Bumper Stickers by Bishop, Part Two

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

By Catherine Hedge

For five days, I moped around the house, stalling.  I was stuck on my next scene for my Southern novel, Momma Liddy and Me.  I sorted my stationery collection. It goes back 15 years or more as I’m a notoriously bad pen pal.  I crocheted a scrubbing pad from produce bag netting.  (First time.  It works great and goes in the dishwasher!) I spent hours playing Chutes and Ladders with my grandson.  Still….Nothing.  If I ever needed Leonard Bishop to bully me into writing, this week was it.

I knew I was violating his most basic rule.  “If you want to be a writer, you have to write!”

Marie Loughin said it best in our critique group last week.  Marie had been stalling, too, worried she didn’t have enough of her new story thought out.  “But when I started writing, and the ideas just came, I remembered, ‘Oh! This is how it works!’” She’s right. Her first scene was tremendous!

Mr. Bishop used to tell us we would never run out of material, “The writer is an ever flowing spring of story ideas.”  But he also said the Good Writing Fairy wasn’t going to come down and smack us on the head with her wand.  It still took us sitting down and pushing that pen across the page.

So, in desperation, I went back to my greatest hits list, Bishop’s Best: Seventy-seven Top Writing Hints, quotes I had assembled over the years from writing class.  As I read through them, I could hear his voice resonating, see his finger jabbing the air, and remember the writing passion he evoked in all of us.

  1. Take Chances!  If it’s interesting and clear, people will read it! (12/19/96)
  2. A good story is like a motorcycle.  All the parts move together and move forward. (7-8-99)
  3. Go overboard! You can always swim back!  (i.e. Go ahead and be melodramatic.  You’d get out what you wanted to say and could always edit the excess later.) (9/9/99)
  4.  In a short story, you drop a pebble in water and follow the rings across.  In a novel, you drop the pebble and follow the rings at the same time you follow the pebble down.  (repercussions) 8/12/99
  5. Documentation: Don’t stick it in like a postage stamp.  Figure out how to do it interestingly.  (6/23/94)
  6. Don’t confine yourself in writing.  Take the girdle off and put it down during editing. (1/30/97)
  7. Patient writers don’t settle for what they wanted when they began.  Instead, they discover more than they anticipated they had…and write on that.  (11/12/98)
  8. Effects cover a multitude of defects.  (12/10/93)
  9. Every writer has a realm of strengths.  Some have a pie.  Some only a few slices.  (2/6/97)
  10. Remember when you wrote something excellent.  When you do it once, you can do it again (6/5/98)
  11. If you have the skills to write and a sense of the dramatic, you will get published! (1/6/94)

Thank you, Mr. Bishop.   I especially like that last one!  So, here I go…desk clear, fingers flexed, deep breath… I can…I will…I must.  This Day, We Write! *

*Thank you, Robert Dugoni, at Surrey International Writer’s Conference

(Good luck to those of you who wrote to us about starting your first novel.  It’s a grand adventure!)

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I’m Sure There’s A Book in Me, Somewhere!

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

I’m Sure There’s A Book in Me, Somewhere!.

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I’m Sure There’s A Book in Me, Somewhere!

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

By Catherine Hedge

Leonard Bishop told us that he loved to step into an elevator and ask whoever else rode with him, “So, how’s the book coming?”  He’d get answers like, “Well, I haven’t gotten back to it lately.” Or, “Not bad.  I’m just doing some more research first.”  No one ever said, “What?? I’m not writing a book and I NEVER intend to!”

And isn’t that just how it should be?  Every one of us has a unique life, the only one that will EVER be.  Why shouldn’t we write down those moments of our mayfly existence?  Humans are storytellers and always have been, even before they painted their hunting expeditions on cave walls.  We’ve passed on our history, knowledge, and imagination in many ways.  We’ve danced, sketched, told and remembered through song and poem, by scratches on a bone, even wedges impressed in clay.  Every time, that story was breathed to life by an individual believing he or she had something important to say.

We still do.  All of us.  Unfortunately, our modern culture has convinced us that some people’s stories are more important than others.  It’s only worthwhile if someone pays you to do it. (Do we judge singing that way?) Also, if you’re not an expert, you shouldn’t even try in case you do it WRONG!

