...to Santa asking for a short M/M romance story inspired by the image; authors from the group were encouraged to select a letter and write an original tale. The result was an outpouring of creativity that shined a spotlight on the special bond between M/M romance writers and the people who love what they do. This book is an anthology of those letters and stories. Whether you are an avid M/M romance reader or new to the genre, you are in for a delicious treat. So sit back, relax and enjoy Stuff My Stocking: M/M Romance Stories that are Nice and… Naughty. Words of credit and caution… The best things in life, including this ebook, are free. It is distributed as a gift to M/M Romance readers and should not be offered for sale. Each story appears courtesy of its respective author and should not be reproduced without express written consent from the author. If you’d like to write...
Words: 121001 - Pages: 485
...countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window - Holcomb bank. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle...
Words: 124288 - Pages: 498
...countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window - Holcomb bank. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle...
Words: 124288 - Pages: 498
...TIDBITS OF MY LIFE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Ray Jablonski As one grows older and ponders the past one cannot help but wonder what legacy will dwell. Thus, I shall write about the things in my life, big and small that my descendants may wish to know about and perhaps keep in their memory as well. So I shall begin with the earliest history of my life with the ends and odds of the important things I can recall. These tidbits should reveal what my whole life was all about. Perhaps the luckiest and most important day of my life was 6 p.m. on 7 November 1921 (7/11/21), the day I was born. It happened to be that I was the seventh child of thirteen siblings, right smack in the middle. My mother's name was Florence Amelia. It so happened that she was the thirteenth child of her parents, the Zbrowski's. My Zbrowski grandparents were born and married in the western German occupied area of Poland. They had several children there and migrated the family to Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. Florence, my mother, was born there on 19 March 1890. She had six brothers and six sisters. She was very fortunate to have received a good Catholic education and graduated from Common School (eighth grade), which was quite an achievement for a female during the turn of the last century. She was bilingual and could read and write both Polish and English. Her father was a successful tailor and a proprietor of a local saloon at...
Words: 43629 - Pages: 175
...Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis For Billy Fitzgerald I can still hear him shouting at me Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking-had he the gold? or the gold him? —John Ruskin, Unto This Last Preface I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly. At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that, about $40 million. A decade before, the highest payroll...
Words: 101165 - Pages: 405
...Customized for: Isaac (illin@mednet.ucla.edu) THE INTRODUCTION Vault Guide to Schmoozing Customized for: Isaac (illin@mednet.ucla.edu) 2 © 2009 Vault.com, Inc. Introduction What does schmoozing sound like to you? Maybe it sounds smug, unctuous, oily, slimy. It sounds, quite frankly, like 'oozing.' Schmoozing is far from slimy, but 'oozing' actually isn’t a bad description of what a schmoozer does. A schmoozer slides into opportunities where none are apparent, developing friendships from the slightest of acquaintances. Through formless, oozy, schmoozy action, a schmoozer moves slowly but inexorably towards his or her goals. What is schmoozing? Schmoozing is noticing people, connecting with them, keeping in touch with them — and benefiting from relationships with them. Schmoozing is about connecting with people in a mutually productive and pleasurable way — a skill that has taken on new importance in our fragmented, harried, fiber-optic-laced world. Schmoozing is the development of a support system, a web of people you know who you can call, and who can call you, for your mutual benefit and enjoyment. Schmoozing is the art of semi-purposeful conversation: half chatter, half exploration. Schmoozing is neither project nor process. It's a way of life. How does schmoozing differ from networking? Conventional networking is the clammy science of collecting business cards ad infinitum, of cold-calling near strangers to grill them about possible openings in their places...
