Good Chinese food is a long drive from here. Japanese is a shorter drive but not close either. I made delicious dumplings for dinner and recommend Andrea Nguyen's book Asian Dumplings. It's an excellent cookbook on many levels. It has a good. encouraging tone, there are sufficient illustrations, mouth-watering (no, really) photos, and the recipes are simple No one should be reluctant to try dumplings at home if they have this book. She has a website too with some vids to help you out. Hint: you don't need ground pork, use Perdue ground chicken instead. With all the other flavors, you won't tell the difference.
Okay. Avalon. I got an email from the head honcho of the Avalon writers blog. She seemed very nice and welcomed me into the fold since my book is being published in less than a month. Gee, maybe the editor could have mentioned it to me since she mentioned it to them. But that's fine. Let's just get it over with.
The strange part is that these women have banded together to have a nice blog, and it is a nice blog, done by nice ladies (that'll give you a clue why I don't belong there since I guess I've had words with the last 3 editors on my book). She said this is good publicity.
Screech! Okay, back up this truck. Beep! Beep! Beep!
Avalon prints enough copies to cover the advance and they're like Vinny Gambini "I'm done wid this one." There is no you get royalties from Avalon. Am I revealing a secret? I don't know. But that's what one of their writers told me a year ago. I sure didn't hear it from anyone in the company before I signed the contract because if I had Love In The Air would be a Nook already. Thank God (really, not just a phrase to say) I got Disconnected/Paige Turning/Nothing Serious back from them. I suppose that is very clever business on their part when so many companies pulp their books and writers don't earn back their advances. So bravo to them.
But hang on, I thought, if I get interviewed by them as they wish, I get to mention my other books. That's publicity that counts. So I'll give you the link when it happens.
I spent about 5 hours today with the Dream Horse html file to try to determine what went wrong. I still don't see a reason why the spaces between some words are missing. The only thing I can figure is that it's a symptom of another issue.
I used Dream Weaver for a while. What a horrible experience. It's just too complicated. It's too Adobe. I tried a number of other similar programs and was lost with all of them. Then my last resort was trying Expression Web, a Microsoft program. I resist MS whenever possible. I seriously doubt if they had anything to do with the creation of this program--it's too good, too logical, too simple. It works. I recommend this for other people who know very little about html or css. You'll get a lot of help with this program.
Apparently, also something not announced upfront, Amazon would really prefer it if you submitted books in html.
Okay. What I was saying yesterday to my pal (my go-to guy for all questions computer) it's not like ebooks were invented last year. They've been around for awhile. Why is there no word processing program--Word, Open Office, that saves in epub or mobi. What, is everyone too busy creating apps for phones or whatever?
The whole process of turning a document into an acceptable ebook is ridiculous. So from the ridiculous to the sublime....
Here is the only clip I could find of When My Dreams Come True from the Marx Brothers movie, The Cocoanuts released in 1929, filmed at the Astoria Studio in Astoria, Queens, NY. Things don't come with a better pedigree than this. Earlier it had been a stage play on Broadway for a couple years written by the great George Kaufman, adapted for the film by the great Morrie Ryskind, starring the great Marx Brothers with music by the really super great Irving Berlin. This is where the famous routine Why A Duck comes from. Sure the technology of sound is new here and it's looks like a filmed stage play but it's still wonderful.
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