Recently in Writing Category

Finding the right form for expression is always a challenging effort and mandate and today, we are delighted announce that UnitedStage.com has transmogrified from website into the 13th blog in the Boles Blogs Network!

18 months ago, we made the blog publishing switch from WordPress.com to Movable Type. Once we were only Urban Semiotic and now we publish 11 blogs under the Boles Blogs Network banner and nine of those blogs are published with Movable Type.  Yesterday, we upgraded our Movable Type installation to version 4.3 and the first thing we noticed was the expanded options for signing in to comment on all our blogs.  You can now use your Google account to comment as well as Hatena, Yahoo! JAPAN and livedoor.  We've already seen a spike in user comments across the blogs network because of this expanded opportunity to sign in and verify your identity. 

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello -- Goodbye!" and no address.

My article yesterday on content theft has sparked some keen conversation here and in my email stream.  One reader -- "Robert William King" ... I put his name in quotes because he refused to sign in using OpenID to leave a comment confirming his identification -- sent me an email that appears to defend the behavior of the pirates stealing my content and I share his thoughts with you now...

I spent my Memorial Day tracking down the jerk who took my hardcopy book -- Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard -- and scanned it into a .PDF file for easy downloading on his website.  There are few people who believe this sort of behavior is content theft -- but let me assure you what was done to my book is a violation of International Copyright Law, it is pirating -- and in giving away something for free that my publisher paid me to write and paid to have distributed as a hardcopy book -- only ruins the book publishing economy in its core.  That means fewer books will be published and fewer authors will want to write books that can so easily be stolen.  Here's a screenshot of the page for my book from the pirate site.  The .PDF file size description was the dead giveaway that this site was not selling my hardcopy book.

I read something interesting somewhere the other day and the simple, arresting, argument was this:  "The memoir-as-a-book as we know it is dead."

Jack the Cat died yesterday -- Saint Patrick's Day now provides a whole new depth -- and today I am missing the best writing partner I ever had.  Even though Jack had been extremely ill the last three months of his life -- his Veterinarian said he was a "Miracle Cat" because his blood numbers were so bad he should have been dead long ago -- yet Jack still fought on with us to live because he seemed to know what we could never admit:  We could not live without each other.  Even in the throes of his last days with failing kidneys, anemia and heart failure -- Jack always remained the elegant, bi-color, Persian show cat he was born to be 15 years ago.  He never lost his class: