EJ Ruek’s The Grimace and The Giggle

We are moved.  Including animals, plants (the whole garden), furniture, et cetera.  We’re still having DSL problems.  Sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not there, at all.  It’s no fun.  And Verizon has even sent in the “big guns” to try to troubleshoot it.  It’s a gremlin, I’m sure, because it just keeps doing strange anomalies [...]

I’ll be offline for a week, starting May 12. We’re — family and I — are moving to a new home.

I have written…or, more accurately, am writing one book in first person. The only reason that book is being written in first person is that, when I try to change it to my favored third person point-of-view, it loses its snap. Somehow, “The fumes he exuded made my eyes water” has more zing [...]

no, I didn’t get eaten by my novel

Today in the New York Times:
In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html
World hunger is getting [...]

A critter and a beta reader’s job is to honestly tell the author the problems they find in a manuscript, including:

what they like and do not like in a story or its writing,
where they lost interest, if they lost interest at all,
what they think does and doesn’t work.

Their job is NOT to dictate to the [...]

I was doing a Google search and came across this in the results…which, of course, had nothing at all to do with the subject of my search, but, hey, you know search engines!
[A self-employed person has] “no guarantee of either a steady income or work, no company-provided life insurance and health benefits, no company stock [...]

Today I ran across two situations which are the flip-sides of the same coin — a depressed author who writes marvelous middle grade YA stories (Yes, I’ve read her work) and a despairing literary agent who represents YA books. The author is seeking a literary agent and the literary agent is seeking clients — [...]

This today in Publisher’s Lunch which got it from http://www.businesswire.com/ :
You can also read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN0835916320080408
Poll Asks, Name Your Favorite Book
Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out “What is your favorite book of all time?” The answers:
1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the [...]

From today’s Publishers Lunch:
Bob Miller’s new experimental start-up with HarperCollins took shape quickly after a casual discussion over drinks with Harper ceo Jane Friedman at the end of February. Miller says that he was “feeling restless and didn’t know what next mountain to climb” and was “talking about my frustration with the paradigms in this [...]