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Category: Website Updates

Technical stuff about Quacking Alone, the website (usually posted by my husband).

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I told you it was coming soon, didn't I? Mary Anne has been extra diligent and the uploading fairies have been on her side, and now Dangerous Relations: The Office Ink is available on the Kindle and the Nook!

The link to get to the book in our book list page is in the sidebar and... hey whaddayaknow, it's right here too!

Those buttons will multiply once we start uploading the book to other online distributors, and hopefully we'll get it to you in paperback as well. In the meantime, if you have a Kindle or Nook, enjoy!

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Published on 7 Comments on Male Feminists – The Ultimate in Hypocrisy

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but it's me, the Dear Hubby, instead of the Quacked-Out Duck Lady.

She's experiencing some of the fun I used to enjoy, mainly formatting e-books to satisfy the jackals at the various digital distributors. Given that, the full-time job, the bills, the laundry, and writing her wacky romance novels, she didn't have the time or energy to deal with the blog this week, so I'm doing it. This is taking crucial time away from my more important tasks, mainly ARRRRRR WHAR BE THE WENCHES AND THE GROG ARRRRRRR!

First, some news on our website(s). I've taken the time to change the e-book covers to reflect Mary Anne's title changes on her contemporary romances. Her contemporaries weren't moving off the digital shelves as quickly as the historical/fantasy romances, so we discussed possibly bundling them at some future date. Of course, there has got to be some unifying theme to help tie the bundle together, so when we looked at the nitty-gritty essence of the two current contemporaries and the one she's currently working on, we found a hook - Dangerous Relations, where relationships and the law intersect and many times conflict.

So now we have Dangerous Relations: Seducing the Billionaire and Dangerous Relations: Griffin's Law, with Mary Anne currently pounding away on the third one. No, I'm not telling you what the work-in-progress is tentatively titled, leave me alone you freaks.

I also fixed our Nook links on the Complete List of Books page, which were all broken due to Barnes and Noble introducing their Pub-It service, a direct competitor to Amazon's Kindle Publishing. It's aggravating to deal with, but I understand the necessity of the computer programming changes.

Now onto the meat of the blog post. The other day I encountered, on a fairly well-trafficked comedy website, a piece written by a male feminist.

I struggle to understand the very concept of a male feminist, or any other (what I see as) self-hating political activist.

...continue reading "Male Feminists – The Ultimate in Hypocrisy"

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The Fat Man here. Let me tell you something that's pretty awesome.

That's taking an idea, typing some things on your computer keyboard, moving and clicking your mouse around, turning that idea into a bunch of electrons and photons, then sending those electrons and photons to a place where those infinitesimal little particles (that originated from an even more immeasurable set of things) are transformed into a solid, tangible, molecular thing.

My fat hand holding ideas which have taken on a material form.

Behold such a thing. Mary Anne's latest work, The Duke of Eden, is now available in paperback. She and I (mostly she) finished up work on it a month or so ago. Her ideas became words, then became text, then became electronic signals and magnetic spots on a hard disk.

I listened to her ideas, found some collections of photons recorded by other nice people, took some ideas of my own and manipulated the photons into a form I found to be pleasing. I created magnetic spots on my hard disk from the photons, then sent an electron stream that was a copy of Mary Anne's magnetic spots and my magnetic spots over to CreateSpace. There, they decoded the electron stream, put ink and other chemicals on various thicknesses of paper as indicated by the stream, then cut the papers, glued them together, and sent us back their product, which was really our product in a solid, material form.

My fat hand holding incarnated thoughts, rear view.

That's pretty damned awesome in my opinion. I would say dare say it was verging on magic. All things considered, the 21st Century hasn't delivered everything that was promised to us a few decades ago, but I'm still impressed with what it has delivered. I guess I can wait on the flying cars and jet packs a little bit longer.

Now that the paperback is out and the e-book is available via a few other distribution channels, pick up our ideas incarnated today, mmkay? You'll be glad you did.

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Hey there sweeties, it's the big old fat guy! Guess what? Mary Anne's FINAL INSTALLMENT of the serialized e-book The Duke of Eden is FINALLY AVAILABLE TO YOU, OUR FAITHFUL READERS!

NO MORE WAITING! CLICK HERE TO BUY IT NOW! WOOT!

Of course, I've changed the Complete List of Books page to reflect the newest addition to her growing library of offerings, so if you're a new customer you can cruise through that page to see if you want anything else to load up on your e-reader, including our first book bundle and the other 2 parts of Duke.

