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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:
Blogging has become fairly gigantic in the United States, ranking somewhere in between "Saved by the Bell" (now just a cult following) and "Friends" (a much, much larger cult following) in popularity. With the tools available, virtually anyone can start up a blog and post whatever he or she has to say.
Surely by now, you've started to realize that many of those ads you see on the Internet for free stuff might just be bogus.
Of course, there might be some truth to the "free" part, but that could involve talking to a sales rep for 53 hours, wrestling an alligator or taking part in a survey about going to the bathroom in foreign countries.
Close your eyes and think of two of your favorite smells.
NO WAIT! Close your eyes for three seconds and think of two of your favorite smells (I just thought "What if you never open your eyes ... you won't be able to read the rest of this."). For our hypothetical situation, I've decided to use my favorites: the smell of newly popped popcorn and regular scented Pine-Sol.
Out of all the mysterious things on your computer and/or the Internet, cookies seem to be near the top of the list. From SearchCIO.com, a cookie is defined as a file on a Web user's hard drive (it's kept in one of the subdirectories under the browser file directory) that is used by Web sites to record data about the user.
While it's doubtful Richard Simmons has already finished reading my book, "The Developers," it is worth noting that he already has good things to say about it.
Simmons, who is constantly referenced in the book as a lookalike of one of the characters, Rex Burns, recently responded to the book copy I sent him at his Burbank location.
"Thank you for your kind words and sense of humor," Simmons wrote on an autographed photo. "You are a gifted man!"