Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

Just about everyone dreams of writing a book, but not every writer with no previous experience will be able to score a deal with book publishers like J. K. Rowling did with Harry Potter. In fact, publishers receive probably thousands of submissions a month, but most will only publish a small handful of books so that they can put as much advertising effort as possible into those books to make them a success.

So what is there to do? You can simply not write the book, which isn’t exactly helpful, or you can self-publish. With a publisher like AuthorHouse, they’ll do almost everything but write and edit the book for you. But it’s going to cost you money; $700-1,000 depending on whether you want a softcover or hardcover book.

Yes, it does kind of stink that you have to pay to have your book published when a ‘traditional’ publisher will pay you in advance. But self-publishing has gotten a bad rap from so-called ‘vanity presses’ which are/were fly-by-night operations that took a great deal of money and maybe printed up two or three books.

But AuthorHouse has been around for a good decade, so they’re not going to just disappear. And I’ve looked into self-publishing before, Author House has good rates.

And if you still think that self-publishing is ‘funny’, consider that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Fin and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass were self-published books at first.

I hate wearing shoes, really. In winter, I would rather wear flip-flops than actual shoes and socks. I can’t remember the last time I bought a pair, though. It’s been awhile since I’ve needed to. Now, I’m a bit scared to do so after finding out about some very bad flip flops bought from Walmart. Walmart is where I usually get my flipflops from and I’m sure I’ve bought that brand of them before.

Contaminated pet food, lead in children’s toys and now… shoes that will give you a nasty chemical burn. When is China going to get their act together?

They’re supposedly barcoding vegetables to track them during the Olympics, in case there is a problem. But, after all this with China, I’d be scared to even go over there right now. Or maybe they’re sending us all the crud and keeping the good stuff for the Olympics.

My brother wants to become certified. And, no, I don’t mean insane. He has been wanting to get his A+ certification and has been studying, but isn’t quite sure yet if he’s ready. And he doesn’t want to take the test until he’s fairly certain that he’ll get a passing grade. So today I pointed him to PrepLogic, which offers online training for things such as A+, MCSE, Cisco, and CCNA certification training.

Not only do the prices look quite reasonable, they also offer free downloadable guides for you to use to study, even if you don’t buy any of their training courses. But if you’re interested in computer certification, you probably should look into purchasing some training from PrepLogic.

I don’t think so. I’ve been reading about the ‘simple spelling movement‘ where they claim that words should be spelled easier and/or simpler. Generally, phonetically. But whose phonics are we going to be using? Here, when I do laundry, I do the ‘wash’. In parts of the country, they do the ‘warsh’. So whose spelling would be used there?

Does ‘dance’ rhyme with ‘romance’ and should it have similar spelling? What about ’sure’, ’shore’, ‘zoo’ and ‘pleasure’. Should the ’s’ in ‘pleasure’ be grouped with the z of zoo, the s/sh of sure and shore… or is it its own sound entirely?

Maybe some day ‘thru’ will replace ‘through’ (though I hope not), but I think it’s foolish and stupid to attempt to change all odd spellings all at once. If you change all spellings, you will loose a lot of etymology.

For example, do you know why ’segue’ is pronounced ’seg-way’ instead of something like ’seg-oo’? Segue comes to English from Italian, via music. In Italian, the ‘gu’ grouping is always pronounced ‘gw’ as in ‘anguished’ and since all vowels are always pronounced, the ‘e’ is also tacked on. Thus, you get ’se-gw-e’. You’d lose that interesting bit if you started spelling it something like ’segway’.

I like etymology.

It’s almost October, which means November will be here soon and then December… Christmas! I never know what to get people for Christmas. Well, actually, this year, I kind of know what to get my mom. She wants some DVDs from Amazon.

But my brother, he’s hard to shop for. He’s very specific in his wants, but he’ll usually answer ‘whatever’ when the question of what sort of gift he wants comes up. For his birthday this year, my mom and I got him an MP3 player (among other things) and we’re thinking we might get him a better one or something similar for Christmas from a place like Tiger Direct.

Whatever I finally decide to get my family, it looks like CouponChief.com will have a coupon for me to use.

One of my cats, whom I call ‘MushyKitty’, used to like to get outside a lot. No matter what we did, he kept trying to escape and get outside. Of course, we were always afraid that he would get run over or something along those lines, especially since it would sometimes be days before he would finally return. I wish now that we had thought to strap a camera to him, then we could’ve seen where he went.

My theory is that he might have found another family out there who liked him about as much as we did. Unfortunately for them, we had MushyKitty first (having found him as a small kitten in a completely different city). MushyKitty no longer wanders so I cannot strap any cameras to him to document his adventures.

Of course, there is always ‘PorchKitty’, who has recently adopted my porch as his home. Probably helps that I do feed him when I see him out there. Maybe one day…

When people are looking for a home to purchase, a lot of them decide that they will buy fixer upper house. This can, of course, save them money in the long run, if they do the repairs themselves instead of hiring expensive professionals.

But there is a reason why professionals get paid so much; many times people think that they know how to fix something, but don’t. You know how it works, they’ll say ‘Oh, yeah, you just have to turn the doohicky and it’ll be fine!’. But did they ever look up whether they should turn the doohicky or flip the thingamabob? Nope!

This sort of thing is mainly a ‘guy thing’, but I will admit that it can happen to anyone and everyone. I know of one woman that had a leaky kitchen sink and a stopped up drain. The leak wouldn’t have been so bad if the sink would drain properly, but for some reason it would not. She tried lye, it was still clogged. Without bothering to look anything up, she tried various other things. She tried a clothes hanger and even one of those snake-things they sell to unclog drains. Finally, she took apart the trap in the sink, but still couldn’t find anything wrong. She decided to switch to working on the leaky sink. It was supposed to be ’simple’, but she ended up just making a mess and eventually had to call in a regular plumber.

Maybe if she’d researched the project before starting by going to DoItYourself.com and buying the DoItYourself DVD, she wouldn’t have had to waste all that time, energy and money. Knowledge is power, you know.