Words: 76927 - Pages: 308
...Outliers THE S T O R Y OF S U C C E S S MALCOLM G LAD W E L L # 1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink $27.99 $ 3 0 . 9 9 in C a n a d a Why d o s o m e p e o p l e succeed far more than others? T h e r e is a story that is usually told a b o u t extremely successful p e o p l e , a story that focuses o n intelligence a n d ambition. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell a r g u e s that the true story o f s u c c e s s is very different, a n d that if we want to u n d e r s t a n d h o w s o m e p e o p l e thrive, we s h o u l d s p e n d m o r e time l o o k i n g around them — at s u c h things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth d a t e . T h e story o f s u c c e s s is m o r e c o m p l e x — a n d a lot m o r e interesting — than it initially a p p e a r s . Outliers e x p l a i n s w h a t the B e a t l e s a n d Bill G a t e s have in c o m m o n , the e x t r a o r d i n a r y s u c c e s s o f A s i a n s at m a t h , the h i d d e n a d v a n t a g e s o f star athletes, why all t o p N e w York lawyers have the s a m e r é s u m é , a n d the r e a s o n y o u ' v e never h e a r d o f the w o r l d ' s s m a r t e s t m a n — all in terms o f g e n eration, family, c u l t u r e , a n d c l a s s . It matters w h a t year y o u were b o r n if y o u want to b e a S i l i c o n Valley billionaire, G l a d w e l l a r g u e s , a n d it matters w h e r e y o u w e r e b o r n if y o u want to b e a s u c cessful p i l o t . T...
Words: 86962 - Pages: 348
...Bloodlines of Illuminati by: Fritz Springmeier, 1995 Introduction: I am pleased & honored to present this book to those in the world who love the truth. This is a book for lovers of the Truth. This is a book for those who are already familiar with my past writings. An Illuminati Grand Master once said that the world is a stage and we are all actors. Of course this was not an original thought, but it certainly is a way of describing the Illuminati view of how the world works. The people of the world are an audience to which the Illuminati entertain with propaganda. Just one of the thousands of recent examples of this type of acting done for the public was President Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union address. The speech was designed to push all of the warm fuzzy buttons of his listening audience that he could. All the green lights for acceptance were systematically pushed by the President’s speech with the help of a controlled congressional audience. The truth on the other hand doesn’t always tickle the ear and warm the ego of its listeners. The light of truth in this book will be too bright for some people who will want to return to the safe comfort of their darkness. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I deal with real facts, not theory. Some of the people I write about, I have met. Some of the people I expose are alive and very dangerous. The darkness has never liked the light. Yet, many of the secrets of the Illuminati are locked up tightly simply because secrecy is a way...
Words: 206477 - Pages: 826
...A Painted House John Grisham Chapter 1 The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop." They were farmers, hardworking men who embraced pessimism only when discussing the weather and the crops. There was too much sun, or too much rain, or the threat of floods in the lowlands, or the rising prices of seed and fertilizer, or the uncertainties of the markets. On the most perfect of days, my mother would quietly say to me, "Don't worry. The men will find something to worry about." Pappy, my grandfather, was worried about the price for labor when we went searching for the hill people. They were paid for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked. The previous year, according to him, it was $1.50 per hundred. He'd already heard rumors that a farmer over in Lake City was offering $1.60. This played heavily on his mind as we rode to town. He never talked when he drove, and this was because, according to my mother, not much of a driver herself, he was afraid of motorized vehicles. His truck was a 1939 Ford, and with the exception of our old John Deere tractor, it was our sole means of transportation. This was no particular problem except when...
Words: 119442 - Pages: 478
...A Painted House John Grisham Chapter 1 The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop." They were farmers, hardworking men who embraced pessimism only when discussing the weather and the crops. There was too much sun, or too much rain, or the threat of floods in the lowlands, or the rising prices of seed and fertilizer, or the uncertainties of the markets. On the most perfect of days, my mother would quietly say to me, "Don't worry. The men will find something to worry about." Pappy, my grandfather, was worried about the price for labor when we went searching for the hill people. They were paid for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked. The previous year, according to him, it was $1.50 per hundred. He'd already heard rumors that a farmer over in Lake City was offering $1.60. This played heavily on his mind as we rode to town. He never talked when he drove, and this was because, according to my mother, not much of a driver herself, he was afraid of motorized vehicles. His truck was a 1939 Ford, and with the exception of our old John Deere tractor, it was our sole means of transportation. This was no particular problem except when...
