A Little Help from my friends -
It's been a while since I've posted here, though I haven't stopped trolling Etouffee's poetry. Catharsis is catharsis after all. I'm only a little ashamed to say that for the most part, I've stopped posting here because I've been trying to get my pieces published in Literary Journals of resoundingly suspicious quality, but that I have been moderately successful. I've gotten over a dozen poems published to various journals, and if all goes well I'll have a chapbook published soon. A chapbook is a weird little medium, it's essentially a half book of poetry. It's mainly used for those who don't have the stones to write an entire book of poetry.
This whole enterprise has been made possible by the good folks at Duotrope Unfortunately, they've started charging five bucks a month, but it's been a really awesome resource for me, since I'm a notoriously lazy submitter. I hated writing cover letters, trying to find back issues to see if they published anything that remotely resembled my stuff etc...
But I didn't come here today to shill for Duotrope, with whom I have no business affiliation, but to shill for myself, with whom I have an unfortunate affiliation.
A buddy and I had been musing for sometime that we didn't have anything close to a good system for keeping track of what books we wanted to read. Though I've been taking a few off of this for years. With that in mind we got together and started brainstorming about releasing a combination app/website devoted to people recommending books to their friends and contacts, swapping and trading books, writing reviews, and just for the hell of it leveling up. We don't really know how to make/do any of those things at present, but the business plan is coming along, we're both learning the basics of coding and startup laws, we've almost got an Alpha Version of this thing ready to hit an iphone, we've even got a name...almost.
We also realized early on in this process that we are making a lot of assumptions about what people who read books do, based on what we do. The first thing I do when I read a really good book is try to find a friend who will be into it, and hit them in the face with it. Most other people probably do something else. So we devised a sarcastic little survey to try and take the pulse of the avid book readers out there to help us develop what will hopefully be a very effective and free tool to help we small group of literati throw books at each other faster and "appier". So I need a little help from E2. Anyone who could take a few minutes to fill out this survey would really help me out. Thanks guys.