Category: Mouse News

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Self Published Means Success if Done Right

 A few weeks ago, I reluctantly went to a talk at Barnes & Noble where a some esteemed traditional published writers had gone the self publishing. I listened to David Wilk, who made sense, and whose company does quality work for any serious writer who now knows that you can wait around forever, but the book market as we once knew it and valued it is gone. I highly recommend going to this seminar and learning what you have to do to make yourself successful. It’s not about vanity. Its about reality.

 

BookWorks.com: The Self-Publishers Association Presents

Self Publishing Workshop (WITH WINE! }

Learn from the experts

Everything you’ve always wanted to know about self-publishing

but didn’t know who to ask

Tired of spinning your wheels? Spending thousands of dollars to publish your book

and not getting the results you want? Let the experts show you how to produce,

publish and promote your book, whatever your special needs may be.

Betty Kelly Sargent—freelance editor, former editor-in-chief of William Morrow

David Wilk—founder of consulting firm Booktrix.com, production and promotion expert

Dan Blank— founder of WeGrowMedia.com, social media and marketing specialist

Eric Rayman—publishing lawyer, intellectual property expert

Jason Ashlock—president of Movable Type Management, author business consultant

The Beekman Hotel

First Ave at 49th Street, NYC

Tuesday, June 26, Monday, September 24, and Tuesday, October 23

from 6 to 8 pm

$99 workshop fee

{ includes a free drink after the workshop at The Top of the Beekman Tower }

Call us at 212-486-1531, visit bookworks.com or email david@booktrix.com

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Blog Mouse News

A Feature in the Westport News

…has very smart, very flattering things to say about the Mouse House, and the article on us in their Sunday issue is definitely worth a good read. A few trivial fact twisters, but a damned good article that portrays MouseMuse intent with soul. You can find it here.

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Blog Ina's Story Mouse News

Gertrude Stein and the Pharohs

We took ourselves into Manhattan yesterday for a dose of the hurried life, complete with angst about finding a free parking spot. We strategized to start on the upper East side and wind up at the Gertrude Stein Collection exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then at a jazz/dinner club, “Smoke” on 105th and Broadway. The gods of parking were with us when we easily slid into a street spot at 91st and Fifth. A nice walk on a day that unexpectedly turned out to be beautiful.
Great signage on the Frick Museum undergoing a renovation and cordoned off with mesh and yellow banners. “Like everyone else living on Fifth Avenue, we are having ‘a little work done.'” As we made our way toward the Stein collections, we lingered briefly in the Egyptian hallway to read some of the stories on the Egyptian murals—centuries of agricultural tales illustrated on papyrus. Was it true that the slave who scattered the grain was taller than the slave who tamped the soil down over it? Did the goddess who received the urn after the gods of rain invoked the opening of the heavens truly tower over all of the smaller people around her? That was ancient storytelling—pictures of reality they shared for historical reasons and personal communication.
Onward to the Stein collections. Now, I have a feeling I wouldn’t have liked Gertrude. While I appreciate many of the artists she supported and nurtured, the collection is wonderfully annotated, and the writers have cautiously depicted the vicious feuds and killer ambitions of both the collectors and their chattel, the starving artists, ex patriots. Storytelling for me as a non-visual artist who has listened in personally on the “making” or “breaking” of a career in the fine arts (I had a boyfriend who was a powerful art critic) felt all too venal and self aggrandizing. The Steins were intellectuals and didn’t have to work for the bread on their tables. If you didn’t interest Gertrude, you may as well have become a shoemaker in Paris in the early 1900s. As you read between the lines near each grouping of paintings, see what you think. The paintings become so alive with the story, but so does their not so passionate motivation for each painting. Long live commercial value!

Yes, after riding around for a half an hour toward our jazz club we found a street parking spot on 108th and West End. Great teeny club, a jewel. Sat close to our neighbors on both sides. Ate like a queen. Listened to “Jimmy Cobb” recreate Miles Davis “Kind of Blue.” Blue periods for painters and musicians, but for us, it was a rosy day.