What a frightening word.

I taught English for 32 years.  I had colleagues who would tell me, “I can’t have my students write yet.  Not until they can spell correctly and create a perfect sentence.” (I still can’t do that!) Their students spent years in grammar books, copying sentences and underlining predicates.  Fortunately, the education community, including those same teachers, has seen the power of letting students write and express themselves.   The belief that children, too, have ideas worth sharing elevates their work from drudgery to dreams.

Last week, I faced a group of twenty 2nd through 5th graders, aged 7 through11.  These children voluntarily gave up their lunch recess so they could talk about writing.  Their teacher was putting together an anthology of their works to be bound and placed on the library shelves. I asked the students to stand if they had ever written a piece they wanted to share with the whole world.  Some jumped out of their chairs, some deliberated and stood slowly, but every one of them answered, “Yes!”

They gleefully chanted along with me, “When I write, I have the Ultimate Power!  Because, there is no one all history who can write my story, except for me.  And If I don’t do it, it will never exist! “

I lovingly envied their confidence and joy!

I can tell you all the reasons I stopped writing for 15 years…a writing teacher who told me I had no talent, the wall between the start and finish that seemed insurmountable, the fear that it was conceit to think I could ever “Be as good as Steinbeck.” I truly believed that a GOOD writer would start on the first page of a book and write straight through “The End” on the last page.

One of the best moments of my life was when I met the gregarious, masterful Leonard Bishop, who shattered my image of a “real writer.”  He’d tell us, “Rules?  There are no rules! Just keep it interesting and dramatic!” or, “Why do you think you have to write like Steinbeck? He already did it.  Now find what you have to say.”

Leonard advised us to read good books and steal…not the idea, but the strategy the author used to hold us to the page.   A book wasn’t written in neat, orderly piles of manuscript, but by taking detours and risks.  Writing is messy.  Writing is hard.  But we could do it, if we really wanted to.  So could anyone. “Every book that has ever been written was written line by line, using certain techniques.  We can learn those techniques to become better writers ourselves.”

So, whether you’re writing journals for your cedar chest, poems for your sweetheart, a cooking blog, or your own how-to guide on model trains, go for it!  There really is nothing to stop you…except you.

Thank you, Mr. B, for goading us on…“Remember, the World doesn’t care whether or not you finish.  It’s just another book.  No, the World won’t know the difference.  But you will.”

Posted in Leonard Bishop, Publishing, Teaching, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

To subscribe or not to subscribe–good question. Here’s what to do.

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Marie Loughin

I follow forty-nine blogs. Forty-nine! I was mind-boggled when I counted them up. I read blogs about writing and the publishing industry. I read blogs by authors I love and friends in the writing community. For fun, I follow The Bloggess*. (Every slightly insane person should read The Bloggess.) And, to show you just how geeky I am, I follow Wil Wheaton*.

Yes, Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Hey, in some circles, he’s hotter than Neil Gaiman! Speaking of whom, I follow Neil Himself, too.

Imagine if I got e-mail notifications for all those blogs. I’d go truly insane. Fortunately, I found a way to follow loads of blogs without too much annoyance. I use an RSS feedreader.

I recently discovered that some of my best blogging buddies had no idea what a feed reader is. Some of them follow more blogs than I do. Fearing for their sanity, I wrote up some quick instructions to help them out. Then I got to thinking: If these smart, with-it people don’t know about feedreaders, then surely a lot of other folks don’t know about them either. This post is for those people, the ones who are plagued by e-mail notifications (or avoid subscribing altogether so they won’t be nagged by e-mail).

(Those of you who already use a feedreader can quit reading now. Or you can read on and add useful tips in the comments section.)

Some of you might be asking, “What the heck are you talking about?”  Or, more specifically, “What is a feedreader?”  I’ll start with a simple definition of “RSS” from Wikipedia. 

RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

(You may come across other types of feeds, such as ATOM, but I don’t know anything about them.)

An RSS feedreader gathers “frequently updated works” of your choosing into one place. This includes news feeds and blogs. The feedreader allows me the ability to choose when I want to read without having to deal with e-mails. Every morning at breakfast, when other people might be opening up a newspaper, I open my feedreader and check out the more interesting sounding posts while I munch on my shredded wheat. When other folks are done reading, they fold their newspaper and toss it in the recycling heap. I close up my reader and put it out of my mind.