Words: 119442 - Pages: 478
...Irvine Welsh Trainspotting IRVINE WELSH works, rests and raves in Edinburgh. He has had a variety of occupations too numerous and too tedious to recount. Trainspotting was his first novel and he has also published a collection of short stories, a novella entitled The Acid House and a second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares. IRVINE WELSH TRAINSPOTTING Minerva Thanks to the following: Lesley Bryce, David Crystal, Margaret Fulton–Cook, janice Galloway, Dave Harrold, Duncan McLean, Kenny McMillan, Sandy Macnair, David Millar, Robin Robertson, Julie Smith, Angela Sullivan, Dave Todd, Hamish Whyte, Kevin Williamson. Versions of the following stories have appeared in other publications: 'The First Day Of The Edinburgh Festival' in Scream If You Want To Go Faster: New Writing Scotland 9 (ASLS), 'Traditional Sunday Breakfast'in DOG (Dec, 1991), 'It Goes Without Saying' in West Coast Magazine No. 11, 'Trainspotting at Leith Central Station' in A Parcel of Rogues (Clocktower Press), 'Grieving and Mourning In Port Sunshine' in Rebel Inc No. 1 and 'Her Man, The Elusive Mr Hunt' and 'Winter In West Granton' in Past Tense (Clocktower Press). The second part of 'Memories of Matty' also appeared in the aforementioned Clocktower Press publication as 'After The Burning'. Contents KICKING – – * THE SKAG BOYS, JEAN–CLAUDE VAN DAMME AND MOTHER SUPERIOR; JUNK DILEMMAS NO. 63; THE FIRST DAY OF THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL; IN OVERDRIVE; GROWING UP IN PUBLIC; VICTORY ON NEW YEAR'S DAY; IT GOES WITHOUT...
Words: 104455 - Pages: 418
...Copyright Salman Rushdie, 1988 All rights reserved VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road, Auckland ro, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc. For Marianne Contents I The Angel Gibreel II Mahound III Ellowen Deeowen IV Ayesha V A City Visible but Unseen VI Return to Jahilia VII The Angel Azraeel VIII The Parting of the Arabian Seas IX A Wonderful Lamp Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon. Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_ I The Angel Gibreel "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...
Words: 195828 - Pages: 784
...FREAKONOMICS A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Revised and Expanded Edition Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner CONTENTS AN EXPLANATORY NOTE In which the origins of this book are clarified. vii PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION xi 1 INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything In which the book’s central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong . . . How “experts”— from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts . . . Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life . . . What is “freakonomics,” anyway? 1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? 15 In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side—cheating. Contents Who cheats? Just about everyone . . . How cheaters cheat, and how to catch them . . . Stories from an Israeli day-care center . . . The sudden disappearance of seven million American children . . . Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago . . . Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win . . . Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? . . . What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think. 2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? 49 In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information,...
Words: 105214 - Pages: 421
...Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, 317-572-3447, fax 317-572-4355, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER...
Words: 125743 - Pages: 503
...OF SMA L L B U S I N E S S BIG BOOK THE Y O U D O N ’ T H AV E T O R U N Y O U R B U S I N E S S B Y T H E S E AT O F Y O U R P A N T S TO M G E GAX with Phil Bolsta Previously published as By the Seat of Your Pants This book is dedicated to my father, Bill, an old soldier who battles every day to overcome a horrendous stroke. He was a model enlightened entrepreneur, a fact that took me years to appreciate. His compassion with his employees and dedication to service inspired me to be a better businessman and a better person. When I was growing up, he liked to say, “Son, the most important word in the English language is ‘empathy.’ ” When I told him I was starting a business, his first words were, “Always treat your employees right.” He learned that appreciation the hard way, losing his father at a young age and countless war buddies in the trenches. But his love for God, country, and his fellow citizens never wavered. This one’s for you, Dad. CONTENTS Foreword by Richard Schulze, Found er and Chair man, Best Buy ix Introduction: Living by the Seat of My Pants: A Jour ney from Clueless to Cashing In xi PART I Setting Up Shop: What Ever y Budding Entrepreneur Needs to Know 1 1. Make Up Your Mind: Uncommon Factors to Consider Before Quitting Your Day Job 2. Research the Market: Analyzing the Data to Determine Your Niche 3. Write the Business Plan: Building Your Blueprint for Success 4. Find Funding: Raising Capital Without Relinquishing...
Words: 130379 - Pages: 522