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Blog Ina's Story Mouse News

Memorial Day Weekend is All Sundays

Memorial Day weekend is four days of no day. Friday, May 25, was like a Sunday. My husband had the day off so he hung around, a mixed bag of his neatness dogging my desire to just hang out ( in my robe) on the big chair in the living room, while he traipsed by heavy-footed with a few loads of laundry. The footsteps were to let me know that he was the only one doing household chores.
We both had meetings late in the day, separately. But at night it felt like Sunday because we had no plan. We grazed on leftovers. We’d had plans with family that fell apart when it turned out we’d all said “yes” without checking our calendars. Getting 6 people together for a family gathering is not like the old days when you knew that Sundays were for family. On Saturday, we did one of our favorite things— viewing, not buying, fine antiques in the Stamford group antique shops on Canal street. We congratulated ourselves for not spending a penny, but I did wish we were just starting our lives togethet and could absorb a whole new collection of mid-century modern into our ecclectic but over-filled house.
In the evening we sat under the awning at Sunset Grille with friends for whom it took six months to clear this date. We walked Washington street in Norwalk after dinner looking for a vibe’ and much to our dismay, it doesn’t feel like it’s thriving. We did manage a dance at a BBQ place with a band in the back, but that really needed more people on a Saturday night to call it a happening. Even Compo Beach was marginally sparse on Sunday. Quatro Pazzi in Fairfield was packed at 6:30. Great buzz there. Mother-in-law with us. Enough said.

Monday, my husband drove the Hippie Van for WPKN for the Westport Memorial Day parade. Afterwards he came home and slept. I read the newspapers all day thinking it was Sunday. I nearly forgot that I had our radio show— fourth Monday of the month. Look for the archive www.wpkn.org later this eeek. At 11pm up in the studio, and finally for me, I knew what day it was. Bill Bosch and I had never done radio together before and as usual we were an easy team. Steve di Costanzo, our host on Radio Base Camp is a terrific programmer, avid listener too.
It’s Tuesday, but feels like Monday of the first day of summer and after four Sundays, please recommend how to start my day with weekday verve.

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Blog Ina's Story Mouse News

Street Walking in Bridgeport

Leave Town & Country for an Evening

Repost with addendum. We have been playing to capacity at TWO BOOTS of BRIDGEPORT. Now, coming, other programs using real life experiences as their core. http://thebijoutheatre.com/blog/

MAY 23, 2012

Today is an important day for Mousemuse. We are hitting the streets of Bridgeport’s ambitious revival district at Bijou Square. Once upon a time, Manhattanhites winced about attending cutting edge arts events in what was called “alphabet city.” Now, they have to lineup for tickets to cutting edge entertainment or theater that doesn’t cost $175 a ticket like Broadway, but is just as thought provoking.

Yes, in Westport we’ve embraced the arts. But the emerging artists have little or no center to simply gather. Restaurants are sprouting again in Westport. Gorgeous women and magazine men. Good hype and vibe at the Spotted Horse late at night. Then where to? A rock band at the Duck? Maybe. A little upstairs music at a couple of places. Jazz Jam at WAC in folding chairs with a plastic glass of wine? No ambience, but sometimes exciting if you could walk there and feel the “club” vibe.

But how about a little culture? Are the art galleries planning to stay open. Is our town Madison Avenue? Is Westport ever going to properly develop a venue with a stage. Town Hall has the auditorium, and a black box theater that’s privately run, but budget constraints are real as Westport focuses in on our gem of an educational system.

How did Brooklyn and SoHo and Alphabet City develop into vibrant places? Cheap real estate and someone with vision. Lots of someones. Youth could afford to live there and work there. Later they’d move out to the burbs and wonder why they felt “dead.”

We are so insular we’ve forgotten to look a few (metaphoric) blocks up the road. That’s where Bridgeport has, for the past ten years, been quietly putting its future in the hands of artistic visionaries like Phil Kuchma. The Kuchma Corporation has put its money and passion behind the redevelopment of Bijou Square. Kuchma and MouseMuse are meeting on Friday, May 25th. MouseMuse and Kuchma’s team are heading into a momentous time. If you stop thinking of Bridgeport as if it is Hell’s Kitchen, (and you know that Hell’s Kitchen is now unaffordable) you will realize that it’s a city much closer to you than New York, some of the best places like Two Boots and the Bijou were recruited by Kuchma to start up a quality arts community. It’s an opportunity for our fans to not only dine out with the swells, but an opportunity to get real, and to generate ideas.

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Blog Ina's Story Mouse News

Beach Chair Backlash

Remember those lightweight aluminum fold up chairs with plastic mesh web strips we used to hang on a hook in the garage?  Every summer we’d drag tme out to either a lawn event or to the beach. Sure they used to fray at the edges and then rust, but with a new roll of webbing they were as good as new.

Enter the first generation of snazzy chairs that were sturdy enough to hold not only our widening bottoms but bottles and glasses fit in the side pouches or tray tables on the  arms. Only a tornado could blow away those new chairs introduced into the leisure market in the 1980s.

