“Buddy, can ya spare a dime?”

Back in 29 a dime might have gotten you an overcooked cuppa Joe and a stale donut. Today, it wouldn’t buy you the paper cup. In this twenty-first century example of financial crash-and-burn, entertainment is going to be hard to come by. Most any form of entertainment, things we took for granted just a year ago, is going to slap hard against the tight fist you’re trying to wrap around what money you have left.

Eating out has become a luxury one can hardly afford, despite the many restaurants that are cutting their prices to the bone. I’ve been watching restaurants closing their doors left and right around here. Movies, theaters, concerts? Have you seen the cost of those tickets?

Vacation? Surly you jest. Who the hell can afford a vacation right now?

So, what do you do? Hunker down at home, break out the cheap chips and dip and huddle around the boob tube? That sounds like fun.

There’s an alternative. It’s called books. Books are cheap and, unlike a meal at a restaurant or a movie ticket, books are reusable. You can trade books with your friends, your family. And books offer not only hours of entertainment but, during those hours you get a break from all the gloom and doom on the TV news, some relief from the financial fear. Good for the soul, good for the attitude.

And, being that all this financial meltdown is coming right at the start of the Holidaze season, books make an excellent, inexpensive present.

And here’s an added bonus: Buy a book, several books if you can afford it, and get involved in a growing movement to list a million books purchased. Karen Dionne, author of Freezing Point and co-creator of BackSpace, the finest writers forum on the planet, has started the blog When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Buy Books where you can list the books you’ve purchased either for yourself or as gifts. The goal is to list one million books purchased and the list is growing every moment. Why not add yours to the list.

My story The Dance is now appearing in the December issue of Vagabond Press‘ The Battered Suitcase. Be sure to check it and the other stories out. There’s some damn fine stuff there.

So, you may be asking yourself what publishing and plugins have in common. Well, nothing really, except I have news about both. I was just kind of stuck for a title for this post and liked the idea of the double p sound.

First, the publishing part. My story The Dance has finally found a home. This is one of my favorite stories and I’ve had a devil of a time getting it published. Not, IMHO, because it’s poorly written, but due to a problem I seem to have with many of my stories, and novels, come to think of it. Namely, what the hell genre is it?

When I first started sending it out, I sent it to places that took mainstream fiction. They sent it back saying they didn’t accept romance. Romance? Well, I suppose one could see The Dance as a romance. I didn’t really think of it that way but what do I know? So, I sent it to some places that accepted romance. Guess what? They rejected it because it wasn’t a romance.

Go figure.

Anyway, I let it sit for a long spell after that as I had a lot of other things going on. Recently, I’ve been using Duotrope’ Digest. What a great source that site is. I researched a number of publications, making a small favorites list and started sending out some of my stories. I remembered The Dance and figured, what the hell, and I found a place that might be interested, sent it their way, and heard this past Friday that they were interested. Whooopee!

So, The Dance will be published in the December issue of The Battered Suitcase. I’ll post a link when it’s online.

Ok, so what about plugins? Well, as every writer knows, writing means never having dirty dishes, which is another way of saying that writers tend to get distracted when they’re suppose to be writing. This happened to me this weekend. I started thinking how cool it would be to know what authors were born on the current day. I figured there had to be a plugin for such a thing. Hell, there are plugins for most everything you can imagine. But nope, no plugin, so I decided to write one.

I spent a day researching and compiling a list of authors and their birthdays and started formating the list. I wrote a basic program to create the database, populate it and display the current day’s birthdays in a blog sidebar. I’m about midway through with it and plan to offer it up as soon as all the testing is done. It only works with WordPress as far as I know. But then, if you ain’t using WordPress you really ain’t blogging anyway.

It’s a simple program, easy to style, and I’ll give it away and ask for a donation if the user finds it useful. It’s over there in my sidebar. No birthdays listed yet cause I’ve only formated up to July so far. It’s a big list and I plan on adding some writers I know to it. Look for a finished product in about a week or so.