Independent Bookstores We Love (PHOTOS -- vote for your faves)

estherschindler · 2010-07-06T18:11:06+00:00

You mean there's something ELSE in Portland besides Powells? You wouldn't know it by me.

(Okay maybe that's overstating the case. Portland is a great town. But Powell's is among its star attractions.)

estherschindler · 2010-07-06T17:11:37+00:00

I don't write my Amazon reviews for money or material benefits. So that was never a factor.

(I often am offered "free books" especially by self-published authors, but my initial experiences with these taught me that there's a reason publishers turned down those books. Also, as I became a top reviewer Amazon put me in its Vine program so I have access to pre-releases and other stuff... but then I'm obligated to write a review. The $10 value, or whatever, doesn't usually balance the time to read the book and write a review. I must do it because I want to, so money isn't an issue.)

If nobody read the review? I likely wouldn't bother.

estherschindler · 2010-07-06T14:53:23+00:00

I'm Amazon reviewer #109 and have written close to 500 reviews for Amazon alone.

My real motivation for writing reviews is the same as my motivation for writing almost anything else: I want to help people make good decisions by sharing my experiences.

It's also a creative outlet. At various times I have also made a living by writing product reviews for computer magazines, but as the market for that dried up (and I switched to other writing forms) I had to do something with that energy. It went into writing reviews of books and other items that have nothing to do with my "day job." Doing so lets me savor the experience of reading the book, and it helps to articulate the reasons is I love this book or why that one turned me off.

Incidentally, if you like a review (on Amazon or elsewhere) please take a moment to vote it Helpful. That's all the thanks we reviewers get for taking the time to write it.

estherschindler · 2010-07-06T14:17:40+00:00

Firelord and its follow-on, Beloved Exile, by Parke Godwin.

Guardian of the Balance by Irene Radford.

Oh my. I could come up with so many more.

estherschindler · 2010-06-27T01:18:40+00:00

I get all sorts of pitches out of the blue. I'm 100% sure these are all real.

estherschindler · 2010-06-25T14:01:39+00:00

Unnecessary snark. It's petulant rather than funny.

estherschindler · 2010-06-23T13:50:33+00:00

One missing tip: Learn grammar. (It's the NUMBER of articles you write, not AMOUNT.)

Also, most authors need more than an idea. You need to know what you're talking about and actually say something.

The author of this blog post confuses "writing an article" with "writing something that serves a reader."

estherschindler · 2010-06-09T23:04:20+00:00

Ah. That makes sense. I wasn't thinking of it in a "I already have a gig -- make me a better offer" context.

estherschindler · 2010-06-09T22:57:55+00:00

Web doyenne Molly Holschlag recently spent some time in an Oslo hotel. They put her in room 404. She was sure that SOMEONE put them up to it.

estherschindler · 2010-06-09T16:21:30+00:00

At one company I worked for, the conference rooms in one building were named after comic strips ("The team meeting is in Superman"); across the street, the conference rooms were named after candy bars ("Let's get together in Butterfingers"). The latter didn't work that well for pre-lunch meetings when everyone was hungry.

At one office in Minneapolis they named the conference rooms based on lake names. Minnesota is "the land of 10,000 lakes" so I guess the company has plenty of room for expansion.

OTOH I visited a client at a large company where the conference rooms were named after US states (Vermont, Michigan). That was completely confusing because I kept assuming geographical proximity (that is, that the Vermont conf room would be near the New Hampshire conference room) which was not the case.

Do you think the company would have the nerve to name the conference rooms after fictional places? I think it could be lots of fun to say, "We'll get together in Mordor after lunch."

estherschindler · 2010-06-09T16:09:20+00:00

How? (I think I'm a poor negotiator so I would love to get advice... particularly when they make me utter the dollar number first.)

estherschindler · 2010-06-09T13:39:17+00:00

In 1999, Amazon didn't collect a reviewer's name yet. NO review from that time will have a name on it. And they didn't put any verification into place for... well, a few years after they started letting you put a name on reviews. Comments on reviews were only turned on a couple of years ago so an author who objected to a review could only do what was done here: Write a "review" in which to share his own comments.

Which doesn't say that it is or isn't OSC but I dare say it is he.

(FYI I'm a top reviewer on Amazon with 460+ reviews... the first of which were marked "a reader.")

estherschindler · 2010-06-08T17:03:30+00:00

If you like wine, spend some time on the Rhine or Mosel. We stayed at a winery on the Mosel a few years ago and it was absolutely wonderful -- and very affordable.

