Marilyn's Musings

I signed up immediately with the first local Internet serve in the community. At that time it was mainly e-mail and a flurry of interesting places to visit. One I remember was a view of  bad traffic place. Yes, I watched that a lot. To learn more about how to use the Internet, I took a day long class. It was mostly a waste of time for me as I already knew most of what they taught us.  By this time, I had my first Rocky Bluff P.D. mystery, Final Respects, written and was looking for a publisher. Back to the latest copy of Writers Digest Market book. Lo and behold, I found a publisher looking for police procedurals. (I'd decided to use the name F.M. Meredith as the author.) I submitted the book. This time, thanks to computers and WordPerfect, I didn't have to make copies using carbon paper, but I still had to send it via postal mail. There was no such thing as attachments to email at the time. Exciting news--the book was accepted. However, the contract...

Seems everyone is discussing e-books and e-readers lately. I've heard arguments that e-books are definitely here to stay and well eventually wipe out paper books. Frankly, though I believe e-books and readers are here to stay, I doubt regular books will disappear. On the other side, believe it or not, there are many who think the e-book and readers are only a fad and will disappear much like the 8 track tape and wants happening with VCR videos. I definitely think these folks are wrong. For one thing, e-books have been around for 10 years--though not a lot of people knew about them, except people like me who were published in e-books. The Rocket E-Reader came along about that time too--and it was great way to read e-books. Unfortunately, Sony bought them out and then didn't come out with another e-reader until a couple of years ago. By that time Amazon had started selling the Kindle. Frankly, e-books are shaking up the publishing industry. I'm not going into all the interest...

Yesterday on Facebook, someone mentioned they'd read Wishing Makes It So on their Kindle and truly enjoyed it. This is the thing about e-books, they don't disappear. Wishing Makes It So, a book that came out in 2006 is still being bought and read as an e-book. I won several awards with this book. It's about a very bad little girl and was inspired by something that happened in our family--fortunately without such dire results. Many of my books are available on the Kindle and in other e-book formats. This is thrilling to me. I've been writing for years, but because I've always been with small, independent publishers, I've never attained best seller status--though I've had a loyal following of readers, especially with my Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series. Yes, I do have a Kindle and I even bought a couple of my own books just to see what they looked like on it. The majority of my books are under my name, Marilyn Meredith, but my Rocky Bluff P.D. series is u...

Guest Blog from Liz Jasper: March 7-13 is go green, read an e-book week. I could spend this time rattling off statistics about the spared trees, reduced pollution, etc. associated with reading e-books. However, while I am concerned about our collective carbon footprint, there are lots of people who have already researched and written about this. (The most comprehensive I've run across is in the June 08 issue of Environmental Science and Technology. If you'd like to run across it: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es087144e?prevSearch=electronic+books&searchHistoryKey=) So what I would really like to know, as an environmentally responsible vampire mystery writer, is this: Are vampires bad for the environment? Think about it. Unless they have the bad fortune to collide chest first with a sharp stake or (depending on the vampire) step out into a lovely, sunny, existence-ending day, they live forever. Longer than Styrofoam in a landfill. Or Twinkies. Or broccoli on my nie...