Apple Crisp Recipe | Simply Recipes

Apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, butter and oats? Welcome to the essential ingredients of the apple crisp, one of the most simple and easy of apple desserts. To make an apple crisp one layers sliced peeled apples that have been tossed with lemon juice and vanilla in a baking pan, then tops the apples with a mixture of brown sugar, butter, cinnamon and oats. It's the crunchy topping that makes the apple crisp "crisp".

From Elise of Simply Recipes.

PNH on Blogging as Conversation

I'm pretty sure I've linked to a brilliant post by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Blogging as Conversation here already, but I still think PNH says some of the smartest, most sensible, things I've ever read about blogging:

Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

And, not to be overlooked:

Talk to the rest of us like we’re human beings at an interesting social event. If you feel like you’re up at a lectern on a big stage, reconsider. Tor.com aspires to be a room party, not Carnegie Hall. Circulate and talk.

 

Kevin Allen on Racism

Kevin Allen was a contestant on Donald Trump's TV show The Apprentice in 2004. Allen was a Wharton Business School graduate, with an Emory MBA, and a University of Chicago law graduate, was "fired" as a contestant by Trump because Trump felt Allen was, essentially, an over-educated under-achiever.


Trump has been on a pretty clearly racist tear in various anti-President Obama shenannigans, including demanding proof that President Obama was born in the U.S. He's also demanded "proof" of the President's scholarly record as an undergraduate at Columbia, and as a law student at Harvard.

Trump has recently claimed that he is "the least racist person there is."

In a post at Talking Points Memo, Kevin Allen offers the following thoughtful comment on racisim:

I think it's important to note given his comment that racism is not about just making racial slurs or about what you say outwardly, it's also a mindset and how you feel about folks and how you compartmentalize. It's interesting, I read his comment when he referred to how he has a great relationship with "the blacks," like it was some sort of alien population, which is a bit odd.

It is, I think, unconscious bigotry that is the hardest to identify and excoriate from ourselves.

Why Do eBooks Cost so Much?

Michael Hyatt, the Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers on ebook production costs:

Second, physical manufacturing and distribution expenses cost less than you think. Some people assume that these two items represent the bulk of a book’s costs. They don’t. Together, they account for about 12% of a physical book’s retail price. So eliminating these costs doesn’t do much to reduce the overall cost structure.

Publishers still have to pay for acquisitions, royalties, editorial development, copyediting, cover and interior design, page composition, cataloging, sales, marketing, publicity, merchandising (yes, even in a digital world), credit, collections, accounting, legal, tax, and the all the usual costs associated with running a publishing house.

More here.

On Agency Agreements

Literary agent Jennifer Laughran from Andrea Brown literary on agency agreements/contracts:

Here's are the big points an agency agreement should contain, and things to watch out for. NOTE: Some agencies have no agreements at all, it is all verbal/handshake. Some agencies will have more or less items, or have these worded in different ways, or in a different order, but these are in general items that should be covered either in your written agreement or in your conversation pre-"handshake" deal:

1. Scope of Representation

2. Commission

3. Termination:

More here.