Charity Sunday: More free reading to keep you sane #freebooks #ProjectGutenberg #CharitySunday

As the COVID-19 epidemic continues to spread, people around the world are adjusting to new constraints on their movements. Many of us are more or less stuck in our homes, with little to do but worry about the future.

Worry is not healthy. Stress undermines your immune system. Instead of worrying, why not curl up with a good book?

Books can be expensive, though. And these days, many of us are facing serious financial concerns.

So, do you know about Project Gutenberg?

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort that digitizes and distributes free ebooks, in English and other languages. You can read about its history here. Founded by author Michael S. Hart in 1971, it is the world’s oldest digital library. The goal of the project is to make public domain works, especially literary classics, available to as wide an audience as possible. Currently the project offers more than 60,000 titles. You can search by author or title, go see the recently added books, or use the categorized listing.

Browsing the catalog can be great fun. You never know what gems you will discover. It’s also a great source for classic books you somehow never read. Recently, for instance, I saw a review on Goodreads for Anne Brontë’s classic The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were among my favorite titles during my youth, but I’d never sampled anything by the third Brontë sister. I have now remedied that omission! (Review coming soon...)

If you’re not in the mood for a classic, you can also find contemporary titles, donated by the authors. I just finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a rather prescient science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow.

You can download books in many formats - not only PDF, EPUB and Kindle formats but in many cases, plain HTML and text versions as well. So you don’t need an ereader to take advantage of its riches.

In short, if you’ve got reading time on your hands these days, but you’re short on cash, you might want to explore their excellent website.

Project Gutenberg is staffed by volunteers, but needs funds for computing resources, professional services and so on. So today I’m running a Charity Sunday for the project. If you love reading, leave me a comment. I’ll donate $2 to the project for each comment I receive.

Meanwhile, I have an excerpt for you from another “bookish” title of mine. This is a bit from Damned If You Do. The main character is an author of erotic romance who’s struggling to make a living through her writing. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

Excerpt

Her four dollar cup of Americano, now cold, tasted like muddy pond water. With a bitter sigh, Wendy Dennison, aka romance stalwart Gwen Diamante, iconized her browser and popped up her work in progress. The word count in the bottom status bar accused her of sloth and incompetence. She should know better than to check her sales stats and reviews before she’d produced at least a couple thousand words. Nothing sapped her motivation for writing a new book as much as surveying the tepid response to her last one.

Maybe another coffee would help. Extravagant, yes, but she needed a kick in the butt to get her out of her slump. She signaled to the cute college guy behind the counter, pointing to her cup. “Can I get another hit, Eric?”

The gangly kid grinned at her. “Coming right up, Wendy.” A mass communications major at the University of Pittsburgh, he treated her like minor royalty. Clearly he thought it was the ultimate in cool to be serving a real live published author. If he only knew the truth.

Wendy typed a four line sentence and scowled at her laptop screen. She highlighted the second clause and swapped it with the first. After staring at the page for a few minutes, she hit “Undo”. She turned the first clause into a participle instead, then tried replacing a pronoun with the character’s name. That didn’t really help either.

Eric removed the stale cup to her left and set down a steaming, fragrant mug in its place. “Two sugars, right?”

Still wrestling with her recalcitrant prose, Wendy gave him a cursory nod. Then she realized how impolite that must seem. “You’re a darling. Thanks so much!” The barista pushed his shaggy brown hair off his forehead and beamed at her. Wendy’s black mood brightened a bit.

With pierced earlobes, Black Sabbath tee shirts, and artfully threadbare denims, Eric had a sort of punk sex appeal. Wendy let herself imagine how he’d look naked—all wiry limbs and pale skin, with a bushy nest around his cock, which would be long and slender, like his tall, lanky, not-quite-mature body. Hard, of course. Young guys always were.

He’d be willing to wait though, to give her pleasure before taking his own. She saw him kneeling between her spread thighs, wearing a worshipful expression. He leaned in to flick at her clit before running his tongue firmly along the cleft between her swollen lower lips. Oh my God! Did he have a stud embedded in his tongue?

“Can I get you anything else?”

Eric’s voice hauled her back to reality.

“Oh—um— ” Blood heated her cheeks, especially when she realized how damp her panties had become. What was she thinking? He was young enough to be her son!

“We’ve got a special on cream cheese brownies. Two for one.” He lowered his voice to a seductive purr, apparently aware he was tempting her.

Wendy recalled both her financial constraints and her depressingly accurate digital bathroom scale. “I really shouldn’t,” she replied, determined to do the right thing.

“C’mon. You need the energy to fuel your creativity! Eat one now, and take one home for later.”

“Well…” Saliva pooled in her mouth as her resolve wavered. She could always skip dinner. “I did have a salad for lunch…”

“Two sinfully rich double fudge cream cheese brownies, coming up.” Her youthful admirer gave her another grin. “Don’t worry. They’re small.”

She turned back to the computer, scrolling back to read the previous few paragraphs. The tension between her heroine and her hero sizzled, but somehow she couldn’t get them out of flirting mode and into bed together. They resisted her every attempt to move them in the directions prescribed by her outline.

Maybe she should switch genres. Try some sweet romance for a change. Or a cozy mystery. Those seem to be selling pretty well these days.

She knew from experience, though, that she’d never succeed in keeping the sex out of her books. Her imagination naturally flowed in carnal directions.

Please don’t forget to leave a comment! Every one is a contribution to the world’s biggest library of free digital books.

And if you want some of my books free, check out my post from yesterday. I’ll be announcing more free Lisabet Sarai titles later this week.