For all of you return customers, thank you so very much for your support. Mary Anne has been very appreciative of your continued patience and your enjoyment of her work. She's got a couple of other things she wants to do with The Duke of Eden novel itself, and then she wants to move on to some other exciting writing and bundling for you, the readers.

So stay tuned, and stay ducky!

AOFM out.

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Hello my chitterlings, it's the Mad Fat Guy, updating the blog while the Crazy Duck Lady keeps chugging on the last installment of The Duke of Eden, among other duties.

I just wanted to draw your attention once again to the fact that Mary Anne's faerie romances are now available as an e-book bundle. When you purchase these 3 books in her Forever series, you're getting one of them for FREE!

The bundle is now available for your Kindle, and we've recently uploaded it to Smashwords where it soon will be ready for download. I've added the bundle to our sidebar on the right and, of course, to the book list page. As other sales venues open up to our bundle, I will be updating that page so keep watching.

And for those of you who've already purchased one or more of Mary Anne's books, THANK YOU! We hope to see more of you in the near future.

Fat Guy out.

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To the few, the proud, the truly demented - I have Tweet News. Quacking Alone Romances is now on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter @quackingalone by clicking the blue button in the sidebar. The button, like everything else on this site, was installed and designed by my amazing hubby who hasn't killed me yet - though I know he's been tempted, especially tonight.

See, until a day ago I was a Twirgin - a Twitter virgin. Not only had I never used the service, I'd never even seen it. But I heard that it was a great marketing and communication tool. In keeping with our plan to build sales and hopefully develop QA Romances into a full-time way to support our family, my hubby and I have been working on different areas. Hubby's busy bundling the Forever Series into 1 ebook we'll sell for $5.99. In the course of that, he discovered some formatting problems with Sixth Sense we weren't aware of so he had to go in and reformat the whole ebook. The bundle should be up very soon at Amazon, Smashwords and all of SW's great partners (Apple, B&N, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, etc.). The revised and re-formatted version of Sixth Sense should be up soon as well.

In addition to writing the WIP (The Duke of Eden), my part of the job is to work on marketing. Twitter was the obvious next step, but I took it with great fear and trepidation. It still scares me because I'm very confused about the whole thing. I got lots of advice that a good way to tweet was to have Facebook feed Twitter or maybe it was that it'd be good to have Twitter feed Facebook. Anyway, I understood something should feed something and I emailed hubby to ask him to work his magibytes and make that happen.

Understandably, he got a little confused by my e-mail and took the bold leap of coming in and actually talking to me about it. Did I want Twitter to feed my personal FB page or the QA page? Or, did I want my personal FB page or the QA page to feed Twitter?

First, I asked him what he thought. He growled and looked around for something to bite. I hid the youngest and asked him to please have the QA FB page feed twitter. He headed off to his magic cave to work his wizardry.

After a bit I thought about it and changed my mind. I grabbed a shield and crept down to the cave entrance and asked hubby to have Twitter feed the QA FB page. He emitted a stream of fire that destroyed the shield and seemed to be headed for me. I quickly thanked him again for the Twitter button on the pages and told him to hold off. For now, we won't have anything feed anything. So Twitter has random thoughts about writing, TV, my life, my insanity and other tidbits that you can't find anywhere else.

In my one day of tweeting, I've found the service is an interesting way to keep up with news and events in the world of romance and in the lives of some newsworthy folks. I'm already following about 53 tweeters, including a whole bunch in the romance world. I'm also following Shonda Sunshine (Rhimes) - the brilliant creator of Grey's Anatomy. This morning she tweeted a wish for everyone to enjoy the weekend. I tweeted an inane reply that I'm sure she never read. But it was a tiny (wee, miniscule and nearly nonexistent) way to communicate with someone I really admire. That's pretty darned neat right there.

I'm following Sarah at Smart Bitches and Jane of Dear Author and both have sent out some informative info. Season4Romance seems to have insight into everything, everywhere. Smexybooks has passed along some good info as has Reviewromance. I've just found a couple of others, including one that sounds right up my alley called Romancingrakes. I had to follow Amanda Hocking because I find her very inspiring (I don't care how much stuff she hoards in her living room).

