A tree, at least

Yesterday the baby woke up with that whiny tone in his wail that means "I'm sick." When I picked him up, he felt hot. Sure enough, he had a fever of 102 degrees. This meant he was clingy and grumpy all day, but even so I did manage to wrap most of the packages while he was sleeping, and the girls and I finished decorating the tree. So we're starting to get ready.

I didn't do a bit of writing, though. Ha ha! I'm loafing! And I'm going to keep on loafing for the rest of this week. (Assuming you define "loafing" as cleaning, doing laundry, and baking cookies, anyway!)

Oh, and the latest edition of At the Back Fence over at AAR has a long section about ebooks. Some positive, some not so. Anne Marble writes, "E-books! Once considered (OK, still considered) by many to be the red-headed stepchild of publishing. When a lot of people weren't looking, e-books went up in the world. In the past, most e-book advocates were e-book authors. Now, many of the advocates are fans, including recent converts."

And: "You know all the arguments against them...The 'indie' e-books are written by people nobody has heard of, people who couldn't get a contract with a "real" publisher. And the darn things are full of typos and grammatical errors, anyway...Those complaints are sometimes still true... However, they aren't always true, or at least not true all the time."

Okay, so that doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement:-). Nevertheless, there are a lot of positive comments in the article too, such as this acknowledgement: "We've all witnessed the marvelous success of some previously e-book (and/or small press) published authors who are now being published by major New York publishers. Authors coming out of the e-book industry are now viewed as actual authors by the same publishing houses that once viewed e-publishing with a jaundiced eye."

And Marble quotes a reader: ""Yes, I agree there are really some poorly written, poorly edited e-books. I've read them. I've also read some wonderful e-books that are better than anything in print."