Got a nice mention in Smart Business Magazine. http://randallkennethjones.com/portfolio-items/colin-mochrie/

Though it begs the question, if I’m so smart, how come I’m an actor and a writer?

And welcome Australia. Do come back some time.

It’s called Flipped and it’s more or less about a childhood crush, that greatly resembles my own, including a few that happened when I was 19. I was a late bloomer.

Also I have discovered  a hilarious Twitter page called Veryrealistic YA. Don’t go there. It will take up hours of your time.

To my new readers in Israel, Spain and the Philippines, glad to have you aboard, even if you got here by mistake.

What I really hated about the very bad book was that the action was usually moved forward because the female character, who has a 4.0 and is Harvard material, never followed the instructions of the people who always gave her good advice, and always followed the people who never give her good advice. I can accept that a author uses this device a few times over say, 400 pages, but always? This, by the way, is a conceit used by lots of crummy books and movies, to be fair.

Dear Writers,

Women are not that stupid.

There, I am done being angry.

First, let me say I am really, really happy you visit my blog almost every day. Second, let me say I really, really  hope that you are not looking for my first cousin, Allen, a well known nephrologist, or my distant cousin Hugh, a well know writer, instead. Damn. I think I just made things worse.

It is the second book of a trilogy. Why did you bother finishing the first, you might ask. Well, I was hoping the soap-opera-ish* plot actually made sense, and the author would do something that would at least begin to clarify the burning questions I still had. She didn’t. It only got worse.

*For those of you who are old enough to remember All My Children, think Luke and Laura. Oh, come on, admit it. You watched it.

Read a bunch of comments from teen readers about a YA trilogy I personally love*. Many seem unhappy that the third book is so unlike the first two. They can’t understand it. So, here’s the scoop, young people. It took the author five years to write the work. She was in her mid-twenties when she started the first book and early thirties when she finished. Different world view.

No new visiting nations to report today. At least Brazil came through.

*And have already given enough publicity to, so I am not going to mention that the protagonist is 17, Jewish, has superpowers and that her first name is Mara.

Heading up to a writers conference on Friday. Just read the fine print. “We are happy to announce that every room at the inn now has it’s own bathroom.” Hmmmm.

I am giving up on ‘The City of the Day” conceit as it seems to have resulted in increased traffic from South Korea, but not the US.

So many of today’s YA books have the words ‘The First (or second or 254th) in the Deadly ( Endless Pain,Bad Thing, Dramamine) Trilogy (Cycle, Saga, Series, Running Joke), that sites like Goodreads now refer to the books that don’t as ‘Stand-alones.’ In my day we called them ‘Books.’

The city of the day is Fairbanks, AK. And a warm welcome to Sri Lanka (I’m not making that up).