There are several feedreaders to choose from. I use Google Reader, so that’s what I’ll describe here. I assume other feed readers work in a similar fashion.

  1. You need a Google account. (I believe Yahoo also has a reader, but I can’t help you with that.)
  2. Go to your Google home page. (Whether you know it or not, you have a Google home page if you use Gmail.) Find the toolbar across the top of the Google home page that includes links to Google plus (e.g. “+Marie”), Gmail, YouTube, Play, Maps, etc. The rightmost link is a dropdown menu “More.”
  3. Click on “More” and then choose “Reader” from the dropdown menu. You will be taken to your Google reader page. (Yes, you have one, even if you didn’t ask for it.) You can now subscribe to the RSS feeds of the blogs and newsfeeds you follow and they will be added to the reader.
  4. To subscribe to a blog via RSS feed, go to the desired blog site and look for a little orange square with white curves in it, like the one to the right.  (There are variations on this icon and sometimes it’s not orange.) Click on this icon.
    1. You will likely be given options for which feedreader you want to add the blog to. Choose Google (if that’s what you’re using).
    2. You might then have a choice between adding the blog to your Google home page or adding it to your reader. Unless it’s your very favorite, can’t-miss blog, you should add it to your reader.
    3. You will be re-directed to your reader. (If you are asked to log in, use your Gmail password.) Excerpts from the most recent posts for the site you’re adding will be listed. Above those excerpts, you’ll need to click on a subscribe button. You are now subscribed to the blog. (You can also subscribe to a blog directly within Google Reader by clicking on “subscribe” at the top left of Google Reader and pasting the site’s url into the blank. Whatever’s easier for you.)
    4. Repeat with each blog you wish to follow.
    5. Check your feedreader regularly, because you will not get e-mail notifications when something new is posted.

Useful Tips

  • At the top of the reader are some dropdown menus. “Mark all as read” can be used to mark all posts from a given site or folder as “read” so that they won’t show up anymore. When I subscribe to a new blog, I often mark everything as read for that blog so I will only be bothered with new posts.
  • I like to categorize the blogs I follow into folders. My folders include “writing peeps,” “writing information,” and “entertainment.” To create a folder, go to left side of the reader. If you hover the prompt over “subscriptions,” you can click on the down arrow to get a dropdown menu. At the bottom of the dropdown menu is “manage subscriptions.” Click on that and you will get a listing of all of your subscriptions. To the right of each subscription, there is an icon “change folders.” If you click on this, you can choose an existing folder or create a new folder.
  • Moving back to the top of the reader, the dropdown menu “feed settings” is where you’ll find the “unsubscribe” option. You can also add a blog to a folder from this menu.

Google reader has many options that I have not explored, but the above should get you started.

If you use an ipad or iphone, then I suggest getting the FeeddlerPro app. (Yes, there are two d’s in “FeedlerPro,” and don’t confuse it with Feedly, which strikes me as a useless thing.) I prefer using Feeddler on my iPad to using Google Reader on my laptop. It’s got better features. For example, Feeddler provides a list all the titles for the unread posts for a subscription. You can decide not to read posts based on their titles and toggle them as “read” without having to open the post. You can also read posts out of order, which is awkward with Google Reader. You might be able to find similar apps for other tablets.

Tips for Google Chrome Users

If you use the Google Chrome web browser, check out their extension for subscribing to RSS feeds. The extension will put the little orange Google Reader icon on the right side of your URL/Search window. All you have to do is click on icon to subscribe. This is often easier than searching the person’s site for where they hid the RSS subscribe button. If they have one at all.

To get the extension, go to the top of the Chrome browser and click on “Chrome.” Choose preferences and then enable “RSS subscription extension (by Google).” (Note: too many extensions will slow your browser down, so don’t go nutty and start enabling everything in sight.)

Important note: When you read a post in a reader, you are not actually at the person’s website. You will not be able to see all pictures, video, or nifty formatting. Sometimes this is okay, but sometimes you want to see the full post. Just click on the post’s title and you will be taken to the actual blog site. Or if you click on “comment” at the bottom, it should take you out the actual blog site.

Another important note: The internet gurus are constantly tweaking readers, browsers, and so forth, so my instructions may not work 100% for you. However, they should at least give you an idea of what to look for.

And that’s it. You now have no more excuses for not subscribing to lots of blogs, including Pen in Hand. Or maybe this one.

*Rated PG-13 for occasional naughty language and (re The Bloggess) occasional crudeness.

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Diet Tip: The Crunch Factor

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

Diet Tip: The Crunch Factor.

Posted in Humor, Slice of life, Writing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Diet Tip: The Crunch Factor

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

By Catherine Hedge

My sisters work hard at being fit.  They recently invited me to join them on a 17-day diet.  One sister has already had terrific success.  My first reaction to her description of the diet was to gag.  That’s because a main ingredient for the first few days is yogurt.  Yes, I know it’s healthful, loved by many, and accessible.  But why do I have such an unreasonable aversion? Because it is missing a key element I must have to survive…The Crunch Factor.

I have a bad habit known to few except my former students and my dentist.  I am an incessant chewer.  I don’t know the origins of my affliction.  Perhaps it’s because I spent my first month in the hospital as a premature baby.  My mom barged in the nursery and rescued me when she saw they had propped a bottle in my mouth and left me alone.  I didn’t have a swallowing instinct yet.  She was a nurse at the hospital and no one dared stop this Momma Bear! (Thanks, Mom!)   So, is my habit because I wasn’t breast-fed or that I’d already grown addicted to the rubber nipple chew toy?

When I was five, I remember my parents putting some nasty tasting stuff on my little finger because I always had it stuck in my mouth.  Grade school offered a whole new buffet… rubber erasers, wooden rulers, and #2 pencils. I’d run these back and forth in my mouth like corncobs, leaving little bite marks the length of the tools.  I can close my eyes and remember exactly how that orange-yellow paint tastes.  It probably had lead at the time.  Even worse, my friends and I used to follow the road crews on our block.  We’d steal little chunks of sealing tar and chew them all day.

As I matured, I switched to Bic pens.  They had nice soft sides and dandy little plugs you could pop out with your front teeth.  When I was in the middle of a really difficult term paper, I could go through three or four pens.  I swallowed several end plugs.  Sometimes, a pen leaked in my mouth, but did that stop me?  No, it was just time for a new package.

I have tried to curb my habit.  For a while, I just used fountain pens.  The pens had hard cases, often metal.  Soon, however, I could only find pens with refill tubes…tasty, malleable plastic.  Toothpaste doesn’t get black ink rings out of the corner of your mouth, I discovered.

I am particular rabid when I am stressed.  The harder a paper is to grade or a scene to write, the faster I chew.  If I’m listening to intense music, the pen waves back and forth like a conductor’s baton.  I’ve tried keeping jars of jawbreakers, especially Atomic Fireballs, on my desk.  Bad idea.  After a long night of portfolio grading, I emptied 15 cellophane wrappers and my tongue was raw with cinnamon.  Back to the pens.

There are some advantages.  People don’t steal your stuff so often.  I once had a student ask to borrow a pencil.  I offered him the only one I had.  The paint was chewed half-way down.  The student, a perfect child, gasped and blurted, “What are you? A beaver?”   He apologized, I laughed, and he borrowed a pencil from someone else.

So…What about the diet?  In solidarity, I’ve forced down three cups of yogurt.  A record for me.  Otherwise, I am following a program by the American Diabetes Association.  I choose from different food groups and carefully monitor carbohydrate levels.  I limit meals to 45 carbs and snacks to 15.  I’ve discovered that if I choose certain foods, like apples, baby carrots, and peanut butter celery, I am satisfied.  I have met my Crunch Factor.

For example, I monitored my intake today of CF:

Breakfast: ½ sliced apple

Snack: 16 stick pretzels

Lunch: ½ c baby carrots

Snack :  3 stalks barely steamed asparagus.

Dinner: more carrots, ½ apple

Dessert: 1 pen

Posted in Humor, Nostalgia, Slice of life, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Major (Monster or Manifestation?)

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

Major (Monster or Manifestation?).

