I find historical accounts like this highly entertaining! 🙂
Feast Day of St. Arnulph of Soissons, an 11th-century French patron of brewers. In the year 1612, brewers John Kempster and John Byrd of Bayton, Worcestershire, were charged with making beer “too well,” and selling it at their pubs for only a penny a pint. According to a petition signed by neighbors, they did “make it so extraordynarye strong that it draweth divers idle persons into the alehouses, by reason whereof sondrye assaults, affrayes, blodshedds, and other misdemeanors are there daylie comytted by idle and droncken companie, which do thither resort and there continue in their dronckenes. Also divers men’s sonnes and servants do often resort and continue drinking in the said houses day and night, whereupon divers disorders and abuses are offered to the inhabitants of Bayton, as in throwing men’s waynes [wagons], plowes, and such like things into pooles, wells, and other bye places.” from Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English 365 Day Calendar of Vanishing Vocabulary and Folklore for 2009
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from Write to Done
7 Ways to Use Brain Science to Hook Readers and Reel Them In
“In the same way that food tastes good so we’ll eat it, stories are

photo credit: perpetualplum via photo pin cc
entertaining so we’ll pay attention to them. But for writers the real breakthrough is the discovery of what triggers that delicious sense of enjoyment we feel when a story hooks us. It’s not lyrical language, great characters, realistic dialogue, or vivid images. Nope.”
Click the link to find the secret formula. 😉
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from Nathan Bransford
No, You Shouldn’t Send Your Tweets to Facebook
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Finding Timely Images for Topical Blog Posts
“As you all know, you cannot have your hands in the Google Image cookie
jar without expecting some kind of retribution from the original owner, and of course some of those images are not licensed beyond the site they are on. So using Google Images for topical blog posts is pretty much a financial suicide mission. You also can’t just lift an image from a news site saying “kindly borrowed from xxx” – that’s still image theft and you can still be taken to court, found guilty and punished heavily.”
Here’s the answer! Find out where you can get Creative Commons images and how to properly attribute them.
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And while I was at For Bloggers By Bloggers…
Read, Savour, Comment, Share – Your Four Step Guide to Blogging Success
…jumped out at me. If you have a blog and feel like it’s going nowhere, these tips might be your answer to having the most successful blog on the block.
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from Author Salon
A SMART DOSE OF ANTAGONISTIC FORCE
“What chances do you as a writer have of getting your novel manuscript, regardless of genre, commercially published if the story and narrative therein fail to meet reader demands for sufficient suspense, character concern, and conflict?”