You made it! Thanks for visiting.
My first tour stop in 2008 will be the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, where I'll be a part of the fifth-annual CityLit Project. The event is free to both the public and exhibitors, which is not typical for most book-related events. It's pretty annoying to go to some events where either you have to give up a large percentage of your sales or you have to pay an upfront fee.
For Christmas, I received one of those Page-A-Day calendars to keep on your office desk. Normally, when I have one of those, I pull off about two months' worth at the same time because I completely forget about it. And I still do that for the newest one I own, but this one is a little different. This calendar is full of odd and wacky websites, which of course, is great research for my columns. I'll highlight some of my favorites here, and try to give a little bit of info when necessary.
As a huge fan of baseball, I enjoy reliving the past seasons, teams and players that I may have seen, read or heard at some point in time. Rob Neyer cleverly combines the best and worst of every Major League Baseball team in his "Big Book of Baseball Lineups".
It helps tremendously to have the chance to work with an actual editor with any writing project ... especially a full-length novel. Patrick Coyle provided a lot of great feedback with "Polos to Ties," which is probably one of the main reasons I've received decent feedback so far from literary agencies. I'm still looking for a reasonable deal, though, as finding the right agent isn't always the easiest thing to do.
In the near future, I plan to post the first five chapters of the book, but I'm also waiting a response from a second editor as well.
You'll notice that I haven't been writing much, for a few good reasons. At work, we've been pretty busy, and we just moved into a different office. In my spare time, I've been devoting most of my time sending out book queries and proposals and also working on my girlfriend's school's website.
But let's face it: The important thing happening right now is men's college basketball. Who will win their conference tournaments? Which teams will make it to the Big Dance? What team will win it all?
There are two important links you need at this stage:
While navigating most websites, you are faced with numerous decisions. Should you click the link? Should you fill out the form? Should you mute the annoying music, which sounds like a cross between a pipe organ, chipmunks and Rod Stewart, being emitted from the site?
If you have a website, I can help you with the music problem: REMOVE IT FROM YOUR SITE! Better yet, I can help with you finding out what your visitors are clicking on your pages. Actually, I should say that CrazyEgg can help you.
I finally returned to the Purdue campus during the weekend, and it didn't take me long to realize how much I missed it. Even though it has been five years, and a plethora of new buildings have gone up all across Lafayette and West Lafayette, there were still plenty of things to reminisce about.
While I admit to being a little hesitant at reading such a grandiose PDF as presented from The technological society by Jacques Ellul, I found a bounty of words and phrases (some that I agreed with, some that I didn't) of which I made note. I'll try to make comments about as many as possible, although an entire Internet might not be enough room to give my thoughts about this text.
OK, technically speaking, I am a human being. But my friend, co-worker and "Corporate Ties" cover designer, Sean O'Connor, has constructed a robot in my likeness.