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Major (Monster or Manifestation?)

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Catherine Hedge

By Bill Borel

The Borel family had always been very understanding and open minded. We had the normal conflicts and jealousies of all families but nothing truly disruptive. We accepted differences in political, religious, income levels, educational, and most other world views including sexual preferences. Nothing caused a failure to communicate among us … except Major.

The day Mother brought Major into our home, the family split. The older four siblings accepted Major but I think it was only because they no longer lived at home. The last three of us had to put up with the little devil and his arrogant attitude. I don’t think a name ever suited a dog more than Major. What others saw as an attractive and muscularly built short-haired terrier, we last three saw as a sneaky, perverted, war criminal.  And the argument only got more heated after my father passed. The others believed the dog was brought into our home so my father’s spirit could reincarnate in him. We last three thought that was an insult and that the others ignored the reality of what Major was.

It is true the dog and Dad had things in common. They both had military bearings. My dad fought honorably in the First World War and achieved the rank of second lieutenant. Our Major did nothing to earn his rank. My dad honored and protected my mother. He was the ultimate gentleman. The dog was an imposter. Sure, when the others were visiting, Major was attentive to Mom. He was usually by her side. But we knew better. We knew it was all an act; but we could nothing because Major had the ultimate protector, my mother. She loved the dog. She ignored the fact he would wander the neighborhood in our small town terrorizing every creature in his way with his “small dog” complex. She didn’t believe her little saint actually dug under and climbed over fences to sire half the dog population in Arcata. When Major was murdered by a dog and left on the side of the street, he refused to die. Brothers- in- law, Joe and Mark found him there, placed him on a board and brought him home to mother for his last rites. He was dead, but Mother was a saint, in fact I am sure is a saint, and used her spiritual powers to revive him. Lying on the board, not breathing, blood dripping from his nose and mouth, Mom said the magic words, “Oh, Major”; and the tail, bent and broken in two places, wagged and rose to half mast.

The stories and episodes of Major continue to haunt our family reunions even after thirty years. Cathy and my other nephews and nieces stand with us, the last three. They had an opportunity to experience the arrogance of Major as Mom visited or lived with most of my siblings at various times. But the older four supported Major to the end. And so the argument continues.

(Clip Art Source: http://www.lipizzan.com/JackRussellClipArtImages.html Thank you!)

Posted in Dogs, Nostalgia, Slice of life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Puppy Day 2: The Nervous Breakdown

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Marie Loughin

Here is my new puppy. Don’t be fooled by his adorableness. He is a vibrating, finger-biting, cat-harassing, carpet-pooping little monster. That charming curlicue tail is fuzz-covered worm set on a barbed hook. Those soulful little eyes issue commands like a drill sergeant from hell. “Toy!” they say. “Toy now! Throw!”

So I hoist my carcass off the couch, pick up the puppy-slobbered stuffy and toss it across the room.

I get a 0.03 second reprieve and he is back, wriggling at my feet, giving the stuffy a severe case of whiplash. One eye rolls back at me. “Tug. Tug now. I dare you.”

“Drop,” I say, firmly. Experts say tug encourages finger biting.

I am ignored. A game ensues. It is called Dare to grab the toy in the split second after I drop it, before I clomp down on it (or your finger) again.

I often win. Sometimes. I sometimes win.

Play continues until dog collapses in exhaustion. Isn’t he cute.

I rush to the computer to get 15 solid minutes of work done.

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

To add variety, we go outside for a walk. Pee happens there. Not poo, though. Poo is saved for carpets.

Here he comes now—the evil puppy. Yeah, perk those ears a bit higher. You’re not fooling anyone. Those soulful brown eyes are a façade, hiding the soulless monster within. That sweet little whine is merely an echo of the bwahahaha in your cold, cold heart. Forget it, you’re not getting in my lap.

Uh uh.

Oh, no you don’t.

Not in this lifetime—or any other.

<*sigh*>

Oh, all right. Come up here. Dork.

The puppy passes out. This time, I pass out, too.

This story was originally posted back in April on marieloughin.com. As long as folks here at Pen in Hand were sharing their dog stories, I thought I’d share one of my own.

