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Before moving to Baltimore, I had had little experience riding most types of mass transportation. Back at home in Louisville, I occasionally took the bus places, but most of my other experiences were infrequent. I can count on one hand the number of cities (Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco) where I had ridden some form of public transit.
During the weekend, I had a chance to finally attend the Baltimore Writers' Conference. There had been times in the past when I was thinking about going to one, but I could never fit it into my schedule. Luckily, I think I picked a pretty decent one to attend. First, it happened to be at Towson University, where I attend grad school. Second, there was a pretty good crowd of people there, all of whom seemed like qualified members of the writing profession.
The day after the election, I had a chance to check out all of the front pages from around the world. It was remarkable how many international newspapers had Obama as the top story, and as expected, a number of U.S. papers devoted their entire front pages to election coverage. I created an Obama collage of the papers as a tribute to our next president. Feel free to use as a screensaver or desktop image!
You may have noticed that I recently changed the name of my new book to "Corporate Ties." I haven't had a chance to change all of my marketing material yet because, well, there's only so much time in the day, right? After thinking about it and discussing with others, "Polos to Ties" worked great for the local audience, but from a book sales standpoint, a random person might not notice the fashion connection.
According to the Detroit Free Press, there are giant sunflowers scattered all over the Ford Motor Company grounds. A panoramic view of the sunflowers is available on the Free Press website. This is the coolest thing I've seen in awhile!
While I've heard possible book groups picking up "The Developers," I just recently found out that one is taking the next step and actually reading it. The Crawfordsville (Ind.) Public Library is in the process of reading the novel, and the book discussion is set for 6:30 p.m. Dec. 4. I will join the group via audio chat to discuss the book and anything other questions I can answer, at least I hope so!
For someone who depends on the Internet for many things (assuming my mom will stop calling and just instant message me), it is definitely easy to get freaked out when my connection goes down. I usually run a few tests and check a couple of different websites, just in case it's only one server out there (perhaps my email) instead of a complete outage.
I will be participating in the 2007 BookExpo America, which will be held May 31-June 3 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. This will be my first book expo, which is billed as "the premier event serving the U.S. book publishing industry."
Nine-year-olds care about winning baseball games. Just ask Peter Smith, Maurice Robinson and Billy Rogers.
Peter has been to many Washington Nationals games this year, and he just recently started keeping track of the team's boxscores. Maurice listens to Baltimore Orioles games and his great-grandfather, who tells tales of John McGraw, Babe Ruth and Frank Robinson. Billy never seems to come inside until after dark, usually because he is in front of his house, playing baseball with the neighborhood friends.
It would be prudent for anyone to believe that dormant racism was ever a solution for the United States. Not that this ever fully occurred, but upon seeing the aftermath in Charlottesville, it’s also fair to concede that white supremacists who once hid in the shadows now have no restraint in showing their true beliefs.