Tuesday is my bridge teaching day--even more so now than before since I've added an evening bridge class starting tonight. I'll be adding a Monday evening class next week, so I'll be doing four classes in 26 hours. Wow. The evening class is small--6 students--but it should be fun. There was a lot of positive energy. Thanks to the bridge, I got exactly zero writing done today. Unfortunately, I also got no reading done today--and today is submissions day. I'll need to manufacture some extra time from somewhere to catch up on submissions.

I finally posted my son Nick's account of how to get eBooks onto the Creative Zen. The Creative Zen is a MP3/Video player. I gave him the Zen for Christmas last year on the provision that he figure out how to read eBooks on it. He was unsuccessful until I saw an article on getting eBooks onto the iPhone over at www.teleread.org. I used that to write a short article on putting eBooks on a not-so-smart phone and he used it to get eBooks on the Zen. Thanks, Nick. Here's the article: http://www.booksforabuck.com/writers/creative_zen.html

Although I was away from my desk most of the day, I'm still participating in the Muse Writer's Conference. I didn't get a lot of questions today, so I decided I'd write a brief note about something I notice and something that maybe doesn't really get covered in the core writing class--how to write dialogue and how to manage attribution (which is the word used for making sure your readers know who's talking). I do a lot of editing and so these are things that I edit for. Some of these, especially my discussion of how to handle dialect, are subjective. Mark Twain wrote dialect phonetically and I'm okay with this when it's important to the story. In the upcoming A Full English Problem by Anthony Perham, there's a certain amount of dialect spelled out and I think this works for the story. Overall, though, I recommend against spelling out dialect. I was pleased enough with the way the little article turned out, I republished it on the www.BooksForABuck.com website. Here it is: http://www.booksforabuck.com/writers/dialogue_attribution.html. As always, I'd value any feedback, suggestions, or disagreement.

I'm going to make STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL by Karen Leabo the www.BooksForABuck.com book of the day. A store window designer gets a chance at the biggest job in her life--relaunch of the city's major department store. The only problem--she'll have to work for the man she fell for and who dumped her. She swears she won't risk her heart again but keeping that promise isn't easy. Sexy and fun--and only $2.99. Learn more, read the excerpt, or buy the eNovel here: www.booksforabuck.com/rompages/rom_2005/strictly_confidential.html. (Available in HTML, Adobe Acrobat, Palm Reader/eReader, and Microsoft Reader formats). Here's the cover (cover design by Karen Leabo):

rob