They came in their own cases and packed up as small as a full sized beach umbrella. You’d sling the case over your arm and trek uphill or downhill until you settled on your patch of land and began to reassemble them? Sturdy little buggers they were. Taut and tough like an army cot. After low back-breaking sling-ass evening at the beach or Tanglewood, the engineer types helped the non-mechanical people fold and slide the chairs back into its own nifty neat sleeve. They only weighed as much as a few golf clubs, but they weren’t unsightly when not in use like the cheapo, low-tech old chairs were.

Thirty more years of portable chair engineering has taken us to every convenience you’d want in a chair. Canopies, tables, footrests. Every year another chair item to make a trip to outdoors a pleasure. Before we knew it, the chairs had gotten almost as heavy as carrying a sailboat boom on your shoulder.  I secretly craved my mother-inlaw’s ten dollar aluminum rusted chairs from the 1950s. She gave them to me when she moved.

We gave away our high tech chairs and went in search of something lightweight, ugly and low tech. This 2012 summer scene at Compo Beach?  Mostly aluminum plastic webbed chairs?  Maybe it’s not necessary to put engineering minds into creating a luxury portable chair with so many bells and whistles, ones that by sheer weight alone could deter you from taking them out of the car. Maybe those chairs are better off in an RV.

 

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Mouse News

Secret Marinated Chicken & Mock Cesar Dressing

See ” Ina’s Story”  for how salt became my passion in dressings.

Cooking for an army is easy. Thanks to Siobhan Powers who started me on frozen tenderloins. Who ever knew? So much of this kind of cooking is about not being nervous. If you leave out an ingredient, remember, only the salt, acid and oil, matter.

Ingredients and Guidelines

1 bag of frozen chicken tenderloins (Costco or Trader Joe’s—TJ’s bag is half the size) 

2 cups of home made Italian dressing ( this is for the 6 lb bag)

Several tablespoons of Kosher salt

3 to 4 freshly squeezed lemons

3  large cloves of garlic minced

Let the salt and garlic sit in the acid for an hour or so

Add olive oil so that the container has a little less than half in acid as it does in oil.

Shake it up, blend it, do anything you like with it, including throwing the lemon rinds into the marinade.

Pour into the 6 lb bag of frozen chicken

Shake the bag around a little. Distribute the liquid.

ADD

1 jar of Tamarind sauce

1 cup of Worcestshire Sauce

Let it sit in the resealed plastic bag in the refrigerator for at least a day. It will defrost.

Fire up the grill to high.

Put the tenders on until they get grill marks, flipping only once. DO NOT OVERCOOK. Just grill marks.

Heat oven to 225. Place the grilled tenderloins in an open roasting pan in one layer, spoon some of the marinade over the chicken and cook for about 15 minutes.

SALAD DRESSING

4 tablespoons of Kosher salt

Juice of 2 lemons

1/8 cup of white vinegar

1 tablespoon Poupon Mustard

Splash of Worcestshire Sauce

About 1/2 cup Vegenaise Mayonnaise (This brand is the only non egg brand that tastes like Hellmans. Buy it at Whole Foods)

1 small can of anchovies

Put all of this in a blender and throw in 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese. Keep tasting. I don’t measure, but you will learn to judge by eye and taste.

 

 

 

 

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Mouse News

The Mouse house is abuzz!

The Mouse house is abuzz with youth and talent this summer. Evan Streams whose has been maintaining our lists and organizing computer files, will be sharing the desk chairs and computer screens with Zachary Wheat, an Emerson College communications student, and Kafesha Thomas, a Wilton High School intern. We are so lucky to have these three bright, willing, young minds keeping us current and efficient.

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Mouse News

Counting down the days..

Bill Bosch is counting down the days until his early retirement from being an educator. He’s chronicling his 55 years in school, including his own schooling, until “School’s Out.” Read his columns each week here: http://goodmenproject.com/?s=Bosch.

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Mouse News

May 21st show live on WPKN, 89.5 FM

Steve Di Costanzo’s “Radio Base Camp” on WPKN, 89.5 FM on the dial and www.wpkn.org streaming or on iTunes will air or 3rd show on Monday, May 21, 2012 at 11pm. The hour-long segment  Mouse in the House is hosted live by both Chadwick and Di Costanzo. A compilation of four pre-recorded stories from previous shows.

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Mouse News

Fairfield County Business Journal

The current issue of FAIRFIELD COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL features MouseMuse Production’s business profile on the FCBuzz Page. “To Make a Long Story Short” summarizes the entertainment and community highlights of Storytelling programs.