I have 8 tweeters following me. Perhaps many of you who've been on the service a while find that number pathetically low, but for my first day I think it's okay. A big HOLLA at and thank you to the first 3 tweeter followers of QA - ChickLitandWine, BookClubWoman and Romancemama. I'm following them too. They look like great peeps to follow. Y'all should all check them out as well along with all the fine folks who have updated to follow QA since the blog post went public.

Of course, I'm hoping to connect to a bunch of readers through that great button hubby provided, despite my wishy-washy confusion about the whole thing. I've also added the twitter info to my author page at Amazon and at SW. BTW, the last few QA tweets do feed to the author page at SW. You can check out the rampant insanity there before electing to follow us on Twitter.

As I mentioned above, and yes, thanks to my indecision about having anything feed anything, for now, if you want bits and pieces of the daily zoo that is my world, you should sign up to follow Quackingalone on Twitter.

Come on, you know you want to follow us on Twitter - it's like watching the animals run the zoo.

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 Great news for our readers eagerly awaiting the next chapters of Mary Anne's The Duke of Eden serialized historical romance novel - it's here!

We also have a button for it on our Complete List of Books page, but you may have to scroll down to the bottom of the lengthy book synopsis there... your patience is appreciated!

And once again, we show you the glorious, magnificent pecs of the Adonis adorning my wife's e-book, because you ladies just can't get enough of that guy. Or that guy's chest. Or whatevs. Just look at 'em and buy the damn chapters already. You female chauvinist sows. LOL!

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Angry Old Fat Man, being more angry than usual. Probably more fat too, but to hell with it, like that makes a damn anymore.

I'm a computer guy, just trying to make heads or tails of the world as I plod along. I'm trying to build a business, so I worked practically the entire evening for free on a computer running Microsoft Vista.

If you don't know because you're an Apple sycophant, a Linux basement-dweller, Amish, or been living under a rock for the past 5 years, the Microsoft Vista operating system (like every second or third version of their software) sucks ass. It took entirely too long for Microsoft to realize they had a huge stinker on their hands, and after working on getting it somewhat stable they ended up having to rename it (Windows 7) for users to even look at it.

This machine I've been working on has an infamous Black Screen of Death, where you only see a black screen and a tantalizing mouse pointer that moves OK but has nothing to point at or click on. I've tried every free remedy under the sun and it still sits there, its dark face mocking me.

Did they even test this son of a bitch before they shipped it out the door? This is what Microsoft gets for hiring potheads and cheap overseas programmers. This is also why they're getting their lunch eaten by smartphones.

...continue reading "AOFM-MWU – S#@! I Have To Deal With"

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I finally finished up the cosmetic work on our Complete List of Books page. You'll notice we now have convenient little buttons instead of the cluttered links we had before. As I stated before, I had to handcraft the buttons because none of the publishers/distributors in question had standard buttons for use on third-party websites. So if some of them look less than polished, tough schmidt, I ain't changin' 'em. Also, if you're a representative of one of the publishers or distributors mentioned above and you want to sue me for the buttons, I've got some suggestions:

  1. Go ahead, jerkass, my wife's a lawyer.
  2. Have your people send my people (as in me) some approved buttons. Hell, make them available for anybody who wants to use them. You might sell more shiznit that way, who knows.
  3. You could leave us alone and just take a share of our money, or you could see what kind of backlash you'd get from all of the authors from whom you're making money by treating one of them like a criminal. Piss off a large revenue base in the Obama economy? You can only afford to do that if you're Microsoft, and even then only for a limited time.

Speaking of buttons...

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Published on 1 Comment on AOFM: Latest Site Changes & A Movie Review

Hi there! It's the author's overweight male spouse, pinch-hitting while the mistress of the house summons her muse for other work. I don't know about those two sometimes.  *suspicious*

Anyways, let's talk about some changes I've been working on. The big thing is that we have a Facebook page now. So those of you who are addicted to the social networking thing (read: Farmville) can now talk about us or to us on the biggest computer social network on the planet. Yay!

The next thing is I'm working on making Mary Anne's book list page a little more attractive by changing out the text links with cute little rectangular buttons like so:

Buy the paperback from Amazon!

Did you know there weren't any standard set of buttons for Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any other website that sells books? I know, it's crazy, isn't it? So I have to create my own and hope I don't get sued for adding to their profits.

 Now we come to the content portion of this post: a movie review. Mary Anne and I watched The Lovely Bones last night on one of our many premium cable channels.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S IN IT, TURN BACK NOW! Otherwise, click the "More" link below.

...continue reading "AOFM: Latest Site Changes & A Movie Review"