That’s taking an idea, typing some things on your computer keyboard, moving and clicking your mouse around, turning that idea into a bunch of electrons and photons, then sending those electrons and photons to a place where those infinitesimal little particles (that originated from an even more immeasurable set of things) are transformed into a solid, tangible, molecular thing.

My fat hand holding ideas which have taken on a material form.

Behold such a thing. Mary Anne’s latest work, The Duke of Eden, is now available in paperback. She and I (mostly she) finished up work on it a month or so ago. Her ideas became words, then became text, then became electronic signals and magnetic spots on a hard disk.

I listened to her ideas, found some collections of photons recorded by other nice people, took some ideas of my own and manipulated the photons into a form I found to be pleasing. I created magnetic spots on my hard disk from the photons, then sent an electron stream that was a copy of Mary Anne’s magnetic spots and my magnetic spots over to CreateSpace. There, they decoded the electron stream, put ink and other chemicals on various thicknesses of paper as indicated by the stream, then cut the papers, glued them together, and sent us back their product, which was really our product in a solid, material form.

My fat hand holding incarnated thoughts, rear view.

That’s pretty damned awesome in my opinion. I would say dare say it was verging on magic. All things considered, the 21st Century hasn’t delivered everything that was promised to us a few decades ago, but I’m still impressed with what it has delivered. I guess I can wait on the flying cars and jet packs a little bit longer.

Now that the paperback is out and the e-book is available via a few other distribution channels, pick up our ideas incarnated today, mmkay? You’ll be glad you did.

NO MORE WAITING! CLICK HERE TO BUY IT NOW! WOOT!

Of course, I’ve changed the Complete List of Books page to reflect the newest addition to her growing library of offerings, so if you’re a new customer you can cruise through that page to see if you want anything else to load up on your e-reader, including our first book bundle and the other 2 parts of Duke.

For all of you return customers, thank you so very much for your support. Mary Anne has been very appreciative of your continued patience and your enjoyment of her work. She’s got a couple of other things she wants to do with The Duke of Eden novel itself, and then she wants to move on to some other exciting writing and bundling for you, the readers.

So stay tuned, and stay ducky!

AOFM out.

I just wanted to draw your attention once again to the fact that Mary Anne’s faerie romances are now available as an e-book bundle. When you purchase these 3 books in her Forever series, you’re getting one of them for FREE!

The bundle is now available for your Kindle, and we’ve recently uploaded it to Smashwords where it soon will be ready for download. I’ve added the bundle to our sidebar on the right and, of course, to the book list page. As other sales venues open up to our bundle, I will be updating that page so keep watching.

And for those of you who’ve already purchased one or more of Mary Anne’s books, THANK YOU! We hope to see more of you in the near future.

Fat Guy out.

See, until a day ago I was a Twirgin – a Twitter virgin. Not only had I never used the service, I’d never even seen it. But I heard that it was a great marketing and communication tool. In keeping with our plan to build sales and hopefully develop QA Romances into a full-time way to support our family, my hubby and I have been working on different areas. Hubby’s busy bundling the Forever Series into 1 ebook we’ll sell for $5.99. In the course of that, he discovered some formatting problems with Sixth Sense we weren’t aware of so he had to go in and reformat the whole ebook. The bundle should be up very soon at Amazon, Smashwords and all of SW’s great partners (Apple, B&N, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, etc.). The revised and re-formatted version of Sixth Sense should be up soon as well.

In addition to writing the WIP (The Duke of Eden), my part of the job is to work on marketing. Twitter was the obvious next step, but I took it with great fear and trepidation. It still scares me because I’m very confused about the whole thing. I got lots of advice that a good way to tweet was to have Facebook feed Twitter or maybe it was that it’d be good to have Twitter feed Facebook. Anyway, I understood something should feed something and I emailed hubby to ask him to work his magibytes and make that happen.

Understandably, he got a little confused by my e-mail and took the bold leap of coming in and actually talking to me about it. Did I want Twitter to feed my personal FB page or the QA page? Or, did I want my personal FB page or the QA page to feed Twitter?

First, I asked him what he thought. He growled and looked around for something to bite. I hid the youngest and asked him to please have the QA FB page feed twitter. He headed off to his magic cave to work his wizardry.

After a bit I thought about it and changed my mind. I grabbed a shield and crept down to the cave entrance and asked hubby to have Twitter feed the QA FB page. He emitted a stream of fire that destroyed the shield and seemed to be headed for me. I quickly thanked him again for the Twitter button on the pages and told him to hold off. For now, we won’t have anything feed anything. So Twitter has random thoughts about writing, TV, my life, my insanity and other tidbits that you can’t find anywhere else.

In my one day of tweeting, I’ve found the service is an interesting way to keep up with news and events in the world of romance and in the lives of some newsworthy folks. I’m already following about 53 tweeters, including a whole bunch in the romance world. I’m also following Shonda Sunshine (Rhimes) – the brilliant creator of Grey’s Anatomy. This morning she tweeted a wish for everyone to enjoy the weekend. I tweeted an inane reply that I’m sure she never read. But it was a tiny (wee, miniscule and nearly nonexistent) way to communicate with someone I really admire. That’s pretty darned neat right there.

I’m following Sarah at Smart Bitches and Jane of Dear Author and both have sent out some informative info. Season4Romance seems to have insight into everything, everywhere. Smexybooks has passed along some good info as has Reviewromance. I’ve just found a couple of others, including one that sounds right up my alley called Romancingrakes. I had to follow Amanda Hocking because I find her very inspiring (I don’t care how much stuff she hoards in her living room).

I have 8 tweeters following me. Perhaps many of you who’ve been on the service a while find that number pathetically low, but for my first day I think it’s okay. A big HOLLA at and thank you to the first 3 tweeter followers of QA – ChickLitandWine, BookClubWoman and Romancemama. I’m following them too. They look like great peeps to follow. Y’all should all check them out as well along with all the fine folks who have updated to follow QA since the blog post went public.

Of course, I’m hoping to connect to a bunch of readers through that great button hubby provided, despite my wishy-washy confusion about the whole thing. I’ve also added the twitter info to my author page at Amazon and at SW. BTW, the last few QA tweets do feed to the author page at SW. You can check out the rampant insanity there before electing to follow us on Twitter.

As I mentioned above, and yes, thanks to my indecision about having anything feed anything, for now, if you want bits and pieces of the daily zoo that is my world, you should sign up to follow Quackingalone on Twitter.

Come on, you know you want to follow us on Twitter – it’s like watching the animals run the zoo.

 Great news for our readers eagerly awaiting the next chapters of Mary Anne’s The Duke of Eden serialized historical romance novel – it’s here!

We also have a button for it on our Complete List of Books page, but you may have to scroll down to the bottom of the lengthy book synopsis there… your patience is appreciated!

And once again, we show you the glorious, magnificent pecs of the Adonis adorning my wife’s e-book, because you ladies just can’t get enough of that guy. Or that guy’s chest. Or whatevs. Just look at ‘em and buy the damn chapters already. You female chauvinist sows. LOL!

I’m a computer guy, just trying to make heads or tails of the world as I plod along. I’m trying to build a business, so I worked practically the entire evening for free on a computer running Microsoft Vista.

If you don’t know because you’re an Apple sycophant, a Linux basement-dweller, Amish, or been living under a rock for the past 5 years, the Microsoft Vista operating system (like every second or third version of their software) sucks ass. It took entirely too long for Microsoft to realize they had a huge stinker on their hands, and after working on getting it somewhat stable they ended up having to rename it (Windows 7) for users to even look at it.

This machine I’ve been working on has an infamous Black Screen of Death, where you only see a black screen and a tantalizing mouse pointer that moves OK but has nothing to point at or click on. I’ve tried every free remedy under the sun and it still sits there, its dark face mocking me.

Did they even test this son of a bitch before they shipped it out the door? This is what Microsoft gets for hiring potheads and cheap overseas programmers. This is also why they’re getting their lunch eaten by smartphones.

Anyways, I worked like a bitch to get absolutely nowhere on the problem, then I sat down and puttered around on the Internet. I got bored and decided to work on another problem, mainly the Facebook “Like” button in the sidebar on this blog you’re looking at.

Mary Anne had expressed her displeasure with it several days ago. It was showing a lot of stuff including names and tiny FB profile photos. It was overflowing the sidebar boundaries before I worked on it for an hour and a half. After trial and error and frustration and cursing I got it to barely fit in the sidebar. Then Mary Anne noticed that FB Like button on some other website looked different, and she decided that it was the way ours should look too.

"Like" button for another website. Note: It's not a real button.

She didn’t realize, of course, that it wasn’t really a Like button at all. It was just a link to the website’s affiliated Facebook page, where you then had to press the Like button you found there. The button I put in our sidebar was a true Like button – one single, solitary click and BAM! Quacking Alone is in your Likes list.

The button also changed to a different view when it was clicked versus when it was left unclicked. Unclicked, it showed a Like button with the signature thumbs-up icon and “X people like this page” where X is the number of people who already like it. It only showed the names and pictures when the button had already been clicked. This is the way Facebook programmed it; I had nothing to do with it.

That was just not good enough for Mary Anne. So I tried my damndest to change it. I did all the programming required by Facebook to try and fix it to her liking, even to the point of correcting their programming – when I have no PC programming experience!

I finally got the profile photos to stop displaying. While looking around on how to resize the button after the photos were gone, I saw where I could change the button style, which would radically alter the shape, size, and appearance of the Like button. Unfortunately, the other styles weren’t as informative or as pretty as Mary Anne would have probably wanted, so I just went with resizing the current (photoless) style.

Would this be satisfactory? Hell no. It just wasn’t good enough. Mary Anne is to satisfaction what Tantalus is to fruit – one shall never touch the other. She bitched and griped constantly about it.

So I tried several other things at the outer edges of my capabilities to get it to work, all to no avail. I gave up on it until the night I was working on the computer that had Vista on it. As I said before, I was puttering around on the Internet and decided to work on the Like button. I just went ahead and changed the style to the ugly, non-informative button.

Fast-forward to this evening. I get home and, as always, check my e-mail to see if someone has a decently paying job or is sending a Brinks truck full of gold bullion to my house or some other fantasy. There, sitting in my inbox, is an e-mail from Mary Anne that she sent to me last night while she and I were in the same house:

I’d really appreciate you taking a look at the FB button on the blog again;  it’s stil got that message with names instead of the button with a number

thnks

M

For one thing, I didn’t know she’d be satisfied with “the button with the number”, because, well, do I need to mention Tantalus again? For another, I didn’t read her e-mail earlier because I figured that anything she wants to tell me she could say it to, I don’t know, my face? Yes, it’s a radical concept, this whole “face-to-face” thing. It’s only been around for 10,000 or so years; maybe we shouldn’t rush it.

Since she was being passive-aggressive and all, I decided to reply in kind:

Check it again. I think I may have fixed it before I read your nagging-ass e-mail.

So now the Facebook Like button is just a thumbs-up and a number. The number is how many people also like Quacking Alone on Facebook.

Now excuse me while I go get handrails installed on my ass - so OSHA doesn’t fine me when they see every-damn-body and their mother riding it.

1. Go ahead, jerkass, my wife’s a lawyer.
2. Have your people send my people (as in me) some approved buttons. Hell, make them available for anybody who wants to use them. You might sell more shiznit that way, who knows.
3. You could leave us alone and just take a share of our money, or you could see what kind of backlash you’d get from all of the authors from whom you’re making money by treating one of them like a criminal. Piss off a large revenue base in the Obama economy? You can only afford to do that if you’re Microsoft, and even then only for a limited time.

Speaking of buttons…

Anyways, let’s talk about some changes I’ve been working on. The big thing is that we have a Facebook page now. So those of you who are addicted to the social networking thing (read: Farmville) can now talk about us or to us on the biggest computer social network on the planet. Yay!

The next thing is I’m working on making Mary Anne’s book list page a little more attractive by changing out the text links with cute little rectangular buttons like so:

Did you know there weren’t any standard set of buttons for Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any other website that sells books? I know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? So I have to create my own and hope I don’t get sued for adding to their profits.

 Now we come to the content portion of this post: a movie review. Mary Anne and I watched The Lovely Bones last night on one of our many premium cable channels.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE AND DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S IN IT, TURN BACK NOW! Otherwise, click the “More” link below.

The first gripe about the movie is that it’s directed by Peter Jackson, which means it’s about an hour too long. This is par for course for Jackson, who can’t seem to make a movie less than 2.5 hours in length. It’s all the eye candy and dreamworld sequences that he’s got to put into every single movie he makes. Yes, it’s pretty. Yes, it’s breathtaking. Yes, my bladder fills up 3 or 4 times while all of this is going on so when Jackson gets to an actual plot point I usually miss it because I’m taking a bathroom break.

That’s why the movie theaters are dying – Peter Jackson films and DVRs. Pause, hit the latrines, and you don’t miss a thing. The only alternative is to wear Depends to the local cineplex.

