Thursday, June 01, 2006

ERrrrr...what was it again?

Darn. I had a whole post in my head last night and now heck if I can remember what it was at all! Ugh!

We watched Hotel Rwanda last night with Don Cheadle. He's such a great actor and hardly ever gets his due. The movie was...heartbreaking. I had always been curious as to why the Hutus and the Tutsi's hated each other so much and to find out why/how was just awful. There's really NO reason. Not that there's ever a good reason for genocide, but in their case, the distinction between a Hutu and a Tutsi is primarily a made-up one (former Belgian colonists) -- the Belgians who occupied the country basically made the distinction based on whatever they wanted -- thinner noses, lighter skin...but it was arbitrary. And after they left, the Hutus took power and took revenge upon the Tutsi's who had enjoyed more liberties under the Belgians.

There's another, perhaps more historically accurate, description here.

History...ah, it changes with every writer.

But, no matter the who, the what, and the why, the story and the genocide that happened are just heartbreaking. And, of course, similar things go on every day in other countries. Nothing is more shocking and terrible than the things that people do to each other. We always seem to find a way to group ourselves and ways to define "outsiders" or "others." Even if we were all colorblind, there would be ways. It would be based on height or width of the eyes or who knows what.

Anywho...

Today we have to go to a AAA office to get our International Driver's Permits for Spain. You have to even get some passport-sized photos to go with it. Joy. Another official picture I can look awful in.

In writing news...still haven't heard anything from the publisher, but I know they are busy, so I'm not reading anything into that. I've actually worked a bit on Abigail, though I'm feeling generally uninspired, so I get the feeling that whatever I've added lately is going to get some work done to it in revision.

In site news...no more donations have come in. :-( Expenses...still going up. I'm hoping to move to a new (and cheaper) hosting provider sometime in June or July. That will definitely help. I did kick off two new contests (and please, do enter! I always have a cadre of site members who enter every contest, but if new people don't enter, there's really not much use in continuing them. It's kind of silly to just give away books to the same people every month and not much use to the publisher or the author. So far I've always had enough new people to give books to both groups -- some new, some old, but summer is always kind of strange -- a lot of people find the site when searching for information on a book for school). The chat with Sarah Mlynowski went pretty well. I'd have liked it if a few more people showed up, but enough were there that the conversation never lagged. I'll have to see about setting up more chats in the future. They kids in the forum are asking me to set up one with a publisher. And we are planning on having a chat with Stephenie Meyer in October.

I need to update the Prize Bucket. I'll hopefully get that done tomorrow.

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