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Dear Diary, It’s Hard to Come Home…

Aug 25, 13

4 countries 6 currencies 38 days 4 backpacks 3 rental cars 1 car loaned by friends 2 ferries old friends new friends 2 amusement parks 3 medieval villages 1 mountain climb to a chateau daily scrapbooks fresh baked bread old cheese, salami, french wine, Danish snaps, Danish beer, bubbles, 4 swimming pools, 2 hot springs, 2 beaches, and a whole lot of sunshine… It has been a week since we returned from our 5 week trip to Iceland, France, Denmark, and Sweden. I have had a hard time reintegrating back into my life. I have had difficulty writing. Not because I don’t have anything to say but because I have been on some kind of sensory overload for several weeks now and I have had a hard time forming a thought of my own. I have been awash in varied and intense emotions. I have had my fill of beautiful places and interesting visual stimulation. I have had my fill of re-connection and connection with people I have known, and people I have gotten to meet in the last month. I am physically spent. I can feel the physical exhaustion hanging on even though I have taken it easy this week and haven’t tried to do too much. I am sated by the time on vacation with my family and have been enjoying some time alone this week. Being in close quarters with my family was so warm and we have shared a real sense of connection that was sweet and special. Now we are all disconnecting just a bit so we can go on with our individual lives. People want to hear about our trip and I am not ready to talk about it much yet. It is like a new lover, something to savor that is greater than words. If I talk about it, I tie it down, I accidentally commit to giving it a meaning instead of letting my feelings exist on their own in a land without words. I want...

What’s a Bookii Anyway?

May 02, 13

Posted by Melanie in Ask Melanie, Featured, Free

I was hanging out with a crazy Brit named George when I first had the idea of the bookii. I had been working on writing a book and was finding it incredibly 2 dimensional. I wanted multiple topics and more visual than I could accomplish in print. I wanted my reader to be able to explore my book rather than reading it one page after the other. In a conversation with George we were talking about an online technology called Prezi that allows you to explore deeper and is a more flexible presentation platform than Power Point. Somehow talking about that helped me start to visualize a dynamic memoir that had pictures and color and video and wasn’t bound by the boundaries of a printed book. Prezi didn’t end up being the medium, but the concept stuck with me. What makes it a bookii? Well, it is a book that you read electronically It is written by one author and instead of purchasing a book, you purchase an annual subscription to a bookii. My bookii is creative non-fiction–a lifestyle, but I hope there will be lots of bookiis that are both fiction and non-fiction combined. I imagine being able to read my favorite authors and about their characters while simultaneously being able to look up what they were thinking about when they were writing about it or what their inspirations were by exploring their bookii. The Crucible Bookii is my bookii. It is the world’s very first bookii. It is rich with interesting articles about the stories that make up my life. I hope you will become a member and share this journey with me as I create this interactive real-time memoir. Melanie shares how the bookii idea...