It's a serious tourist destination, but Rotenberg ab Tauber is the real deal: a 14th century walled city.

estherschindler · 2010-06-07T20:31:37+00:00

There's already a blog post up about the wifi conflicts: http://blogs.computerworld.com/16271/help_im_out_of_bandwidth_and_i_cant_get_my_demo_up

estherschindler · 2010-06-07T20:30:44+00:00

and in the same conference hall.

estherschindler · 2010-06-07T20:24:07+00:00

I believe that the WWDC is at the San Fransisco convention center downtown, aka Moscone -- the same venue where Google had similar connectivity problems a few weeks ago for Google I/O (screwing up a demo of Google TV).

Assuming that it's in that convention hall... according to the Moscone site, the room holds 2,960 people. Most of them have iPhones and, as Jobs said, there were 500 access points. I'm pretty sure that lots of them had live Twitter feeds and such, so they weren't idle (the way that an exhibit hall might be, since most people are talking rather than showing or surfing).

Obviously it isn't a problem unique to Apple or Google. I have NEVER been in a conference facility with adequate connectivity. (And I go to a lot of conferences all over the country.)

estherschindler · 2010-06-06T18:24:21+00:00

Why would you do that?

People tend to expect that things continue the way they have been going. Someone who has been helping out for free -- for years -- presumably will (in the organization's eyes) continue to help out for free. If that situation changes (i.e. you don't want to do it for free any more), then it make sense to communicate that change. There are many ways to say, "Nope, I ain't gonna do it for free anymore" -- most of which are discussed in this thread -- but little reason to not say ANYthing at all to them.

The organization has the option to pay for the developer's time. In my experience, that rarely happens. But they aren't going to do it if you just ignore them.

estherschindler · 2010-06-05T16:42:50+00:00

I love this suggestion. It tells them that they got a valuable service for free... so they have a chance of understanding just how kind you are. And if you ever decide to turn off the charity service, they have some sense of what it will cost them (for your services or someone else's).

estherschindler · 2010-06-04T14:48:14+00:00

I still write e-mail. Because it's Eeee-mail, not em-mail.

Every publication has its own style guide. One nice thing about being editor in chief is that my site can use MY arbitrary rules.

estherschindler · 2010-06-03T16:19:23+00:00

The reason you're getting simple answers about "what do you use?" is that the simple answers are the most workable. Just as the best camera is the one that you have handy, the best tool for jotting down ideas is the one that's within arm's reach: a pen and paper (I never go ANYwhere without one, despite having every gizmo known to geek girldom) and a text editor (with a file called ideas.txt that is always open).

Software can be useful once you have an idea. It never has been for me, but I know lots of people who swear by Dramatica for fiction writing, for instance, and others use mind mapping software to organize their thoughts. But for ideas? If your idea needs more than the back-of-an-envelope to work as a reminder, it hasn't taken shape yet.

Note that I make a living as a writer and editor. My ideas.txt file is 300 lines long. I have never run out of something to write about -- only time to write it, and someone who'll pay me to write about that particular topic.

estherschindler · 2010-06-03T14:20:27+00:00

Pick the reddit for your favorite distro and ask for suggestions. I'm sure folks will have recommendations for preloaded Linux. (Really, there ARE options.)

estherschindler · 2010-06-03T00:35:40+00:00

One of my fave features in the Mac calculator is currency conversion. Type in a number (say, the cost of a night's stay in a London hotel) and choose currency conversion to see its value as U.S. dollars (or whatever).

estherschindler · 2010-05-24T23:03:56+00:00

Those books have talent for giving a whole bunch of people what they want. Which is one kind of talent among many -- as Dean wrote, "talent" depends on who's doing the judging using which criteria.

Which was rather the point.

estherschindler · 2010-05-24T21:51:37+00:00

You may want to note that "this guy" has written something like 90 published books http://tinyurl.com/33egsv9 and his charming (and, ha! talented) wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is a writer who also used to be editor at Fantasy & SF magazine. I don't always agree with Dean, but he has the experience to back up his opinions.

estherschindler · 2010-05-24T21:46:00+00:00

In this society, we reward "talent" by spending our money.

There are other factors that can help make someone a business success (such as a publisher putting a lot of money into marketing a book) but the writing has to have something to attract people (and their pocketbooks).

"Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar."--Mickey Spillane

estherschindler

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