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Encyclopedia Virginia is looking for an Assistant Editor. Knowledge of and interest in Virginia history a big plus. This will be a full time classified staff position at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. For more information, contact Brendan Wolfe at EV.

And there’s more! According to Brendan:

We’re entering into a partnership with the Library of Virginia that involves publishing on our site the entirety of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. At the same time, we’re beginning to edit our pre-colonial and colonial history sections and are developing a smart-phone application that uses one’s current geographical coordinates to identify nearby historical events and connect them to encyclopedia entries. It’s pretty cool — all of which is to say that this is a great time to join the staff.

September is Library Card Sign-Up Month and the Library wants to make sure that your child has smartest card of all — a library card. During September, people that register for a library card will be eligible for a random drawing of a library book bag filled with library goodies.

What? You still need convincing? You got a head like a rock. But okay, here’s the list:

Here are all the wonderful things that you can do with a J-MRL library card:

• Borrow books—find a quiet spot, curl up with a book and enjoy!
  • adult fiction (over 41,000 titles in our collection)
  • non-fiction books (over 87,000 titles on our collection)
  • young adult books (over 3,000 in our collection)
  • children’s books (over 54,000 titles in our collection)
• Borrow audio books (over 10,000 in our collection)
• Borrow DVDs and video tapes
• Check out music CDs
• Use the internet in all branches of the library system
• Use computer word processing in all branches
• Access online databases that the library subscribes to
• Place books on hold
• Request books on Interlibrary Loan
• Suggest books for the library to add to the collection

So is that clear? I hope so, because I don’t want to see you round here again without a library card in your pocket.

Nature writer and photographer Marlene A. Condon

will discuss and sign her new book,

The Nature-friendly Garden

Saturday, June 27 at 11:00 AM

Many people approach gardening as a constant struggle against the outside world. They’re perpetually at war with nature, investing in chemical treatments to fight off mammals, birds, and insects in an effort to preserve their garden as a pristine, unspoiled patch of earth.

Marlene A. Condon proposes a radically different method of gardening: What if, instead of battling the natural world, we invite it into our yards?

The result is a nature-friendly garden which attracts and meets the needs of common creatures while maintaining a thriving and varied landscape of flowers and other plants.

As this thought-provoking guide demonstrates, coexisting with nature doesn’t mean turning your yard into a bramble-infested wilderness. The sustainable low-impact garden described in the pages of The Nature-friendly Garden is a model of environmental balance, fostering species diversity while keeping wildlife damage and invasive plant growth at an acceptable minimum.

Best of all, it offers a privileged look at the workings of nature, opening up a new and fascinating world for even the most experienced gardener.

Marlene Condon will share wildlife sights and sounds that she has captured around her home in Crozet, Virginia, as well as explain how folks can create their own nature-friendly landscape.

Marlene A. Condon is a nature writer and photographer with a passion for creating wildlife habitat around homes. A field editor for Birds & Blooms since the magazine’s debut in 1995, she has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines. Her yard has been certified as a backyard wildlife habitat by the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and the National Wildlife Federation and it has been showcased on public television stations WVPT in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and WCVE in Richmond. Marlene is an adjunct professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College where she teaches wildlife and gardening classes and she is a speaker in Shenandoah National Park.

I’m very hungry for other blogs and observations about the Aubrey books….Where else can I read insights about the series from amateurs?

Oh, Jim, how I envy you! The Patrick O’Brian bug is freshly coursing through your veins! So many resources to recommend, how shall I choose?

The first, the best, the greatest, is the List of the World: The Gunroom. But be warned, the conversation sails by and large, and you have to be a Clever Jack to keep up. If you get in over your head, it might help to cruise over to Gibbons Burke’s venerable Gunroom Guide.

If you check out those two sites, plus the W. W. Norton site linked above, you’ll have plenty to keep you afloat in Aubrey/Maturin pleasures for weeks to come. Enjoy the journey!

Learn to use HeritageQuest for your genealogical sleuthing.

The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library will provide two training sessions on how to use HeritageQuest which is a collection of research materials for doing genealogy research. The sessions will be Friday Oct 31, 9:30 am at the Central Library and Saturday Nov 1, 10:00 am at the Northside Library.

HeritageQuest, which is JMRLs most popular database with 2000 3000 searches per month, is a collection of research materials for tracing family history and American culture that contains over 25,000 family records and local histories. This collection assembles every extant U.S. federal census, banking and military records, genealogies, primary source materials, and genealogical and local history serials.

A few of you out there may be wondering why fiction writers need to do research at all. Can’t they just make everything up?