Posted in Dogs, Slice of life | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

My Adventures in E-publishing: Round Two

Posted on May 6, 2012 by donnagillespie

By Donna Gillespie

And so at last the freshly scanned copy of my first novel was buffed and polished and — or so I thought — all ready to be electroni-cized. (That story’s here: My Adventures in E-publishing, Round One; http://www.peninhand.org). It was time to find the right conversion guy.

I knew I would need separate files for Kindle and Nook, but other than that I knew very little. Google flushed out a bewildering profusion of conversion services. Many weren’t based in the US. And it seemed they charged a lot — $800 was the norm for a book-length manuscript, and as my novel was on the hefty side, doubtless it would have cost more. Some services offered to help me with the prose. Not encouraging, since based on their promotional emails none of them seemed to speak English very well. And did they not realize this book was completely baked, and I never, ever wanted to look at the prose again?

And so I googled and googled and googled some more, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally I turned up one — just one — person who seemed to “get it.” (Does this speak to my impoverished googling abilities, or is there really only one out there?) He seemed intimately acquainted with the mysteries of Kindle, Nook and IPad, and his rates were surprisingly reasonable. He also knew how to get a book into the IPad bookstore, not so straightforward as getting into its equivalent on Kindle and Nook. When he advised me that the opening line of each chapter shouldn’t be in bold type, as I’d had it, but should be in small caps, I was smitten. Publishers do this. This guy…knew things. And when I brought up the problem of getting a new ISBN — the electronic version needs its own — he told me he gets a discount on them because he buys them by the dozen.

This was almost eerie.

I’d already discovered I had a great graphic artist right in my neighborhood. We agreed the cover design should be adapted to the smaller size of the image displayed in electronic bookstores — something more stark and iconographic than I’d had before, probably closer to a logo than a traditional cover. And so all magically came together this March. My baby burst from its chrysalis and entered the virtual world.

Its Amazon page looked just right…shiny new cover…freshly written bookstore text. Most exciting of all, where it used to say “Click here if you’d like to read this book on Kindle,” now, miraculously, were those words I’d once despaired of ever seeing: “Click here to start reading The Light Bearer on your Kindle in under a minute.” I stared and stared, stunned that the whole system had worked.

Drum rolls and silence.

Now I had a whole new activity to distract me from writing — checking to see if I’d sold a copy.

Eventually, sales happened, and at first it was a pulse-pounding thrill to find that a number “one” on the monthly sales page had magically morphed into a “two.” It’s refreshing, after the murkiness of royalty statements, to have such an instant, accurate account of sales. Publishers’ royalty statements come every six months and give you pages of figures running the gamut from head scratching to downright confusing — all muddied further by the publisher’s habit of withholding reserves for returns. This was instant sales gratification for writers.

Then one day while checking the book on my Kindle, my world crashed down. I started finding errors I’d never seen before. The file I’d received from the printer who’d scanned the book used a sans-serif typeface for the quotation marks. In short, as I was editing, I hadn’t been able to see which way the little critters were curling…and when the conversion guy restored them to their former curly state, some of them weren’t curling the right way. Yikes. The book was out there, selling, with misbehaving quotes. I expected howls of protest from outraged readers. There were, perhaps, twenty or thirty of the offending critters in this 800 page book, and at least one writing friend wasn’t impressed with my angst — she said she’d downloaded books for her Nook that had whole pages missing. What was the problem? I should move on, and get back to writing the next book. But I’d been so proud of all the original-book typos I’d hunted down and fixed — and now this. In my imagination those backward curly quotes loomed large, throbbing, pulsing with Edgar Allan Poe intensity — lurid, squiggly, alive. I had to do something.

So back to the conversion guy the book went. And it turned out that, with his sophisticated programs, he was able to fix all the unruly quotes with a single keystroke. Apocalypse averted.

And though this whole process was a long, long detour from my “real job” — finishing book number three — I feel it was well worth it. I’d fixed some things in book # 1 that I’d wanted to fix for 17 years, and may have pulled the book back from the out-of-print abyss — after all, I figure, e-books aren’t really in print to begin with, so how can they go out of print? It’s a good feeling to know that, unless aliens land and steal all the electricity in the world, my baby is safe.

Posted in e-publishing, Publishing, Writing | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments