Monday, April 13, 2009

New Gig as the LA Internet Business Examiner

I've just accepted being the LA Internet Business Examiner at examiner.com with the commitment of writing 3-4 posts a week on this subject. While I'm very pleased about this opportunity, I took a hard look at my online commitments and realized that something had to give.

Thus I am giving up this blog in "exchange" for the examiner.com opportunity.

I won't be taking this blog down as there are several posts that are what is called "evergreen" -- not time specific. So if you happen to stumble upon this blog after today, I hope you'll check out whether there are any previous posts you'd like to read.

And I invite all of you who have faithfully followed me here to check out my new gig at examiner.com -- LA Internet Business Examiner.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

President Obama Establishes a White House Council on Women and Girls

As a long-time feminist, this video brought tears to my eyes. It's only a few minutes long and definitely worth watching:

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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Reflections From the Passover Seder

At the Pesach seder this year one of the guests shared her thoughts on the 10 plagues and then connected her thoughts with our world today. I'd like to give you an overview of what she said:

She pointed out that it wasn't until the 10th plague that the Israelites had to do something themselves -- they had to put lamb's blood on their doorposts. In other words, talking about leaving Egypt didn't lead to leaving Egypt. The Israelites had to first take action themselves towards their goal.

And then she said that this is the same today. That TALKING about helping to do good in the world (my note: such as feeding the hungry or donating funds to help military families in need) isn't worth anything. You have to DO something -- to act -- for your good intentions to have any value.

Very profound -- and if you've been TALKING about donating funds to a needy organization or reaching out a helping hand to a newcomer in your community or any of the myriad good deeds that we all talk about, commit yourself to ACTING on one of these projects.

It's spring now -- traditional time of rebirth. Start acting today.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Monday, April 6, 2009

TV Show House Goes Further in Its Support of Mental Illness -- Spoiler Alert

If you are a fan of the tv show HOUSE and haven't watched the April 6th episode, I'm warning you that there's a spoiler ahead. You've been warned.

In my February 3rd blog post "Popular TV Show HOUSE Uses Its Star Power to Support Mental Health" I applauded that the tv show has been raising a great deal of money to support the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Tonight the show dealt with suicide and a search for the cause of that suicide. At the end of the show there was a public service announcement about what to do if you are in crisis. And then there was another announcement:

If viewers wanted to leave a message for the person who had killed himself -- they could go to www.fox.com/kutner and leave a message.

I had just written a blog post at www.FictionMarketing.com about when people act as if fictional characters are real. And my immediate reaction to the web page to leave messages for "Dr. Kutner" is that this blurring of what is fiction and what is reality has gone too far.

Yes, I cried during the show, but I was crying for the fictional character. No, I don't want to demean the death of real suicides by leaving messages for a fictional tv character.

What are your thoughts about this?
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Movie DUPLICITY Deserves Its Low Box Office Take

The weekend domestic movie box office was reported in Daily Variety today as it is almost every Monday. FAST AND FURIOUS on its opening weekend took in $72.5 million, which was considerably more than projected and a very good opening weekend number.

In 7th place was the Julia Roberts-Clive Owen starrer DUPLICITY, which in its third weekend took in $4.3 million for a cume of $32.4.

Unfortunately my husband and I contributed to that $4.3 million.

We had gone to the film expecting it to be a comedic spy thriller, perhaps even in the vein of the classic THE LADY VANISHES. Oh, how I wish we could have vanished back home as we both sat in the theater shaking our heads. How did this movie get a greenlight and a big budget?

In my blog post at FictionMarketing.com I talk about when fictional characters are real. In the case of the movie DUPLICITY, the characters are so uninteresting that there is absolutely no risk of anyone thinking these characters are real.

And the stakes of the story? In THE LADY VANISHES the fate of the whole Allied effort might depend on the vanished lady getting safely back to England.

In DUPLICITY -- okay, I don't want to tell you to see the movie to find out the stakes. Let's just stay that it makes no difference to anyone whether Julia Roberts and Clive Owen complete their mission satisfactorily. And that's a real shame for a movie that's a comedic spy thriller.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Read the Mrs. Lieutenant Blog Post About Rape

Today is one of those days when I'm directing you to my Mrs. Lieutenant blog because the subject of the post -- rape -- and the actually uplifting message of the www.YourMilitaryLife.com interview of Eldonna Lewis Fernandez are topics that I want to share with my PZ the Do-Gooder Scrooge blog readers.

Read the Mrs. Lieutenant blog post now.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Fiction Marketing: Using Blogging to Promote Your Novel, Memoir, Poetry or Stories


FictionMarketing.com has just been launched as an experiment in using a website in conjunction with a nonfiction book proposal to attract an agent for the proposed book project. The book itself -- Marketing Your Fiction: Effective (and Frugal!) Ways to Promote Even the Hard-to-Sell Genres -- is a how-to book for writers of all types of fiction.

My younger daughter Yael built the site through our company business www.CalltoActionWebsites.com -- and my co-author of the book project, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, and I are very pleased with the site.

We're giving away a copy of the book's blogging chapter to help people who are considering starting their own blogs. I wish I'd had this chapter when I started my blogs. And Carolyn has quite a few blogs of her own. So we wrote the chapter with the information that we would have liked to have.

Visit the site now. We've just posted on the blog section an edited transcript of the tweetchat we did on Twitter yesterday evening on writing book proposals. (Carolyn sells on Amazon a 49 cents report on writing book proposals.)

And let me know what you think of the site and the concept.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.