I'm happy to introduce Lucy Silag, Book Country's new Community & Engagement Manager.

I'm really happy that Lucy has joined us. She's worn many hats in her professional and writing career: bookseller, publicist, writing tutor and professor, and author. I think she's the right fit for us because of the combination of her temperament and her impressive background in all aspects of the business. Like the rest of the Book Country team, she believes that a writing and publishing community is essential for writers and she has a ton of great ideas to make Book Country even better. With her history of writing, workshopping, and publishing, I'm confident that Lucy will help us grow Book Country into the best place for writers on the web.

You'll be able to find Lucy starting conversations on the discussion forums, reading your manuscripts, writing blogs, and representing Book Country at conferences so she can meet a lot of you in person. Please join me in welcoming Lucy. She's written a blog post so you can get to know her, too.

Hey everybody . . . was trying to stay off Book Country for a bit this morning so that I could get some writing done . . . but I find myself logged in just the same. You guys are just too engaging . . .

Anyway--I was about to do something crazy, I wondered if anyone else out there does this, too: I am going to shut down my laptop (not just close it or put it to sleep) and grab a nice pen and a fresh spiral notebook and actually write on paper. Haven't done this in a while, but today that just feels really compelling (even though I know that it will be "make work" for myself later if I decided to keep anything that I have written--I'll have to decipher my terrible handwriting and transcribe it to Word).

What about you guys? Anyone else ever do that? Why does it seem so appealing right now?

Anyway, happy writing today!

@Mari--that's really interesting. Tell me more about why if you care to share!

When I was in high school and college, I was this insane note-taker, and I wrote constantly in my journals. But then, after I started working and writing on my computer, I found that whenever I tried to write longhand I would get super frustrated. It wasn't just that it felt slow and awkward (my writing hand was seriously out of shape! Who knew you lose that if you don't practice it?) but also my executive writing abilities got all confused, because I wasn't able to move things around, edit, try things and try again differently, in the same way that I can when I am typing. It made me feel like whatever direction I chose to go in writing by hand, I'd have to stick with or start over.

Then last fall I read WRITING DOWN THE BONES by Natalie Goldberg, and she advocates for writing longhand and never letting your pen leave the paper, just to see what will come out. That made me eager to try longhand again. I find it soothing. But not very productive!

Whenever I write by hand, it always makes me wish I could talk to Jane Austen for five minutes. I'd like to ask her how she stayed organized writing by hand. Or any author prior to the word-processing age, really.

Does anyone else on Book Country ever write longhand? Why?

Lucy