Friday, December 18, 2009

Friday Funny

The big chain drug store next to the Inn I'm sitting at has a big sign with rotating LED messages. As I was walking I saw the following two messages, one after the other...

Sign one:
Manage Your Diabetes. Come in and ask us how.

Sign two, directly following sign one:
Holiday M&M's. $1.99

Now that's marketing at its finest.

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Almost done

I realized the other day that I've neglected to share any updates on my book. Well... I finished writing it in September. Two weeks later I was referred to an editor by a CPS friend (his wife) and sent my completed story out to California. Since this is my first book, and I don't exactly have the funds for a full-blown edit right now, this lady is giving me a general overview rather than a full edit. In other words, she's going to tell me her opinion about content, flow, and story line. Then I can take her suggestions and possibly attempt some revisions.

For those of you that have followed Elizabeth's journey through editing and revising, know this isn't a simple task. Since I don't yet have huge aspirations for this thing, I think I'm just going to do some general revisions and then get it into print. I started by ignoring the book for a couple months. I knew I couldn't have an objective mind so soon after finishing it as the story was so heavily imprinted on my brain. So I put it down and didn't look at for a full two and a half months. Over the weekend I picked it back up and have spent a couple hours since reading through it fixing silly grammatical errors and sentence structure. I'd like to have the whole thing gone over within the next week.

After that I will be happy with it as a first manuscript. Then I will be getting it into print; at least two copies. One copy will be for me and the other I'll be giving to the person the book is named after. By then I should have my edit back and I can start calling in favors (that don't exist) to get it into the hands of a publisher or two or ten and try to get it analyzed. After that, who knows.

So there it is. My first book is almost done. I'm pretty excited.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The month of writing

So a couple of my blogosphere friends took part in nablapomo (posting at least once a day every day in November) but I chose to sit it out this year. It's a good thing I did because I not only wasn't able to post everyday, I wasn't able to even get to a computer for almost two weeks. So now I have a TON of reading to do. This is gonna take awhile. Wish me luck, I'm off.

At the Bank

The last post was a bit heavy, but thank you to those that read it and at least thought about it. To lighten things up a bit I'd thought I'd share a bank funny.

So I've been at this new bank for almost five months now. Today I decided to read more than just the rates on our loan sheets to get a better idea of how we do business. The rate sheets started with automobiles, then went to home equities, then to unsecured. In the bottom left hand corner I saw a group of loans I hadn't read before. This is what the list said...

Other non-licensed loans: Snowmobiles, Jet Skis, Pianos, ATV's

Anyone want to play, "One of these things is not like the others"?