Dang it. Lost the post. Just letting you know I finally posted the chocolate pictures. You know you were so interested in it. 

Plus, a few pictures from my new camera from the subjects I had on hand last night and this morning, my cats and the trees outside my window. I still haven’t read the directions, so this is just pointing and shooting with an old zoom lens. You’ll notice Mogget doesn’t much like the flash–he’s not sleepy, he’s blinking. 

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Well, there’s a magazine writer, a poet, and a children’s writer. It’s been too long since I found the link (at least a week!) so I’m afraid I can’t give credit where credit is due, but I’ve just finally gotten back to it and have been going through the archives. I must say, it’s funny. Funnier than the PW Children’s Weekly email. What’s that webcomic called? Tales from the Slush Pile, that’s what. That one is rather hit-and-miss. For some reason I still read it every week–they had a good run with the illustrator and the celebrity picture book recently–but yesterday’s was kind of … cute, but not funny. Am I just not getting it, or does everyone else think this, too?

ETA: Ha! Read this one, and then read this one. Handles the subject in a very funny way, focusing on the characters.

Why, she taste tests chocolate, of course!

Seriously, this was a Very Important Experiment this morning. For Lent, I’ve given up dairy. I’m not Catholic, but I think this is a good tradition to give a spiritual meaning to what you’re sacrificing, and it was what has pushed me over the edge to actually do this experiment right (Mormons fast once a month for similar purposes). You see, lots of people have told me that when they gave up dairy, it solved their sinus problems. But I L-O-V-E dairy. Cheese, milk, butter, hot chocolate with milk in it, all the different foods that have milk products, like Italian with all its cheeses, pizza, oh, I could go on and on. I try not to reach for sugary snacks (oh, I fail at that too, but in general…), so instead I’ll reach for a cup of hot chocolate (okay, sugary) or milk or string cheese or whatever.

Well, this presents major problems, if you’re trying to give up hot chocolate, when you love it so much! How do you implement such a drastic change in your diet? 

Lucky for me, I have a coworker and a friend who are both vegan and they’ve given me some very good, very specific advice. Ingredients to look for, suggestions for easy meals for making the transition, a long list of foods that I probably eat anyway so I’m not completely changing my diet in one fell swoop.

But what do you do about hot chocolate? After all, it’s the chocolate part that I love, not necessarily the milk (though the milk does make it takes quite yummy!). And most hot chocolates have milk ingredients just in the mix. Nestle, Swiss Miss, all the cheap hot chocolates are so because a large portion of their ingredients are things like nonfat dried milk.

Thriftway to the rescue. It happens to be the grocery store nearest my work, and I was browsing one day needing a chocolate fix. The really dark chocolates, like Ghirardelli’s 60% Cacao, don’t have milk. I was wondering if there was a hot chocolate equivalent, and if so, if it would work with soy milk.

Success! Over the course of the last week, I found three different kinds that don’t have milk ingredients. 

A local brand called Chocolate Vitale (subti
tle, European Classic: Drink of the Gods), Green & Black’s Organic Hot Chocolate Drink, and Ghirardelli’s Double Chocolate hot cocoa all were dairy-free. I showed them to my coworker, who checks the ingredients again just to be sure I haven’t missed one she can’t eat (she’s been doing this for years, so there are a number of ingredients I might have missed that she would recognize), and she also pronounced them good for vegans (Green & Black’s makes it easy–they have a nice little “Suitable for Vegetarians & Vegans” pronouncement under the ingredients).

So, this morning she brought her favorite soy milk, and I brought some (I have no favorite yet, excepting that I’ll never again get the organic brand that came out truly brown with little chunks, obviously spoiled), and we mixed three cups each, one for each kind of chocolate. 

The results? We roughly agreed. She liked the Chocolate Vitale best, with Ghirardelli coming in second, and Green & Black being nice, but not her favorite–a little too on the bitter side. I pretty much am split between Chocolate Vitale and Ghirardelli, because they’re both yummy for different reasons. G. is best for the cocoa taste, and C.V. is most like drinking heated thick chocolate (yum!). G.&B. was nice, but I wonder if I didn’t make it right, or if it was just that tasting it alongside the other two I realized I preferred them more. I’ve made it before and enjoyed it, but this was the first time I tried all three side by side.

Well, there you have it. Vegan hot chocolate for the masses. If you know of any other brands, do let me know, because those are just the ones I happened to find at the local stores. For example, does Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s sell a vegan hot chocolate I should know about?

