N.S. Dolkart's Blog, page 5

Book Giveaway!

Hey everybody,

I’m giving away a free signed copy of Silent Hall! If you live in the US, you can throw your name in the proverbial hat and then perhaps one fine day you’ll get a lovely surprise in the mail. Check it out!

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Silent Hall
by N.S. Dolkart

Giveaway ends July 21, 2016.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Guest Post: My Favorite Tropes to Subvert by N.S. Dolkart

Hello folks,

I know you all are likely busy doing very busy internetty things, but let me briefly point your attention to a guest post I did at My Life, My Books, My Escape. I suspect you will enjoy it…

Source: Guest Post: My Favorite Tropes to Subvert by N.S. Dolkart

Listen in to Hour of the Wolf!

It’s been a busy few weeks what with the book launch and three subsequent reading/signing events, but I had to make time to let you all know that you can hear me live on the radio tonight (or technically tomorrow morning) from 1:30-3:00am EDT on Hour of the Wolf! Hour of the Wolf airs on 99.5 FM for those in the NY/NJ area, and streams online at wbai.org. Depending on your time zone, you might not even need to stay up late!

Also, the show takes callers. If you have any questions for me, I’d love to hear from you!

Interview at the Qwillery

It’s the day before Silent Hall comes out in the US, and the Qwillery has posted an interview we did together, covering such questions as how I decided to become an author, and which characters were hardest or easiest to write. Check it out!

Interview at Strange Alliances: “N. S. Dolkart on crafting imaginary worlds”

N. S. Dolkart’s début novel is indeed remarkable, but what is going on under the hood that makes it stand out? The following interview is a fascinating insight into how a fantasy novel is transform…

Source: N. S. Dolkart on crafting imaginary worlds

A message to the Bernie-or-Bust crowd: Your revolution’s success is conditional on Hillary Clinton winning.

A lot has been made about how Bernie Sanders’ coalition, built almost entirely out of people under 40, is the future of the Democratic party and quite possibly the country. Journalists and “journalists” across the political spectrum all seem to agree on one thing: Hillary Clinton may win this battle, but Bernie Sanders will almost certainly win the war.

There’s just one problem with this analysis: the whole scenario is conditional upon Hillary Clinton becoming the next President of the United States.

“Nonsense!” you cry. “A leftist America is inevitable! The old politics is dead, or at least will be soon!”

Well, consider this: the next president may well choose three or even four more Supreme Court justices. Have you seen what a right-wing court did to voting rights in the last few years? Now imagine if Donald Trump the replacements for Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Notorious RBG. Welcome to “swing” justice Samuel Alito, my friends. John Roberts would be considered part of the “liberal” wing.

Watch the entire Voting Rights Act be ruled unconstitutional, alongside the Civil Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, Violence Against Women Act, Title IX, you name it. States will have the ability to restrict voting rights however they please. Poll taxes? Sure. ID laws that accept only NRA or AARP membership cards as valid forms of ID? Hey, whatever. States’ rights are paramount, man.

Am I being hyperbolic? I wouldn’t count on it. The Court was itching to strike down the entire VRA before Scalia died, and had already lined up cases that would allow them to basically end unionization forever. You think Sanders voters and their priorities are the future of the country? Not with a 7-2 conservative Supreme Court, they’re not. Watch millions of Democratic voters get mysteriously dropped from voting rolls without any hope of winning a lawsuit to reinstate their voting rights. Did you see that story about the post-ID-law closing of DMV’s in minority neighborhoods in Alabama? Expect a lot more of that.

But hey, at least after four to eight years of Donald Trump, the country will be ready for political revolution, right? Hahahahahahahaha, no.

By then, expect electoral votes to be allocated by congressional district nationwide, with the principle of One Person, One Vote out the window and no restrictions on how gerrymandered districts are allowed to be. Today, Republicans have total control (legislatures + governors) over 24 states’ governments – Democrats have total control over seven. Expect those numbers to be enshrined forevermore.

So look, if Sanders were actually winning the Democratic nomination (and I know some people have some pretty fanciful notions on that front), this article would be directed at intransigent Hillary supporters. But he’s not, he’s losing, and it’s his supporters who are threatening to vote Trump or third-party or write in Sanders’ name or spend voting day at home trying to build a time machine or whatever.

To those people, I say this: if you care about any liberal or left-wing cause at all, you cannot stand by and watch Donald Trump win. Vote for Sanders in the primary – it’s your right and your obligation to vote for the person you think would make the best president. But if you ever want your vote to count again, a Democrat must become the next President of the United States. And let’s face it, that Democrat is going to be Hillary Clinton.

***

N.S. Dolkart is the author of Silent Hall, available for pre-order at any bookstore in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand. It’s coming out on June 7th, and it’s really good. You should buy it.

My book arrives

It turned out to be a surprisingly good day.

A Rant About Nursing Home Volunteers

Note: I work as an Assistant Activities Director in a not-for-profit nursing facility. I love my work, and I love the people I work with. We have many volunteers who visit and do a tremendous amount of good for our elderly residents. This is a rant about the ones that are less helpful. Especially Brownie troops.

Brownie troops are the worst.

