Deanna Hoak

I know. I promised to respond to everyone and haven’t. I plead summer. :-) Once the kids are back in school and I’m still not posting, then I’ll have to admit I just suck. :-P
But over on my MySpace page (which has exceeded 1100 friends now, which I find amazing since I never go in [...]

I’ve really loved blogging again. I tend to forget, when I’m not blogging all the time, how much I enjoy the interactivity and the discussion. I have some of the most insightful participants here, and I really appreciate your contributions; the comments are often far more interesting than my original post.
Tomorrow I’m going to [...]

My daughter finished up Space Camp today at the Kennedy Space Center. It’s the second year in a row she’s attended, and she absolutely loves it. She still wants to be a rocket scientist when she grows up, as well as the first female president.
I know I posted last year, in that link above, about [...]

So those of you who game, what is it, exactly, that draws you to it? I’ve always enjoyed role-playing games because of the world-building and character development. I’m an “explorer” type of gamer–one who likes wandering around and seeing if they can find everything within the game, rather than being focused strictly on leveling. Nowadays [...]

We watched a gorgeous fireworks show tonight, with the sparks shimmering in reflection off the water of the lagoon. We were close enough to hear the booms, but not so close they were deafening.
The Fourth of July was always one of my favorite holidays–I love the fireworks and the outdoor celebrations and the barbecue and [...]

Someone wrote to ask me what I meant in the last post about the budgets being kept artificially low by having books set in Times New Roman rather than Courier.
Here’s what happens at many publishers (big publishers are worse about this than small ones, generally, simply because they’ve been doing things the same way [...]

There have been quite a few posts commenting on the best fonts for manuscripts lately. Jay Lake posted in favor of 12-point Courier New (which, by the way, I have talked him into), and then C. E. Petit posted that there is no universally “correct” way of formatting, and then Cheryl Klein praised and linked [...]

I promised a post a day for the next week, so here’s the first. :-)
We got to see a preview of Transformers at the local military base last night, and for the most part I really enjoyed it. (The base theater sucks, and everyone has to stand for the national anthem before you see the [...]