Blogger and researcher Lisa Gold outlines the benefits and potential pitfalls of research, including:

You don’t need to know everything about a subject in order to write about it….

And the very important:

Do not wait until you have done all of your research to begin writing….

And also:

Allow the research to lead you in unexpected directions. If you find out something that conflicts with your plans, don’t view it as an obstacle, figure out how to use it.

Read more: Advice for writers about research « Lisa Gold: Research Maven.

CvilleWords: You kindly commented on CvilleWords after I linked to a couple of your word puzzle sites: Wordtwist.org and Acrostics.org. You have a whole slate of word puzzle sites as the “Puzzle Baron,” correct, ranging from cryptograms to sudoku? But that’s far from the limit of your web presence. Would you mind telling CvilleWords readers a little about some of your other ventures?

Stephen: Sure thing. I’ve put together a good number of word game and puzzle sites over the past few years and only recently decided to sort of pull them all together under a single brand. “Puzzle Baron” originally started as sort of an inside joke between my wife and I, but I ended up liking the name and so that became the new brand. Wordtwist.org and Cryptograms.org are the most popular sites so far, but we also have sites devoted to acrostic puzzles, drop quotes, hangman, sudoku, and other games as well. Apart from that I have a few other web sites such as Casebook: Jack the Ripper, a research site devoted to the historical mystery, and Teaviews.com, where tea lovers from around the country come together to review the best (and worst) blends.

Casebook: Jack the Ripper is quite impressive and clearly an authority in the area of Ripper studies. I see that you started the site in 1996. The Internet was very different then; how has Casebook evolved over the years? How much traffic do you get on the site? Where has the site led you? Does Patricia Cornwell ever visit to support her theory that Walter Sickert was the Ripper?

The Casebook site was the first I ever built – it’s sort of how I cut my teeth on the whole “Internet thing,” which back in ’96 was sort of new and uncharted territory for most folks. The site grew from what was originally just a collection of articles I’d written about the case to what is generally recognized as the biggest single source of Ripper information available anywhere, online or off. At this stage I’m more of a compiler and organizer of information than anything else – the vast majority of the content comes from volunteers and researchers who simply want to share their information with others. The site currently gets about a million and a half visitors each year. Patricia Cornwell has never made contact through the site or with me directly. When the book came out there was a lot of media attention and I did several television and print interviews about it, and wrote a few pieces on what I saw as major flaws in her theory. At one point we were both scheduled to be on an NPR program together to discuss her book, but she canceled her appearance the day before taping. To be fair, her attitude towards the research community – which at first was extremely confrontational – has softened a bit recently, and last I’ve heard she’s even brought on a well-respected Ripper-researcher to assist with the next edition of her book.

You must have been quite young when you started Casebook. What sparked your interest in computers and the Internet? Are you self-trained? What do you think might be the connections among your many interests?

I started the Casebook during my freshman year of college. I had a vague awareness of the Internet in high school but never did much with it. When I got to college though, we all had free internet access in our dorm rooms (which at the time was really quite a new thing) and I just started playing around with it. I learned as a I went along, and eventually made a career out of it – which was fortunate, since I graduated in ’98 with a degree in Anthropology, and there weren’t a whole lot of job offers on the table in that department. I don’t know that there’s a single thread that connects all of my web sites, apart from the fact that they are all devoted to subjects that truly interest me. If I didn’t love the subject matter, I wouldn’t waste my time building a web site about it.

Finally – what makes Charlottesville the right town for you?

I grew up just outside of New York City, went to school in Delaware, got my first job in Alexandria, VA and then moved south to Warrenton. Finally I ended up just outside of Charlottesville in 2005 as part of my continual “southern migration.” I was familiar with Charlottesville from my college days, back when I used to date a girl who went to UVA, and I guess the town always stuck around in the back of my head as just a really nice “big small town.” My wife and I enjoy the country atmosphere but we also like being close enough to town to grab a nice dinner or see a show once in a while.

From Damian Daily, a funny and informative interview with Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman, co-authors of How Not to Write a Novel.

And from Books on the Brain, some highlights from Natalie Goldberg‘s new book, Old Friend From Far Away:

She states that first we must know how to remember, a skill I need to develop as my memory is as hole-y as swiss cheese. She gives exercises and writing prompts on how to discover forgotten memories. One such prompt is to write for 10 minutes about what you don’t remember.

What I don’t remember?? Hmmm. It’s odd how trying to think of things you don’t remember brings up a plethora of things you do. But perhaps that’s the point.

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