Why TishBoyle.Com?  Seemed like a good idea at the time - establish a personal web presence with a soupçon of commercialism (Buy my books! Hire me!) and hope something good happens. Now that it's been up for a while, it’s taken on a life of its own.  To be honest, we're still waiting for this presence to generate a dollar in sales, job offers, or interesting proposals.

Features:  How does TishBoyle.Com differ from the pack? It doesn't. Almost everything you'd expect is here: Home page = home; Products = recipes, in print, get books, critics; About = daytime, jobs, bio; News = now; about; Photos (or Gallery) = action pix, etc. ... Not that impressive, but we've got some top links like the New Jersey Turnpike and the Empire State Building. Deliberately omitted are "guest book," "members," "calendar," “notify,” "wish list," and the like. Some stuff is too cornball even for us.

Design:  This site has no original or advanced design attributes. Its homemade, amateurish look slavishly imitates templates used for building the lowest personal sites. These templates are generally created for peppy beginners (Hi Kids! Welcome to My Website! See My Photo Album. See My Favorite Links!).

 We concede that pages tend to be off-center, lack uniformity, and load slowly due to careless design. You won't find cascading style sheets, frames, dynamic html, transitions, blinking text, proprietary themes, animations, or other special effects* here any time soon.

Graphics:  In keeping with our low-rent design philosophy, we've tried to stay with generic graphics. Most have been around so long that no one knows who created them. We suspect their authors have long since moved into retirement communities, have died of old age, or have gone mad. But, if our suspicion is incorrect, read on below …

Graphics with Hyperlinks:  Sometimes they're present, sometimes not, depending on whether we can find anything interesting to link to. To check, pass your cursor over the graphic or text to see whether the little  white hand  appears and replaces the cursor arrow.

Credits:  Some 'Net professionals have strong proprietary views about graphics and design themes they've created. If we've inadvertently appropriated yours and hurt your feelings (or worse), please accept our apologies in lieu of filing suit.

Blame:  If visitors detect an underlying theme that owes more to whimsy than to gravity, it's our husband’s fault.

Privacy Policy:  We strongly endorse privacy. To be sure, we'd be tempted to covertly collect, track and sell information about visits to this site to the highest bidder if it were worthwhile.  But relax - it's not, we don't, and we won't - our consciences and attorneys won't let us.

About Specific Pages:

OFFICIAL HEADQUARTERS: Official? How about pompous. We’re not exactly proud of this page, but we had to start somewhere. At a minimum, it establishes a few central facts (OK, gilded a bit) that visitors may remember without going any further. The Canadian flag? An expression of solidarity with our current publisher (John Wiley & Sons), which has a branch office in Toronto, and pays attention to its Canadian customers. Also, Dad was born and raised in Canada.

VISION:  The overdone mission and vision info presented here is a direct result of observing the p.r. activities of our husband's employer - often viewed as a bloated, slogan-spouting behemoth that routinely substitutes platitudes for accomplishments.

SURF:  This is our favorite page. Even if we lack originality or functionality, others don't.

CRITICS:  All of this is true. Honest. Of course, some use of ellipsis was necessary to conserve space (e.g. "under no circumstances should you buy this book!" was shortened to become: "…buy this book!").

READERS:  Here, we simply pasted in the review captions that appear on Amazon. Unless you read Japanese, you're going to have to copy Japanese reviews from Amazon's Japanese site and paste them into a translator (see http://babel.altavista.com/). Trust us, you'll find the results to be entertaining.

READERS & CRITICS:  Where the rubber hits the road, identical to the case of readers and professional critics. All of these guys are important to serious writers, no matter what they say (ever heard this one: "I don't pay attention to what anyone thinks; I write for my own satisfaction."?)

RANTS:  Ever evolving and in danger of overwhelming the site.

ACTION PIX:  We can't really explain what we're doing here - other than wanting to avoid creating a formal photo gallery. Since the page title is redolent of many porn site solicitations, it may disillusion some or trigger net nanny-type software.  Additional photos will become available at some point.

*Exception pages: this animated .gif was too hard to resist. And this one, and this one, too.