Square Pegs

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.

Even though we often disagree with his politics, we have a soft spot for Dana Rohrabacher. You gotta love a Congressman who surfs. And, sure, we’d rather he spent a little more time paying attention to running the country, but when a man’s gotta write, nothing’s going to stand in his way. Okay, so he wrote his obligatory* screenplay a long time ago. And what with politics being so time-consuming, it never got off the ground. Possibly it never hit the second draft stage. Rohrabacher might have returned to a life of legislating and surfing had he not — sigh

Looking for a holiday gift? Never fear, BS is here. Over at Romancing The Blog, we discuss the gift of reading and how you can pass it on. The Gift of Literacy ProLiteracy

Like most nosy bloggers, we have been following the story of Brad Vice and assertions of plagiarism with great interest. Plagiarism is bad. Heck, we might even admit to a moment or two of schadenfreude — what’s the point of having a bad reputation if you don’t live up to it? Then came the niggling doubts, that need to know all, see all, understand all. In the end, however, we simply felt like the kid who’d done a bang up job on putting together the lower left quadrant of the puzzle before realizing someone had walked away with the rest

We have a will of iron, yet cannot resist the Bat Segundo podcasts. Worse, we cannot resist the descriptions of the shows. This week, the show does not feature Mr. Segundo, but manages to get Octavia Butler to go on the record about a wide range of topics: Subjects Discussed: Anne Rice, the advantages of writing vampire novels, research, the ambiguities of “persistently repulsive” material, Fledgling as ripping vampire yarn and multilayered quest story, setting vampire rules, naming character names, the influence of the state of Washington upon atmosphere, Butler’s editorial relationship with Seven Stories, Warner vs. Seven Stories, on

The little sister had no choice — after being tucked into her bed, she was force-read books every night. At some point, she learned to form sentences (oh, we rue the day!) and became, well, there’s no delicate way to say this, demanding. One might say spoiled, but it’s so cute when they barely reach your knees*. At some point, came the dreaded year of the Berenstain Bears. Every night, one, two, three, sometimes four Bears were read to her. The same Bears over and over. By over and over, we mean over and over and over and over again.

We admit we don’t follow the minutiae of amendments to tax bills closely — which is a shame because we nearly missed this one: Living writers, musicians, artists and scholars who donate their work to a museum or other charitable cause would earn a tax deduction based on full fair market value under a bill just passed by the Senate. Current law makes it economically unrealistic for artists to donate their works. At present, only the cost of materials can be deducted. While we’re certain that the art of appraising fair market value will require considerable fine-tuning, this is a