Fact Checking Obama's health care speech

By Calvin Woodard and Erica Werner, Associated Press

( Just for the record, heckling the President of the United States is no more appropriate with Obama than it was with Bush or any other past Commander in Chief, especially coming from a supposedly adult member of Congress. )

Storm Chaser submitted to Whisky Creek Press

I sent Storm Chaser off to Whiskey Creek Press last night. If I can get published there it might be a good fit, because they deal in all the genres I'm interested in writing fiction for: humor, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, adventure, and romance. Yes, I'm a split personality writer!

Whiskey Creek Press requires three submission elements: a cover letter, business plan, and the complete manuscript. Most publishers prefer sample chapters and an outline first, or just a query letter and synopsis. I think I like this way better -- I hate writing outlines. WCP requires a synopsis as part of the cover letter, but luckily, I already had one of those.

There were two challenging parts to this submission: First, my manuscript was formatted for printing, but they wanted it sent electronically. That meant changing spacing, inserting italics instead of underlining, removing headers, and taking the white space from each opening chapter page, among other things. I think it was something that needed to be done anyway -- more and more publishers are going to be looking for e-mailed submissions.

More challenging was the business plan, something I've never done before. That's the way it is, now: A writer can't just sit back and wait for the cash to come in, they have to help sell their work. Luckily, I had help from one of Whiskey Creek's own writers, Star Ferris, who writes non-fiction as Bev Walton-Porter but is now Bev Sninchak by marriage. She's done the business plan thing before, and helped me immensely. Nobody helps each other out like writers do.

So that's it; time to settle in and wait (and work on other writing). Wait how long? Well, I submitted Coming Attractions to Avalon on June 6, and have yet to hear from them, so ... awhile. But this submission was sent out on 09/09/09, which I'm told is a lucky date, so I've got my fingers crossed -- even though that makes it very difficult to type.