My dairy experiment will probably end at Easter, because it doesn’t seem to be doing much for my sinus situation, but at least I’m expanding my diet choices and finding I like quite a bit of this stuff! 🙂

Lifted from

:

Readergirlz @ B&N in Seattle
READERGIRLZ: TODAY’S GIRLS, TOMORROW’S HISTORY

WHO: Justina Chen Headley, Lorie Ann Grover, Dia Calhoun, and Janet Lee Carey

WHEN: Tonight, March 8th, at 7 PM

WHERE: Barnes & Noble, 18025 Garden Way N.E., Woodinville

ADMISSION: Free

INFORMATION: The four authors behind readergirlz.com will share pivotal moments as women
and authors, in a panel discussion aimed at encouraging girls to follow their dreams.

If you’re in the area, you should stop by and see what it’s all about.

I have been so crazy busy these last two days. One book to turn over to typesetting, another to get to the copyeditor. Plus I’m moving in a couple weeks, so I’ve been running around trying to make arrangements for that, plus I’m almost positive that the sinus infection I just finished yet another round of antibiotics for (3 weeks this time) isn’t really gone.

So you can probably guess that all I want is sleeeeep. 

On the bright side, there are some very cool things in the works as we get ready for Hallowmere’s debut later this year. Keep an eye out! 🙂 And hopefully soon, I will catch up enough to respond to some very patient people who have submitted stuff to me. 

So instead of watching Lost, which would need to engage my brain too much, I’m watching Medium, which is also really good. I wish they weren’t now on at the same time.

AAAAAAAAAA!

I have accidentally deleted this post not once but TWICE! Argh.

Suffice it to say that I have been watching Animaniacs on DVD, and I can’t do that without sharing a tiny bit of the doubtful joy that is the ear-bug of an opener. I couldn’t find the part with the boingy! BOINGY! boingy! BOINGY! in the very beginning, that tells where they come from and how they get locked up in the tower, but I did find the regular opener:

And, in the spirit of international day yesterday (see below) I can’t leave you without also sharing something educational.

Yes, I did mean Yakko’s Nations of the World.

 

 

Did you ever notice that Israel is misspelled in the labels? I never did till just now.)

 

 

 

 

…And…

 

Remember the Wheel of Morality? 😀

Now, with this little sampler, go find the DVD yourself–very worth it. You don’t find humor like this every day. (Though, to be honest, I usually fast forward through the pigeons and the singing cat. They’re not nearly so funny, despite my love of musical parody.)

Well, so was yesterday. I’m just fascinated by how we can make connections across the world with the internet. Yesterday, I saw on my handy little tracker I got a reader from Qatar, and today I have had readers from Ireland, Denmark, Romania, Macedonia, Netherlands Antilles (in South America) and another in … I’ve forgotten the other South American country I’ve seen, Singapore, Japan, and several from the UK (so I know Jen isn’t the only one! I’ve seen Kirlees and Stoke-on-Trent, Cambridge (Jen, I think), and a couple others). That’s of course in addition to the other countries (Australia, France, Germany, etc.) that we’ve already talked about.
And then there’s the whole breadth of the US and Canada, too, but I’m not going to do anymore Romper-Rooming, because it might be a little boring to anyone but me. (I see Amy, and Joey, and Megan, and . . . ) 😉
I don’t even have a way of tracking these beyond the most recent 100 visitors, but that’s okay. I just like glancing at the map every now and then and thinking how cool it is that people from all over the wo
rld can talk like this.

Behind the cut. These are from my real SLR camera. Still more shots from my phone to come. (Meant to do it last night, but sorry, I fell asleep in the middle of the post!)

Whoops, nearly forgot to add the cut. Sorry for any of you who got it before I caught it.

Have a great weekend!

I’m finally answering one of the questions you guys asked!

 wrote:

Waving from France!

I was wondering why you didn’t accept e-mail submissions at Mirrorstone? 

It seems to me that a publisher of science fiction and fantasy would be more attuned to the ecological aspects of e-mail submissions – no ruining the ozone layer with planes carrying mail, no trees destroyed for paper, no chemical companies polluting the water for ink, no garbage to burn…

At any rate, that’s my question!:-)

That’s a very good question, especially from someone writing from a country far across the ocean. I’m very impressed with how Wizards–and pretty much the whole Seattle area–is very concerned about trying to protect the environment. And while I’d love to start taking email submissions for the sake of the environment–your point about airplanes carrying the mail and using jet fuel is important, because it’s certainly not just the paper–the truth is that it’s just plain hard on the eyes to read submissions on screen. I do a lot of work on the computer daily, but there’s only so much I can do before my eyes just give up.

