Skip to main content

Poll - STICKY - NEW POSTS BELOW UNTIL APRIL 30th

I have a project I have been thinking about for some time. Years ago, long before I exchanged my Icelandic food website for a blog, I translated some folk tales about the island of Drangey into English and put them up on an auxiliary website, accompanied by photos. I got some enthusiastic responses, but due to my freelance work I didn’t have the time to develop the idea further, so I filed away the idea. Now I finally have both time and inclination to put this idea into action. Numerous Icelanders have collected folk and fairy tales over the centuries so the resources are basically bottomless, meaning this could become a long-term project.

I really don’t want to add yet another blog to my already too large repertoire, so I will post them on one of my existing blogs. To begin with, the format will be one story, either a folk tale or fairy tale (or possibly even an urban legend) per week, accompanied whenever possible by photos or illustrations found in the public domain or licensed as creative commons. I will use my own photography whenever possible and appropriate.

The question is now where I should publish them: On the Iceland etc. blog, which is basically a photoblog dedicated to my travels around Iceland and other countries, or here on the 52 books blog, which is of course dedicated to literature and reading.

So I would like to ask you, dear reader, to cast your vote. Which location would you like to see these tales posted in? Please go to the survey on the right and cast your vote. If you definitely do not want to see them here, the trick is to cast a vote for the other blog.

Note that I am running surveys on both blogs, so if you read both, please cast a vote over on the other one as well.

Keep in mind that if the photoblog gets the majority vote, the project will be delayed until I have finished blogging about my holiday in India, whereas I can start right away on the literary blog.

The survey is open to the end of April. This post will remain a sticky until then, but any new posts will appear underneath it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more