This is our first year in our new townhouse and as such, we did not know how many kids would stop by (10-12 was the final count). We WAY overbought on candy. Suggestions of taking the left overs into work have been shot down by the missus. The plan is to keep the bag until…
Along with telling me early on that her attitude toward minorities was incorrect, one of the other (few) appropriate lessons my mother taught me was the importance of voting. It was 1980 or 1982 when she took me to our local polling station (which also happened to be my pre-school). I got to watch while…
Up until 2006, you could look at me while at work and never know that I had a tattoo. Of course, at that time, I had eight tattoos. The only one that was ever visible was the one on the back of my neck and only then if I wore a shirt without a collar.…
Conservative blowhard commentators often accuse this or that media of being liberal (depending on which media they want to accuse at that particular moment). While I feel the following is true about any medium, I am speaking today about print publishing so will keep this opinion only there. I don’t think publishing is liberal. I…
My wife and I were passing through Greeley Park a number of years back during a summer art fair. Painters, photographers, and home jewelers displayed their wares. This was back at a time when my then-employer continued to promise me an office. When I passed a small photograph that I absolutely loved and it was…
Once upon a time, I had thought to craft a blog post entitled “The New Yorker’s Guide to the Rest of the Country.” Many of the agents whose blogs/tweets I follow not only work in New York but grew up there as well. They will then jet off to various parts of the country for…
The formula I always say for meeting colleagues in the publishing industry is to take the decade of a person’s age (I’m 33, so 3), subtract 1, and that’s the number of publishers that person has worked for. It’s amazing how accurate that formula is. Publishing is incredibly incestuous in its hiring practices, we list…
I changed my twitter profile recently from “I write.” to “I write in the morning. I make ebooks all day. I write in the evening. I do other stuff.” There was some confusion to this statement. It was presumed that I self-publish in ebook format, and that is not the case. I work for a…
I went to lunch across the street, diligently working on the revision of TTS (Otwald is about to meet Crown Princess Klara, which will require some serious scrubbing). The owner’s wife brings out my food and sees me tapping away on my laptop. “No more work,” she says. “It’s time to enjoy ourselves!” I smiled…
If you’ve browsed my website (and specifically the Inkwell), you will have noticed that I’ve done some work with D&D. I love me some role playing games. RPG play is highly regionalized. There is a reason D&D was born in Wisconsin. The epicenter of fanatical role-playing is the Midwest. Sure there are groups out here…