Do you read novels electronically? It’s a similar situation. Especially for manuscript-length submissions, it’s extremely fatiguing to try to read for long periods of time on screen. I love reading blogs, email, that kind of thing, but people’s attention span on screen is much, much shorter than you want someone to have when reading a book–and you want an editor to feel comfortable enough to want to devote her time to your submission, whether it be 3 chapters or a whole requested manuscript.

The next option would be for us to take email submissions, but then to print them out on our end so they’re more mobile. Most of us don’t sit at our computers to read submissions–if I do it in the office, I’m shutting myself away in a conference room so I can have more quiet for reading, but usually I take them home to read at night; most of my colleagues do the same…. though I don’t live in New York, so I don’t have a train ride home to read on. (And speaking of the environment, how I wish I did! I really miss living on a great public transportation system!)

Sometimes we’ll have a slush-reading party where we all gather in a conference room to read and discuss submissions, and it’s much easier to pass submissions from one editor to another with comments written right on the submission–we reference the paper, hand it back and forth, discuss face to face. 

If we printed them out so we could cart them around, that becomes our cost for paper and toner, rather than that of the submitter. That can really add up with the thousands of submissions we get each year. 

So it”s mainly logistics, though partly cost. Perhaps one day when the computer reading tablet becomes affordable (I’ve heard of some advances in the technology and pricing, but never seen them in person), and they design such a tablet in a way that doesn’t fatigue the eyes more than a piece of paper, it’ll change. But right now, logistics really require hard copies through the early process, especially in the decision making phase.

However.

All contracted manuscripts and most of the auditions (ref. my LTUE talk) that I work with do come in electronically. Once a book has been contracted, almost everything passes back and forth electronically, at least from the author’s point of view. The exception to that would be something like a first edit, which I prefer to be on paper so I can write my comments in where the author can absorb them right next to the text. (I usually print it out two to a page to save paper, even then.) But after that, the revisions come back electronically.

I hear many people ask, “Well, why don’t you just use Track Changes? You can make the changes and add comments and nobody has to print a sheet!” Well, yes, but I find that people see the words on the screen differently than they do in print. You notice different things. I do, at least. So I give myself at least one hard-copy edit where I can spread the pages across the desk if I need to, cross-reference, scribble and scratch out ideas and suggestions. Because in my first edits I read through the text at least twice, I tend to make more scribbly notes the first time around, and when I come back through I might clean it up where I’ve changed my mind, etc. I need that tactile experience to be a good editor.

Then, in
a later edit, I might go through paragraph by paragraph on screen and hone in on the language. That’s actually easier for me to edit on screen because I’m not distracted by all the text. Come to think of it, that might be why I feel like I need a hard copy of submissions–because at the submission stage, I need to be able to see the whole picture, from plot to characterization to style to writing skill, and it’s hard for me to do that when reading on screen. Or I might just be making that up, and not really be able to pin it down at all. What it comes down to, though, is that I work better separating those parts of the editing process.

To sum up, we’re doing a little bit for the environment, and always looking for ways we can do better, but the technology for reading on screen has a way to go before it’ll really be ready for what the publishing industry needs, and speaking in specifics, what Mirrorstone needs. And we of course have to deal with the equipment we have on hand, and none of us has those nifty tablets I spoke of above. 🙂

The caveat: I think

jjsass

 is probably asking from the perspective of living in another country. I’m sure it’s frustrating to have to worry about the cost of postage, the long turnaround time, and all the other hassles of doing business from another country, which is compounded by figuring out how to do the international reply coupon for the SASE, etc.

I completely sympathize. For me personally, as long as you know for sure that your email address is valid and will remain so for several years (just in case–for example, my friend Brandon’s book was finally picked up a year and a half after he’d submitted it to an editor at Tor, and his now-editor had to do some major sleuthing to find him, because his phone number, address, and email had all changed by that time!)–as long as you know for sure it is typed correctly on your submission (and on every place it appears on your submission), you can forego the SASE.* (Hm, that’s a lot of italics, but I wanted to be sure to emphasize all the qualifications I’m putting on that…)

That’s JUST for international submissions, if that makes your life a little easier.
As a general rule, especially for domestic situations, the SASE isn’t just for rejections–it’s an insurance policy in case you have a typo in your email address, or your phone number changes, etc. (again, ref. Brandon’s experience). Sometimes it might be the only way an editor has to get a hold of you for one reason or another, with good news. And most editors aren’t the kinds of detectives that Moshe is, and will just end up tossing your submission if they can’t find you.

But the SASE exception I noted above is just me. It’s much much better just to follow the guidelines if you don’t know if an editor is okay with that.

*And if an editor likes your submission enough to overlook working with you across huge time zone differences and international boundaries, you can probably expect to do much of your correspondence after the initial submission via email for more logistical reasons.