The SLUSHPILE Blog

As you may recall from my prior post, I ordered a magicJack after seeing the tantalizing commercial of free local and long-distance for the purchase of the jack and 19.95 a YEAR (still can’t get over that price!)
Then I blogged about how I was already having misgivings on whether this were a good idea due [...]

When we first moved into the area we live in, back in 1986, the same year we married, our telephone service was provided by a very small, but very friendly and competent independent service provider called Bentleyville Telephone.
I knew that if I had a problem or a question about my bill, I could call their [...]

Story idea, anyone?
Here’s one if you write in the same genre as George Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (funny, the classic future society gone mad tales all have numbers in them. . . hmm):
Let’s take a look twenty years into the future. Let’s make it the year 2020. Embryonic stem cell research is going full [...]

Yesterday I blogged about books becoming fast-food in a vending machine.
Here’s the vending machine in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pt4T-AJKJM (courtesy of Morris Rosenthal’s Publishing Blog)
The first video doesn’t give you much of an idea of how it works, but it does highlight just how compact the Expresso Book Machine (or EBM) has become.
This next video gives you far [...]

A blog I visit regularly is Morris Rosenthal’s Publishing Blog, owner of Foner Books, a small independent publisher like myself. I discovered Rosenthal back in 2005 when his blog and articles were the ONLY source I found on the internet that comprehensively dealt with the then starkly new and largely unknown world of POD publishing. [...]

The winter doldrums have hit me with astounding force this year. Perhaps it was the continuous zero degree or below weather we had for days on end resulting in a constant battle of frozen pipes.Perhaps it was the relentless snow, where we never got a huge amount at any given period of time, but where [...]

Yesterday, after I was done gloating over my accomplishment of actually being caught up on my work, I thought about the things left to do on my to-do list. There’s a ton of them, and for once I’m not going to go into detail. Suffice it to say that I still have advertising, marketing and [...]

Oh, me garsh! Can it really be true? Can it really be so? I raise my head this morning and find that I am (gasp!) caught up on my work!
The tax prep is done. The royalties are done, with checks and statements mailed. And the sun is shining! What a glorious, glorious day!
And on a [...]

Yesterday I didn’t blog because I had a delightful Superbowl Hangover. No, I don’t drink. But the excitement of the near miraculous win by the Steelers combined with the late hours (why, oh, why, can’t they start the Superbowl earlier in the day? Don’t they realize some people actually work for a living?) resulted in [...]