Ready for something different...

Today is National Pieorgi Day and Mr. L will be having them for lunch. Buffalo has a big "Polish" population. Mr. L's mother was a first generation American of Polish descent and made all kinds of great Polish dishes.

I'm on the fence about pierogi. I like potatoes, but I'm not a big cheese fan. We've tried as many versions of Mrs. T's pierogi as we could find and I absolutely LOVED the jalapeño kind, but then we couldn't get them again. Mr. L will eat them just boiled, but I like them fried with onions.

I'm sure my character, Jeff Resnick (from the Jeff Resnick Mysteries) has eaten his share of pieorgi, but he's never mentioned it to me.

Are you a pieorgi fan and if so, what's your favorite kind?

P.S. Don't these pieorgis look fabulous?

If you want my bucks, don't insult me

 Nothing says "hire me" like a sales pitch that starts out "your website is crap." Really, NOTHING. I can't tell you how many of these pitches I get in a week. Most of them from other countries (you can tell by the names of the (I assume) men who sign the emails).

Okay, maybe my site isn't as sophisticated as say ... Barbara Freethy (romance author) or Mary Kay Andrews, but then I'm pretty sure they don't update them, either. They've got the bucks to hire someone. Me? I'm running on a shoestring. My goal was to have a site easy to maintain so that I didn't have to wait for an update. My first website designer was also a writer (like my current one), but she only did updates once a week. She had enough clients that sometimes it took as long as three weeks for her to get around to fixing whatever was broken. And if you wanted a site where she DIDN'T make the updates (where I had to pay for every tiny change), then she charged you three times as much to set it up. Uh...needless to say we parted ways.

I found Jo (my current designer) because I someone I knew had a site done by her. I wasn't that impressed, but I looked at Jo's portfolio anyway and realized that she had probably given the author exactly what she wanted. (Her books were set in a swamp--that's what she got.) I wanted something that said "cozy" and Jo gave it to me. And if I have a problem, she almost always answers within an hour of my email, and often doesn't charge me. She's wonderful and I'm happy to call her my friend. (We hung out at a Ninc writers conference several years ago. It was great to have a friend there.) If you're ever looking for a website designer, Glass Slipper WebDesign is the place you should go.

Anyway, maybe you'll go and check out my website. There are lots of hidden pages (links to the maps of Victoria Square and Lotus Bay), Breakfast at Blythe Cove Manor, etc. Fun things you can find if you just explore a little bit. (Same with my Lorna site.) Here's a link.

http://www.lorrainebartlett.com

So, have you gotten a sales pitch where the person giving it starts out with an insult?