Tasty Snails vs. Espresso Books (and genre crossing)

My friend Louise introduced me to a VERY DANGEROUS website. It is called Food Gawker, and it seems to troll the internet for cool blogs about food.

Here's a photo that was bubbling at the top of the pic gallery today.



I ask you. Does food get cuter than that? Bless her little macaron-making heart.

So I have been stuck there, clicking over and looking at recipes for chocolate cake (which I'm going to make and enter in the county fair this weekend, good luck to me!) and all kinds of other beautiful, deliciousness.

Meanwhile, I have also been reading a MS for a friend. She is writing out of her genre, and it's amazing how versatile some writers can be. I'm really happy to see the different sides of writers' personalities emerge. Yes, I think the voice for most writers is pretty constant--I can hear her romance side sneaking through in this great YA dystopian story--which I think is what makes readers for the most part not mind when writers cross genre lines. There are some writers I'd read whatever they wrote, no matter the genre (almost. I mean, I do have some limitations on what I won't read.)

I also got a load of something really innovative and interesting today. It's called the Espresso Book Machine. From the writerswrite blog:

"The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Trachtenberg discusses the expansion of On Demand Books' Espresso Book Machine, a desk-sized device that quickly prints out black-and-white paperbacks with color covers. Jeffrey says he printed his own book in four minutes."

Click on the link to see the machine.

Huh. How would that be? It might change things. And book publishing would no longer be for the snails. Yummy snails. Mmm!