Vacation

I'll be out for 2 weeks. Posting will be done remotely from the Blackberry, but only if I have something really great to say.

Is It Okay To Write a Harry Potter Alike?

I was shopping at Borders the other day, picking up the new Olivia book for the kids. The kids section is special part of the store with little spacemen painted on the walls and dragons looming overhead. There is, of course, a Harry Potter section, containing not only the paperbacks, not only the hardbacks, not only the paperback 6 book set or the hardback 6 book set*, but a whole array of Harry Potter merchandise. It takes up 25% of the kids section for crying out loud.

What's worse, the rest of the kids section is filled with Harry Potter alikes. So and So and the Mystery of the Such and Such. In particular, there is a Charlie Bone series written by Jennie Nimmo that really stands out. Just a glance at one of the Charlie Bone covers brings to mind visions of Harry Potter books. This probably has little to do with Mrs. Nimmo, and a lot to do with the publisher's marketing strategy (if it looks like Harry Potter, it will sell better).

It makes me wonder, are they any good? It's not like Harry Potter is that original, just the best of it's class. So is it okay to write a Harry Potter alike? Or it that cheating, taking advantage of what sells right now?

I'll tell you what. I'll read book one of the Charlie Bone series and report back here. I can't trash it if I haven't read it, and maybe I'll be surprised. It's not like Rowling has a patent on stories about kids who battle evil things.

* Why would you by a partially complete set? Wait for book 7, then buy it once.

This is a test

Published from email. Yay.

Holy Cow... Use the scales for crying out loud!

Amazingly, I went to a pizza shop last night. The same chain (though not the same store) that used to count me as a valued employee. The pizza was smothered with cheese! Way, way too much cheese. One piece filled me up and left me feeling totally cheesed out. I sweated cheese the next morning at the gym.

Ironically, the whole time I spent chewing, I was thinking, "Use the scales!"

Wordpress... RIP

My host at http://troy.morpheus.net migrated to a new server. I can't complain, but something funky happened with the apache setup and I can't get to my "Wordpress Dashboard". That's cool, I was tired of tinkering with it anyway, so this is a good excuse to put the thing to rest.

I'll go back to using blogger full time (what, like 10 minutes a month?). There's something that bothers me about being one tiny voice in a giant sea of blogger.com voices, but then, I got 10 hits a week at troy.morpheus.net, so it's not like anyone is listening anyway. Well, all except some guy named googlebot, who visits a lot. Please no email, it's a joke.

Use The Scales!

Trying to squeeze every penny of profit out of a pizza is a tough job. It requires the use of a rather complicated equation where the variables are...

• size of pizza
• ladles of sauce
  
• ounces of cheese
  
• number of pepperoni
• etc

The end goal, obviously, is to spend less on ingredients (and wages) than you sell the pizza for. So the optimal solution is to make a pizza as fast as humanly possible using the minimal amounts of ingredients but just enough so that the customer doesn't think you're stingy...

So by now it shouldn't surprise you that we had scales everywhere. It also shouldn't surprise you that we rarely used them, beyond maybe the first few weeks at the make table. Once you've been at it for a week or two, you know what 8 ounces of cheese looks like in your hand. Just like the lady at the lunchmeat counter in the grocery store more or less hits the 1 pound mark in turkey every time. Chalk up a little teenage rebellion, and we never had to clean the scales at night.

Every once in a while, the manager would come back and scream, "USE THE SCALES!" at us. Or, "THAT'S TOO MUCH CHEESE!" Or my favorite, "WE DIDN'T BUY THESE SCALES TO LOOK PRETTY!". I don't recall ever fauning over the scales handsome shiny exterior.

Then one night the district manager showed up for dinner with his family. He ordered something regular, nothing fancy, and the manager came racing back to the make table. "That's for David *********!" (Last name removed to protect identity). Then she proceeded to pummel the pizza with about 11 pounds of cheese. He probably choked on every bite.

So much for the rules!

Harry Potter

I refused to read Harry Potter books for quite some time, not because the content conflicts with my religious beliefs, or because it was childish, but because I was afraid it would influence me in the writing of my own book for the same target age group.

So I've finished my book and started listening to Harry Potter audiobooks on the iPod. Can I just say, I'm totally hooked. I can't wait for the last book to come out. I'll be sad when they are all finished. I'm just like the rest of them.