more; I need an in. Blah blah. . . I had Norah Jones' new album, The Fall, playing through the morning to help me with my search.

The homeless man rips the plastic, still humming, and - what! - pulls out, of all things, the tome, my portfolio, my pre-graduate school portfolio. When I came to Baltimore I knew I'd be bombarded and corrupted - which I was ready for, dying for - so I carefully placed my last five years' work, my heart, into a leather bound notebook full of laminated slips. Just last week, I printed out a thinner version of what it all had become, and tossed the old big fucking thing. He put the black thing aside and kept searching.

Now for a moment, I felt myself get protective over it, as if I would go out there and tell him to return it to its rightful place: the trash. Ha! I felt myself relax. I mean really relax. I watched him shuffle through the shit a second or two more, and, finding nothing, he put my fight, my solitary light, that space I'd created for myself all that time when I felt my parents leaning down on me with worry I had no use for; under his arm, he put it under his arm, and walked off with it.

Go Like Crazy (Valentine's Day Diddy)

I'm not a sentimental person, but life has its pleasures. This may very well end up becoming a poem - yeah, I said - this may very well end up becoming a poem. I figure I can use this to TYPE, to walk, for excersie, try 'n meet sanity halfway before I flee from exhaustion and disillusion and a penchant for just the right amount of excess. . . Frankly, I can't sign on - would rather risk my mind, even my body, than euthanize it through predictability. What a wonderful surprise, tonight, catching your eyes falling from grace. And my stomach points toward inevitability; maybe I have to pee, tic of embarrassment harrassing me my constant companion. Had a beautiful day today! my writing is going well. Writing's going well. Snow like vomit across these city streets: sick or out of heaven.

Yes!

http://www.sounddler.com/index.php?p=video&id=nOQJlWBU42Q&t=video&q=melissa+etheridge+fearless+love

Eels, End Times

My stepdad had this album by a group called "Eels" over christmas - I'd never heard of them but I dug it totally. When I got back to Baltimore I bought it, then I bought the album of theirs preceding it, and then the one before that. To my delight, they just released a new one on Jan. 16th which is their next release after the first one I bought. This one's called, End Times. It's a break-up album, a divorce album, an end of the world album. My tendencies don't tend toward such drama these days, but if you checked with me a year ago my answer would have been different (or just not there). But actually, the album is not over dramatic either; it retains a very palpable sense of whimsy amidst the weariness and never really, come to think of it, gets too angry. Just enough to say "You've come unhinged, baby. . ." But I think the beauty of this album is how the lead singer - who's ship this clearly is - takes it inside, and drives "straight into the night." It's a very adult album in that sense, but also keeps a boyish "God damn, I miss that girl" sensibility. There's some upbeat bluesy numbers, too, in the mix; which are really refreshing. Songs are sparsely lit, overcome by a hush: damn good! for all the snowy weather.

Let's give it a shot

3 free posts this week. alright. Of course I have the inclination to throw a few of my poems up. However - supposedly, doing so could preclude them being published. This is a big question for a writer. Do I hold tight to my work and wait for it to be officially recognized in some small, likely unread, perhaps haughty magazine (not that there aren't really good ones out there), or do I, like an acoustic guitarist strumming to his friends through the snowy 2:30am windows/pupils of my embossed night, release it into the air; by all means, trying it out? My answer: the act of writing is already solitary enough, fuck the publishers if they don't want to use it now. If you'll indulge me, here's a new poem of mine, thanks for listening. It takes two people to sing this one. . .


The Gauntlet


I’m not one to draw circles
around the truth,

For half of you,
I’m better than you think – the other half

and as lonely as I get,
I could always

I’m just as good. There’re valleys
where grass grows orange red, swords

get lonelier. . .
What better way

with no sharp ends. These gears miss
their allotted

than to lose myself in you?
But – tell me! – anyone

appointments. But music plays from the sun!
and the rain

actually believe
honesty’s never a stain? I do.

sings songs, love and pain. People
right outside

Even when it
perforates. And isn’t

have nowhere to go, coughing up blood
in a napkin. Bare arms beating, soul chimes

desperation

charms sounds, letters waiting to be received;
trees trembling tears under a hot sun, buses rolling by –

desperate enough? A cold river
which, if pressed into, will

trains taking; ditches dark dusty and smoky centers, unidentified
flying objects. Half-truths

freeze our souls right
upon the oblivion of old age. I’ve

and whole ones – dignity
that need not be validated.

been there, in my own
unique time. Not even for you.

www.brucespringsteen.net

The Boss' website does a great job of keeping a creative narrative as well as just representing the artist. While He doesn't need much representation, the site posts current clips of performances, tour dates and such. Springsteen has also been known to periodically describe experiences and talk about his feelings on the site - as he did recently for the gay marriage debate. But I think the most unique and which truly conspires to form a narrative is the column to the right of the webpage, in which fans and/or writers of Backstreet - a magazine wholly dedicated to the E Street Band - keep an on going log of their experiences at his concerts. Sometimes one says they were disappointed with a song played and they give the band shit, others say they couldn't feel their left pinky toe during the performance of "The River." It's pretty much all love, but taken together, these accounts could form the ultimate book and testimony to Springsteen's sanctimonious concerts.

Failbetter.com

One of the best online lit mags I've seen is Failbetter.com, at www.failbetter.com. The functional name of the magazine signifies its virture. I get frustrated with a lot of them because they throw all these links at you. Failbetter.com does better with this and keeps it simple and gives you stuff to read, as well as interviews and some writing news. The "theme" of the magazine, based off the title, is to fail better. I suppose this is the creative narrative which runs throughout, or its more like an aura. They need more poetry on the site, but what they do have is good and easy to get to.

Valeria's Last Stand

Author Marc Fitten has an effective and colorful site for his recently published book, "Valeria's Last Stand." The link is http://www.marcfitten.com/ - his book was recently sold all over the world, and in the U.S. to Bloomsbury, the same company who publishes Harry Potter, based in Great Britian and the U.S. So anyway, his budget was probably pretty high - but that said, the site keeps it simple and representitive of the book itself. The pages of a digital version of "Valeria's Last Stand" turn at the peruser's disposal. There is an excerpt, reading dates, press quotes, author biography, contant info, and a reader's guide - all within the pages of a virtual book, which flips to display the respective info. Everything works here, and most of all the excerpt portion, which is clear and easy to read and really gives the potential reader a good feel for things. This site makes you jealous as a writer because you want one for yourself just like it.