Before I discuss the plot of the movie, let me preface it by saying I have not read the book on which it was based. I think that’s Jackson’s main problem in movie length: he tries to put an entire book on the screen. At least that’s what I encountered with his Lord of the Rings Trilogy. So if he tried to cram a whole book into a feature-length movie, that would be, once again, par for course.

That said, the main plot of the movie is that a 14-year-old girl, Susie, is murdered by a BTK-type killer who is never caught by the police. This murder happens near the beginning of the second act in the story arc, so once you see it you know the movie’s not going to be about saving Susie. It’s about the interaction between her ghost and the material world. Because Susie won’t let go of earthly things and events, she is stuck in a sort of Purgatory, though it’s a very pleasant one whenever she’s not looking at her old world.

The entire story arc doesn’t end like a movie usually does (par for course!), which I guess it supposed to make it all deep and profound. We get a foreshadowing of this when we see Susie’s mother reading Camus near the beginning of the movie. Absurdism, which is the Camus philosophy, presents us paradoxes that I detest and find ultimately repugnant.

The paradox in the movie is that Susie must be forgotten in order to be important -  a Camusian position if ever there was one. The aftermath of her murder is the near destruction of her family. Her father becomes obsessed with finding her murderer, while her mother wants to move on but can’t. Her siblings are caught in the middle of this tumult and their questions and fears are overwhelming.

Susie’s ghost is almost as obsessed and enraged as her father, except that she knows who her murderer is. She wants justice. She wants retribution for her treatment. Her body is still in her killer’s house, hidden away in a safe in his basement where he can go and fantasize about and relive the moment he sliced her up (a moment not shown on screen, but our imaginations fill with more than sufficient horror).

Finally, the child murderer is almost caught when Susie’s sister finds the much sought after evidence needed to bring him to justice. But he escapes and in the process dumps the safe containing Susie’s remains in a place where it will never be found. Susie is then free to be forgotten and her family is shown moving on with their lives. The killer dies an undignified death after never having been caught, but his death is a vaguely karmic one that is (once again!) foreshadowed in the dreamlike sequences in Susie’s Purgatory.

It would have been a much more satisfying movie to me had there been a more vengeful ending for the murderer. At one point in the movie the father deduces who the killer is and immediately goes for revenge. Dad’s rage gets him into trouble though and lands him greviously injured in the hospital. Right after this we see the killer start packing up his murder kit and I thought he was going to go to Susie’s house where the children and the mother-in-law (played with great hilarity by Susan Sarandon) were unprotected. The killer doesn’t do that, though. Too bad. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to see a beatdown administered to Mr. Killer by a half-drunk pill-popping hag with a heart of gold.

I would have probably liked the book much more than the movie. I can handle absurdism and some fairly deep philosophical musings in books I read.

In a movie, it just comes across as pretentious claptrap. Hey look at me, I’m reading Camus! Hey look, I understand that everybody dies and I think it’s a just a part of life that should be accepted and expected! The universe is ultimately unfair and the only thing we can do about it is to realize it’s unfair and write books about it and be French! Isn’t it strange how we are exceptional creatures in a world where being exceptional doesn’t matter! Oui oui, where is my beret?!

That’s the problem with books versus movies. Books, to me, are like a steak and lobster dinner, while movies are popcorn and peanuts. I can take a long, drawn-out, dark nihilistic book. That crap is depressing in a movie.

I guess, much like my wife, I have a need for happy endings too. Oh well, there’s still Charles Bronson movies.

The big news for Quacking Alone is that you can read the first chapter(s) of two of Mary Anne’s books right on the web for free, thanks to this new nifty gadget. Brotherly Love and E-Mail Enticement will display right in your browser – no need for downloads or buying expensive devices or other messiness just to get a sample of her work. Just click on the provided links and VOILA you’re reading!

The gadget is in beta right now, but as Amazon irons out the kinks, more and more books will have this option available. So check Mary Anne’s list of books regularly and look for the appropriate links.

In the coming weeks I plan to do some little website tweaks that will hopefully make navigating the site a little easier with the added benefit of making it more aesthetically pleasing. So be on the lookout, mateys! Ahoy and avast!

(No, I’m not converting the blog to a pirate theme… no matter how much I’d like it    )

Anyways, that’s the big news so far. The other news is that I’m going to try and get a new Kindle feature working on this blog – a “Read the First Chapter Free!” button.

Keep your eyes peeled for that and for Mary Anne’s first blog entry on All Day, All Night Divas. Until then, kiddies, keep it realz0rs.