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Your favorite nasty fat fellow here. Things on the blog front are much better since last week.

If you haven't noticed, down below each post there are now a series of tiny buttons that will allow you to print, e-mail, or save a post to your Favorites folder, as well as pass it on via Facebook, Twitter, or Digg.

This is courtesy of the Sociable plugin. I am enormously grateful to the author of this plugin. He made it so that it just dammit works, unlike the ShareThis plugin that I'll never use again.

The buttons you see at the bottom of each post and on each page aren't the only services available; the new plugin allows for at least 50 more, like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc. If there's a button you want added, please e-mail Mary Anne (use the Contact box in the sidebar) and she'll get word to me and hopefully I'll be able to add it for you.

Hasta luego, muchachos.

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Published on 1 Comment on Season 7: The Aftermath of Grey’s 9/11

Last season the halls of Seattle Grace Hospital got too crowded.  The merger with Mercy West brought in a herd of new folks.  All of the Mercy Westers seemed to be in a continual hunt for patients - and for screen time.  The fans of Grey's didn't know or care about the new faces.  They were invaders stealing screen time from the cast that now seems like family.   A bunch of 'em needed to go.

The problem with that was that Derek was running SG and in typical McDreamy fashion he didn't want to hurt anyone.  He'd been trying his best to integrate them into the hospital and had even taken one on (April) as his assistant.  Besides, in the economic tsunami of the current economy, most viewers had a downsized somebody right in their household and we wouldn't view any administrator who downsized a bunch of workers as McDreamy.  (Not even the Mercy Westers who by and large aren't liked much). 

There were also some story lines that needed to be turned upside down to move characters to another emotional place.  And now that the writers were gonna have time to coddle and confound our favorite characters again, the writers needed them to be ready to make some big changes.  I guess what I'm saying is that SG and its team had driven into a rut and couldn't get out even though they were headed in the wrong direction. 

One event, one man with a gun, solved the overcrowded staffing and the rut entrenched storylines.  I think of it as Grey's 9/11.  It blasted away the old SG and forces the staff to start over and build something new.  Just as 9/11 did, the explosion made heroes of folks who didn't set out to do anything extraordinary.  It made some of them make choices and sacrifices at the point of a gun that they'd never have made after cool reflection.  We'll watch our heroes who endured so much and lost so much do the most heroic thing of all - get up, start over and move on.

But they're moving on from a different place.  They're moving on from the place they picked in the heat of battle.  It's like I tell my kids all the time - and I had to tell myself very recently - you have to pick the hill you want to die on.  A bunch of the doctors at SG had to pick that hill at the point of a gun.  This season is about dealing with the consequences of those choices.

...continue reading "Season 7: The Aftermath of Grey’s 9/11"

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I am declaring jihad on ShareThis. May Allah roast their stomachs in Hell.

We are having severe technical difficulties. The first one we had was with Yahoo Small Business Webhosting. Their computers somehow forgot how to find other websites, thus breaking our website to the point that it looked like a squirrel murdered with a motorboat propeller.

I went into a panic because I didn't know if it was something I did, since it happened shortly after I got the e-mail subscription thing working. I began uninstalling and reinstalling things, reconfiguring other things, and beating my meaty face on the desk in desperation. Finally I gave up, cursed and blasphemed myself into a fitful sleep.

The next day Yahoo had their junk fixed. Allahu snackbar! But then when I went to this blog I kept getting an error message saying ShareThis needed a Publisher's key. I then remembered in my fury the night before that I had updated ShareThis to the latest version. So I went to the configuration page and you know what I saw? The Publisher key, sitting there as pretty as a naked Kansas City whore in Italian stiletto heels.

The cursing began anew. I pounded the desk in rage. After I cooled down a bit I uninstalled the fresh version of ShareThis and put an older version that worked back in. I went over the blog pages, expecting to see the tiny, yet functional, ShareThis button I had grown accustomed to for the past couple of years.

Nope. Oh HELL no. No button. Nothing. Tried a couple of tricks, still got nothing.

I don't know how many clumps of hair I've yanked out in frustration or how much screaming and cursing I've done, but this is why I now wish death upon the infidels.

May each one of them have a thousand palaces in the afterlife, and may each of those palaces have a thousand bedrooms, and may each of those bedrooms have a thousand beds, and may they forever roll from bed to bed, burning with an agonizing fever. Inshallah.

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Quick little update from The Angry One. Because of a thoughtful e-mail sent to us by a wonderful lady, I was compelled to add e-mail subscription capabilities to the blog.

The easiest way to subscribe to e-mail updates, notifications, etc., is to click the appropriate links in either the Contact Us box or the Site box in the righthand sidebar. Or if you'd rather, you could click here, but this post isn't going to be here forever. Just sayin'.

