Stormy's Sidekicks. They're real and they're spectacular!

It's time to introduce the most wonderful team a Co-Host could ask for!

I would let Stormy do it, but he's under a few more inches of new snow. I may or may not dig him out.


Sarah Foster from The Faux Fountain Pen! Sarah is a writer, reader, blogger and cupcake maker extraordinaire. She's very funny and doesn't give herself enough credit about her writing or her charm. She's been a great support to many on the Insecure Writer's Support Group and to me on my blog. Thanks for hookin' me up with your awesomeness, Sarah!



Jennifer L. Hawes from The Writing Game! Jennifer is the author of Free Runner, mother of two teenagers, photographer and former teacher. When she's not driving her sons around like a taxi driver, she's hard at work on her new novel.

Diana Gordon from Part Time Monster! This is a collaborative blog that's described as '...a community of monsters.' They talk about book, games, TV shows, movies, music, gaming and much, much more. Diana's super smart and already been a big help! I appreciate her willingness to jump in with both feet!

Let's give our friends a big mushy welcome hug! Thanks for joining my team!


(mmphhffpm)

What was that Stormy?

(mpfhgmmph)

Okay, I'll get the shovel.


Have you joined the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge yet?




Heather M. Gardner

Blog: The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Twitter: @hmgardner

Facebook: Facebook/HeatherWritesRomance

Goodreads: HMGardner

Co-Host: Blogging from A to Z April Challenge

Member: Insecure Writer's Support Group

Member: Blog Blitz 2.0

Super Massive Black Holes and Other Cool Stuff

Yes, black holes are in the news again. Bigger and badder and better than ever. It is generally accepted that at the core of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole (SMBH). These behemoths are many times the size of ordinary black holes. 

And unlike your garden-variety stellar-mass black hole, supermassive black holes didn’t form from a collapsing star; rather, they formed.... well, we actually don’t know how they formed. But we do know just how big they are. An ordinary black hole can have about five to several tens of times the mass of the Sun (solar masses), where our own galaxy’s SMBH has about four million solar masses. 

We know they're out there, but we don't know how they got there. A new SMBH has now been discovered with about twelve billion solar masses. By itself, that’s not unprecedented; others have been discovered with roughly the same mass. 

What’s astounding about the new discovery is the extreme distance of the SMBH—about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth—and hence, how quickly after the Big Bang it formed. To form within the first 875 million years of the Universe’s history, or a mere six percent of its age, has scientists scratching their heads as to how this could be. The more we discover, the more questions we end up with. Reference 

Did You Know: Scientists believe there are rogue black holes wandering around out there travelling, perhaps hundreds in our Milky Way Galaxy. Let’s hope one doesn’t come our way. That would be a bad day for our solar system. 

But Wait, That’s Not All: Astronomers have spotted what appear to be two super massive black holes at the heart of a remote galaxy, circling each other like dance partners. The incredibly rare sighting was made with the help of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Let’s hope there are no rogue binary super massive blacks holes wandering around out there. 

Finally: I’m working on cover art for my latest book Salem’s Daughters and would greatly appreciate it if you could stop by my blog and give me your opinion on the three concepts I have. Thanks and hope you enjoyed today’s post. 

You can visit Stephen Tremp at his Website Breakthrough Blogs. Stop by Friday through Sunday for the Weekend Follies, a great way to get a few laughs as you wind down the work week.

Simulcasting Your Wordpress Blog On Blogger

I have two blogs... okay, I have one blog, The Sound Of One Hand Typing, and I simulcast it on a second blog, The Sound Of One Hand Typing FM. The difference between the two blogs is that the first runs on the Wordpress platform, the second on Blogger.
Why do I do this? A few reasons:

• Being a technical person at heart, I wanted to see if I could do it, and if so, what differences there would be between the more-familiar Wordpress platform and the Blogger platform.
• I wanted to increase my outreach. I went with Wordpress because it was easier to move to a self-hosted blog when I felt the time was right, and I liked its editor better. Still, I knew that Blogger was the more popular platform, and I also knew I probably wasn't getting my name out to Blogger users as well as to the Wordpress ones.

I wanted to make it easier for people to comment. It's easier to comment on a Wordpress blog if you're a Wordpress user, just as it's easier for Blogger users to comment on Blogger. The alternatives (e.g. moving commenting to Facebook, installing a third-party commenting tool like Disqus) were either impractical or impossible, and they would alienate people, what I wanted to avoid in the firsst place.
You're probably thinking I do a lot of work to maintain two blogs, but I don't, because I have help: If This Then That, IFTTT (rhymes with "gift") for short. IFTTT uses recipes that consist of triggers ("this") and actions ("that"), like this one:
If there's a new post on the Wordpress blog, post it on the Blogger blog.
Here's a video that shows how the process works.

So, I can use the Wordpress editor I like, write and publish my articles, and IFTTT takes care of reposting on the Blogger side. Usually...
There's a lot more technical information that I'll post on my websites (along with a few "gotcha"s), but that's an overview of how I'm doing it. Feel free to contact me on this blog, either of my blogs, or on Facebook or Twitter with comments, questions, complaints, deep thoughts, bowling scores, or just if you'd like to say howdy. ETA: The technical post is now up on my blog; you can find it here.