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I will be at Borders locations in Columbus, Cincinnati and Crestview Hills, Ky., this weekend to discuss and sign "The Developers." Here are the specifics:
2 p.m. August 12
Borders, 4545 Kenny Road, Columbus, Ohio
7 p.m. August 12
Borders, Princeton Plaza Shopping Center, Cincinnati
2 p.m. August 13
Borders, 2785 Dixie Highway, Crestview Hills, Ky.
My brother, Chris, recently recounted a tulmultuous occurrence in our lives. Here's the text of that fateful day.
While there are many things to consider when writing, one of the most important items has to be the audience. If I write the greatest story in the history of literature, and it's a war story, there's a good chance that people who aren't interested in war won't like it.
"The Developers" isn't about war, and it's not the greatest story in the history of literature. Maybe the top 10, but not the greatest. Ha! Even when you anticipate that you know your audience, there's still something that just doesn't fit.
Authors who are either self-published or with small publishers have an extremely difficult time getting the word out about their novels. Most large publishing houses have money devoted to advertising, and well-known authors usually have their own publicists to handle marketing.
You receive a lot of spam, right? Apparently, so does everyone else.
In a recent report compiled by SoftScan, close to 90 percent of emails sent in July were spam. It should be noted that SoftScan is a company that offers anti-spam software, and that it also acknowledges that fewer actual emails were sent in July because of the holiday, according to vnunet.com.
We're down to the home stretch in the 2008 American presidential nomination. As usual, the television ads are full of interesting tidbits, many not even true, about the candidates. It hasn't always been this way. In fact, in the recent past, nominees actually created ads for reasons other than seducing the United States into a trance to vote for them.
Haha, just kidding. I mean, would this great country all a politician to just speak the truth and lay out the facts?
I was really surprised how good the ratings were for the first week of the XFL.
Those of you who have mastered the art of building a Web site have probably encountered the most important tool known to designers: the protractor.
Coming in second would have to be tables, the backbone to many pages you have visited in your lifetime, or at least within the last three weeks. Tables are the most primitive of the HTML tags because people like to have things in nice readable fashion, excluding tabloid magazines. Most people prefer tabloids that look similar to newspapers more than 40 years ago, which contained at least 343 headlines on each page.
Editor's Note: This was Ben's final column while writing for the Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal Review.
This will be the last column I write for the Journal Review. I may start them again sometime in the future. I would like to. But for now, this will have to do.
If any of you have column ideas, please still tell them to me and send them. I will keep a list, and somewhere down the road, maybe they will let me do this again.
In the latest IM tellin', Sean and I debate the rules that really should govern ninjas, among other things.
Sean: vampires, by nature, are essentially smooth criminals
Sean: if you think about it
Ben: that is a good point ... almost like ninjas
Sean: ninjas are not smooth criminals
Sean: because you cannot by any means measure a ninja to be smooth or not
Sean: because....who is going to see them?