I read somewhere that the holidays were encroaching. That was probably The Wall Street Journal. Encroaching on what? When confronted with conundrums I turn to the Earl. He’s an aspiring writer whose literary career is wobbly at best. For instance, he lost his cool and was dragged across the floor of a train station clinging to a literary agent’s expensive trousers. When the agent tried to shake him loose the Earl offered his manuscript in exchange for letting go. Needless to say that ploy was a total failure. In all the excitement the Earl had forgotten to enclose a SASE. […]

Okay, if the title of this piece sounds more like it should be for a nursery school class, I apologize. But it seems that this might be of interest to the industry. A follow-up on my last post about Harlequin cutting words from their longer lines — I received information from the Senior Editor of my line (Superromance) that basically what’s going on is a change in HOW we count words. Instead of using the old standard of ms formating for the 250 words per page method, we are now moving to the new computer word count method. That means

We’re off to explore volcanoes and massages and mai tais. Not necessarily in that order. A trio of trusty sitters will be feeding the blog and watering the posts while we’re gone. As always, treat them with the same dignity and respect you offer us. If that becomes impossible, keep the swearing to a minimum. It’s a high-class neighborhood.