The other way is to go ahead and fully register to the site via the Site box in the righthand sidebar. It should give you an option or two to fill in about e-mail subscriptions along with the usual stuff. The added benefit there is that you can post comments without needing to go through further rigamarole or wait for me to spot your comment in the spam filter, pick it up, wipe it off, and insert it into its proper place.

So do it now while supplies last!

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After a fairly lengthy absence, I'm finally on the road to recovery. 

No, I haven't had the flu or been diagnosed with some dread disease. It wasn't really me who was MIA.  I could deal with little ole' me being down and out.  This was much, much worse.  This was every writer's worst nightmare.  Yeah, that's right - my Muse bolted. 

Too much stress at work, too much stress at home and WAY too much of a very bad reality everywhere sent Muse on the lam.  Reality kidnapped my Muse.  As days stretched into weeks and the long Labor Day weekend passed without my fingers touching a keyboard, I started fearing the worst.  Maybe Muse wasn't just on vacation.  Maybe she'd taken up residence elsewhere.  She might even be ... dead. 

It took several things to bring her back, and that's what this blog post is about.  There's more than one way to lure your muse to return.  

...continue reading "All Day, All Night With Zombies & Old Dogs"

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Published on 1 Comment on HOLLA At Chapin Library – A New Future For An Old Friend

I have always loved public libraries. 

The library was always a little like church, wasn't it?  You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons.  But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them.  They were clearly working on some research paper or project.  You could walk the aisles and find a couple of friends chuckling quietly over the pages of some slightly scandalous book they were checking out on the sly.  Or you could have real fun and take a tour through the kid's section.  There you'll see the little boy tearing down the aisle back to Mom, excited to share his newly discovered book.

The public library has always been everyman's temple of knowledge.  And I was always every(wo)man.  Oh, I know that out there somewhere are folks who grew up rich or at least well off.  They rarely visited a library.  If they wanted to read a new book, they'd go to a bookstore and buy it.  Why borrow when you could buy? 

Well, I borrowed because I couldn't buy.  I grew up POOR - very, very poor.  Can't buy groceries, holes in the floor kind of poor.  Bill collectors calling kind of poor. There were many things that got sacrificed out of necessity - but books were never amongst those things.  Thanks to the public library, the wonderful world of books was always something I didn't have to sacrifice. 

Then life moved on and despite our poverty, my Mama (God Bless Her Soul) worked very hard to be sure I got an education.  I did college and law school.  If I ended up as a writing kind of "scholarly" lawyer instead of a rich ole' trial lawyer, well that surely wasn't my Mama's fault.  She gave me the world and even though driving terrified her, at least once a week she'd load me in the car and drive me to the library.  She never checked out a book that I recall, likely because her life was too full of taking care of 2 houses and her sick parents.  But she made sure I worked at my schoolwork and she made those weekly trips to the library for me to make sure that the world of books would be my world.

Things went pretty well after law school.  I was never rich but for many years I met one of my most important goals - I was never poor either.  That was true for most folks for a lot of years, I think.  We became a country of folks who could afford to go to the bookstore and buy.  During all those years the library was still there and I'd pass one and remember when.  But you know, it really is true - everything old becomes new again.

...continue reading "HOLLA At Chapin Library – A New Future For An Old Friend"

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Published on 1 Comment on The Duke (Part 1) Has Arrived

Howdy, it's the irritated overweight male here.

If you haven't heard, seen, felt, or used your Jedi Force Sense powers to figure it out yet, Mary Anne is trying something new - she's writing a serialized novel titled The Duke of Eden. She's got the first four chapters up for a mere 99¢ on the Kindle, so check it out. If you like it, feel free to sample and/or grab her other books.

Because of various contractual obligations, we can offer serialized works only on the Kindle. We're sorry about that; we'd like to offer it everywhere else we offer Mary Anne's books, but... lawyers. You know. Ahem.

I've added Duke to the sidebar and to the book list page. As Mary Anne finishes a sizable chunk of chapters, one of us will announce it and link to those pages for you.

In the meantime, stay chilly peeps. And stay away from lawyers, they're nothing but trouble. Ahem.

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Wow.  Just absolutely - Wow. 

In the last couple of weeks someone hit the fast forward button on the ebook revolution.  Changes that bespeak of major industry shifts have occurred like a landslide. One rock goes, and then another and before you know it, at the foot of a mountain, there's a new road you can follow that will take you to the unexplored territory of the future.

