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It's official: The Developers has an official distributor. Biblio Distribution, out of Lanham, Md., will handle all distribution of The Developers, effective immediately. OK, it's sort of effective immediately because right now, Biblio doesn't have any books. But I've just ordered a third printing, and the company should have the books at the beginning of March.
For the fourth straight weekend, I'll be making a book appearance, this time at home in Louisville, Ky. I'll be at Carmichael's (2720 Frankfort Avenue) 4-6 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12. Make sure you don't go to the Bardstown Road one because I won't be there!
Please stop in and say hi to me or my local publicist, Elizabeth Woods, if you get a chance. Elizabeth is my grandma, one of the main proofreaders for 'The Developers' and an avid bingo player.
There have been rumors for many years, that eventually, it will cost a user to send an email. And since spam has become a ridiculously annoying part of everyday work, the chatter for paid communication has picked up again.
But I still didn't believe something like this would happen anytime soon, until I saw that America Online and Yahoo are beginning to implement a system that will give preferential treatment to companies who pay for sending bulk emails.
If you're close to my age (under 80, but older than 5), you may remember one of the earlier educational games, Oregon Trail. This game possibly accurately depicted random people following Lewis and Clark in their quest for new land, gold and Texas tea. Or, wait, Texas wasn't around yet. Was there tea?
Anyway, the game taught multiple skills, none of which helped you make tea. But they did help kids make critical decisions on how best to outfit a caravan across an unknown wilderness, with food, clothing, weapons, etc.
Because I receive a decent number of questions about a multitude of things, ranging from writing and publishing to computers and programming, I wanted to make myself a little more available to those of you who can't get in touch with me.
Starting today, I will be available on both AOL's Instant Messenger and Google Talk around the clock. So if you have a question or comment, just send it along, and I'll get back to you. It might not be immediate, but I'll try to within a day or so.
AOL screenname: WoodsBenA
GoogleTalk screenname: bwoods43
I'll be heading back to familiar territory this weekend as I host a book talk in Crawfordsville, Ind., at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Crawfordsville Public Library. A little later in the day (3 p.m. CST), I'll be at the Champaign, Ill., Borders.
I lived in Crawfordsville in 1998-99, working at the Journal Review during my time there. I will be discussing writing and publishing at the library, as well as explaining the process of putting together my novel, The Developers.
Recently I was in one of those click-and-conquer moods. You know, where you find something decent to read on a news website, then you see another link, which takes you to something else that looks pretty interesting.
I hope at least a few of the 17 people who read this column are interested in building their own Web site, or already have, or would want to if all the letters on their keyboard weren't missing.
The trouble with starting from scratch on the Internet is it's tough to find your newly created URL in the search engine. The good news is there are ways to make it easier. The bad news is you will need more than just the return and shift keys to accomplish this.
They say that every person is different, and individuality is what makes everyone so special. Unfortunately, that's not usually true with our actual names, regardless of how unique and special your name might seem.
It's amazing that we live in a time period when at any given moment, we could
find out that everything we previously knew about the universe was incorrect.
But so far, it's safe to say that Mars does exist, the sun is at the center
of our solar system and "Space Camp" really wasn't a very good movie.
If you haven't been following the news lately, or maybe you've been busy with
other things, like selling your belt buckles on eBay, let me go over some
of the recent astronomy highlights: