by Suzi Elton

When you do your business writing, consider incorporating the principle of Excite, Delight and Entice. What this means is that you emotionalize your writing in such way that your readers cannot only picture themselves living a more satisfactory life, but can feel the excitement and satisfaction they would have. This produces a strong pull to explore working with you. In effect, they say to themselves, “If s/he knows enough about what I want to write like this – like they know me and my problems – I REALLY want to talk to them about what they do.”

If you look back over the course of history, what started as a trickle of inventions has turned into a waterfall. Imagine it: first came fire, then five thousand years later the wheel, then a thousand years later the plow, then five hundred years later the printing press, then a hundred years later the telescope. Now, every day brings new inventions and advancements in previous inventions.

The internet is one of the more recent developments when you look at the timeline and it has been fascinating to watch it morph from a data transfer technology into a realm of unspeakable possibilities.

Great news! OG’s Speculative Fiction, Issue 22 has been released! In Dawn Lloyd’s “Mr. Pinenut” a man gets a second chance at love, but does he take it? Benjamin Crowell’s “Fork” will rearrange your thinking on alternate realities. Also included is poetry by Marina Lee Sable. Let us know what you think of the issue! Don’t miss our other issues of OG’s Speculative Fiction if you haven’t read them.

The most gifted item this past year? The Amazon Kindle.

Years ago, I bought a Palm Tungsten C, which at the time was on the forefront of the technology frontier. It was a fantastic little device that could connect to the internet, manage a calendar, play videos, listen to music, play video games, and had more than 10,000 other little applications that programmers made for it. It could also do one other thing: read ebooks. This was long before the PDA smartphone really got going, when netbooks were just a dream.

Some years ago I played baseball in Japan. If you looked at our team, you wouldn’t think much of us. Our team was a collection of older office workers and a couple husbands who had put on a few pounds around the waist over the years and one tall gangly American. We looked like an easy win, but for three years our team was one of the best in the league and always had a chance to advance to the national tournament.