First came the deal of the Jackal.  Andrew Wylie is a superagent whose "feral pursuit of clients and their interests earned him the nickname of 'The Jackal.'"  The Jackal's roster of clients reads like a who's who of publishing and includes Mailer, Updike, Nabokov, and Cheever. The Jackal apparently saw what many authors saw - publishers have been screwing authors out of their fair share of royalties for years.  The old book numbers were set in stone, the system likely crafted when books began to be mass produced.  But at the dawn of a new day in publishing power shifted to the hands of the creators who wrote the work. The Jackal was smart enough NOT to let history repeat itself.  This time he, on behalf of his clients, would craft a system that would be fair to the folks who made the system possible.  So The Jackal created a digital only imprint, Odyssey Editions (gotta love the name) and inked a deal with Amazon to sell electronic versions of work of 20 amazing authors.

To do the deal Wylie exploited a hole in older publishing contracts written before the era of e-books.  Writers and Wylie believe that the contracts leave those authors and/or their estates free to negotiate separate deals for the ebook versions.  The publishing royals read the contracts differently and believe the older deals should include the ebook rights - because they're the publishers and they've always had the power to set the terms.  Publishers have decided to punish The Jackal where it hurts - the pocketbook.  Random House held the print rights to many of the works in question and it's announced it won't do business with Wylie until the issue is resolved.  I'm hoping that the Jackal's clients are sending him champagne and telling him that they never liked Random House anyway.  After all, Wylie is trying to craft the terms for the new ebook industry at the dawn of the era, so that when they get set in stone, it'll be in the authors' favor.  In my opinion, Wylie is to be lauded, revered and much - much imitated.  The biggest literary award for the new e-book industry should be named for him - the Jackal or the Wylie. 

...continue reading "The Jackal, A Pioneering Royal & Nostradamus A La Amazon"

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This post may be a bit brief (for me) because we're editing the first part of Duke of Eden, the serialized novel I'm going to publish exclusively on Kindle for the amazingly low price of 99 cents per installment.  I've still got to write the product description but, Yes Virginia - the man tittie cover will hit Kindle next week.  Be sure to check out the book then!

The serialized publication/value price of Eden  actually relates to this post.  As I was working on edits yesterday, I clicked over to Google News - my home page for Internet Explorer.  I've customized my version to show certain types of stories, and yesterday up popped a Bloomberg Businessweek story of all things.  Naturally, I got distracted from my work and had to read the piece right away.  The romance genre meriting a piece on a prominant business site was worthy of notice, and its worthy of mention here.

The piece was titled:  Romance Fiction:  Getting Dirty In Dutch Country. It focused on how romance fiction is - even in this Friday the 13th of economies - on the rise.  The story mentioned the writer's opinion that  the many and varied categories of romance, including Amish, knitting and paranormal specifically, helped keep romance climbing towards the top.  I don't really disagree with the piece, I just don't think the writer attributed the rise to all the right factors. 

  According to the article, publishers say that book sales declined by 1.9 percent in 2009 after a 3 percent drop the previous year and books appear to be "suffering a slow and rather boring death."  The article doesn't talk about ebooks, which have been undergoing dramatic growth. 

The piece notes that despite declining sales in books overall, one genre has been experiencing "steady and unusual growth."  Yeah, that's right, ROMANCE.  The Romance genre increased to $1.4 billion, up by $100 million, or 7.7% from the prior year.  In a down market and a down economy people are buying more romances than ever.  Well, duh.  When have we ever, ever needed to believe in happy endings more than today?

...continue reading "The Used Car/Myrtle Beach Vacation of Genres"

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Published on 1 Comment on Romance – What Makes Us Close The Book?

I recently read an article by a psychology researcher who thought she could explain why women read Harlequin romance novels. Such articles often intrigue me and this one, in particular, drew me in because the author and I share the same name (Mary Anne) - albeit, she doesn't spell hers the way my namesake Granny told me I had to spell mine.  Dr. Fisher concluded that women read romance because they're looking for a cad who becomes the dad.

Most of the articles trying to "explain" women's love of the romance genre make me want to throw something at my computer screen.   The other Mary Anne's piece didn't make me mad so much as it made me pity the author.  First of all, as a researcher, she should have known she couldn't base an understanding of a vast and complex genre like romance on one atypical type of book of the genre.  It makes all her conclusions laughably wrong. For example, based on her study of Harlequins, Fisher decides that romance novels are too short and characters are therefore too underdeveloped.  Certain types of Harlequins are intended to be short fast reads that get the reader in and out fast.  But not all Harlequins are short - some of the publisher's imprints are long, slow, luscious reads.  So Dr. Fisher bases her conclusions one type of one imprint from one publishing house.  I hope she does a better job with the psychological research she gets paid for.

Fisher concludes that romance novels are "candy for women's brains."   She concludes that they allow the reader to live vicariously through the heroine and fall in love with the hero but without any of the consequences.  Of course, she also thinks that the plots revolve around the woman trying to decide if the hero is "Mr. Right." So, at least Fisher is consistently wrong.

...continue reading "Romance – What Makes Us Close The Book?"