As I was standing in the hallway at the Blog Indiana conference last week waiting for a session to end, two men were chatting next to me about burning down the place where I work.

“Yeah, I hate PastaQueen’s workplace,” one said. “They’re evil.”

The other man got out his business card and said, “I agree. I’d love to take them down.” He handed his card over.

“I’ll help you go down there and torch the place some night,” the first man replied.

Wow, I thought as I stared through the glass door willing the session to end. I’d better not mention where I work. And next time I’m at the office I’d better take careful note of the fire exits.

Despite this flaming start, I enjoyed hanging with Hoosier bloggers last weekend. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a first-time blogging conference where the main focus was our location. Indiana is known more for its corn than its blogs and physical location seems irrelevant when it comes to the web. Many people blog because they can’t find people [...]

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There have been a couple times in the past year when I have snatched too many bagels from the break room or eaten far too many slices of cake and pie at family gatherings or I’ve eaten a lot on the weekends for no reason at all. Whenever these things have happened, I’ve thought to myself, “Why am I like this now? What happened to the old me who was so good at dieting?”

Then I went back and read some of my blog entries and realized that’s a load of crap.

I’ve always had issues with eating on the weekends. I’ve always eaten too many M&M’s at baby showers. Food has always been an issue for me – when I was fat, when I was losing weight, and now as I am maintaining my loss. Yet, for some reason, I make myself believe that I was more perfect in the past, that I was better back then, when my blog stands as proof otherwise. The human brain is tricky like that, remembering things as we [...]

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I like to spend my Saturday nights doing wild and crazy things, like installing blog plug-ins. Yesterday night I installed the Simply Threaded plug-in, which I hope you all will take full advantage of. It allows you to respond directly to any comment on a post, displaying your comment directly underneath and indented, instead of displaying your comment at the bottom of all the comments (though you can still do that too). This is handy because it will allow me to directly respond to people’s questions instead of editing comments and inserting my answers in bold text as I have been doing. Here’s an example of how it looked when I responded to Jeni’s question about Cliff Blox:

All you have to do is click the “Reply” link on any person’s comment. Your browser will then jump to the bottom of the page where a checkbox will have appeared with the name of the person who’s post you are replaying to. If you are using Firefox, the checkbox is automatically checked. If you are using Internet [...]

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Me! Or Half of Me, the book, which is tentatively titled Breaking Up With Lane Bryant: A Weight Loss Memoir to be published by the fabulous Seal Press sometime in early 2008. Yes, my children, I am now one of those annoying bloggers who got a book deal. So everyone who has been bugging me to write a book, you can shut up now.

I’d like to give a big shout out to the women of BlogHer, particularly the food bloggers and Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen who mentioned Half of Me to my editor at the BlogHer conference last summer. You rock! Thank you especially for not charging 10%.

I was contacted by a Seal Press editor about the idea of writing a book at the end of September, right when I was pigging out on blueberry muffins in Boston. We e-mailed back and forth a bit and then I didn’t hear anything for two months. I didn’t want to get my hopes up at that point for fear that the fall would snap my spinal cord [...]

• Continue reading "Coming to book stores in 2008…"