They call you up three weeks before Christmas and tell you they want to come caroling for your residents. What time works for you? Well, let’s see, it’s already December, so the monthly activity calendar was finalized over a week ago and is literally up on the walls in every unit, but I guess we could squeeze you in at 2:30 on the 17th. “Um, I’m not sure that time works for the other parents – could we do 1pm on the 20th instead?” No. No, you can’t. The residents are eating lunch at that time. “Well how about 3pm on the 19th?” Nope, we’re having a concert then. We booked it in March. Look, if you wanted to have your pick of dates and times, you might have at least contacted us in November.

This generally goes on for a while. Eventually, the troop leader will convince you to let the kids come in to sing right after lunch on some totally inconvenient date, and you’ll resign yourself to having to gather an audience for them while the kitchen staff is still using the elevator. You tell them it’ll be a smallish crowd, since you’ll only be able to invite the one unit, but you’ll make it work.

But here’s the thing: it’s really really sad to have only four residents in a room, two of them sleeping, when a group comes in to perform for them. So you pull out all the stops, invite everyone on the damn floor, convince them to postpone their afternoon naps, and get a pretty decent crowd all lined up in rows in the dining room, waiting for a show.

Then the troop shows up late.

And sings for ten minutes.

Really badly.

The parents all take photos and videos of their adorable children doing their godawful rendition of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer so that they can show all their unwilling friends and family how cute little Flaelin was, bringing Christmas cheer to the poor souls in the nursing home. Then they leave, patting themselves and their kids on the back. We did it! Our good deed for the year is done.

This happens every Christmas season, and it drives me up the bleeping wall.

Look, nursing homes thrive on good volunteers. Even the very best staff-to-patient ratio is just not high enough for us to visit every resident every day and spend even a solid half hour or so with each one. I mean, the nursing department certainly spends its time with each and every resident, but giving you your Lasix and changing your foot wraps and taking you to the bathroom aren’t what most of us would call quality time. The activities department can entertain those who are willing to leave their rooms for our programming, but we are in constant need of volunteers to visit the people who prefer to just sit and talk to someone while watching Bonanza out of the corner of one eye. We also need people who can help us with transportation, so that we can invite more people to concerts or other fun activities and maybe even spend a few minutes convincing a shut-in that it’s worth leaving their room for once. As it is, we often have to take the first “no” as our final answer, because otherwise it would take us forty-five minutes to gather twelve residents.

So yes, we want volunteers. We NEED volunteers! But we don’t need Brownie troops.

I’m not just talking about literal Brownie troops here, mind you. Whatever their issues, they tend to only contact us in the last two months of the year. I mean people who act like Brownie troops, volunteers who:

Expect you to accommodate their schedule rather than the other way around,
Aren’t actually helpful, and
Insist on patting themselves on the back because they, out of the goodness of their hearts, have visited a nursing home.

There are always a few of these. There are some who ‘volunteer’ because they love having a captive audience that has to listen to their dreadful, repetitive jokes day in and day out. They complain that you started bingo without them, never mind that they showed up forty-five minutes late and didn’t tell anyone they were coming, and they think they’re joking, but there isn’t anything remotely funny about being complained at for no reason. Now, these people can be genuinely helpful too, but you still die inside a little bit when you see them coming down the hall.

There are the people who have no real interest in helping, but need community service hours. Community service is great if you’re going to be truly helpful while you’re here, but for the love of all that’s good and holy, don’t expect us to babysit you. Volunteers who aren’t just dropping by to put on a one-time show need to be oriented, they need to pass a TB skin test and a CORI check, and they need a good deal of initial instruction on what to do and how to handle certain situations. If they go on to do good work, this is all worth it. But often they don’t, and if you generate more work than you put in, you’re actually draining our resources in order to tell the world that you’ve been doing good deeds.

Then there is the Interrupting Do-Gooder. The Interrupting Do-Gooder shows up in the middle of your trivia game, sing-along, or current events discussion, and loudly greets Every. Single. Resident. He vaguely acknowledges the disruption he is causing, but still proceeds to loudly tell the lady in the corner all about his daughter’s gall bladder surgery. He knows she’s a little deaf, so he has to speak extra loud. Wouldn’t want Mabel to miss all the important details. Then he leaves to visit some people in their rooms, which is a genuinely wonderful thing, but it makes you wonder why he didn’t visit those people first when he saw that folks were already having a good time in the group activity. In fact, the more you think about it, the more it infuriates you. How clueless can a guy be? And of course, he always does his interrupting with that classic Brownie troop attitude: I’m here to cheer people up. I’ve done my job. I’m a great person!

I have been working in activities for nearly seven years now, and I love it. My job is essentially to make friends with people, to keep them occupied and entertained, but also to make sure they feel understood. Loneliness has been demonstrated to cause massive physical and psychological harm to elders, and in a medical system devoted to keeping people alive at all costs, activities professionals are sometimes the only ones whose job is to make all that longevity worthwhile. Volunteers can support that goal in really useful and essential ways.

Even Brownie troops can have their place. Most residents love spending time with kids. The trouble comes when parents and leaders expect maximal accommodation for a truly minimal contribution. Since gathering an audience isn’t worth it for a ten or fifteen minute performance, it would be better if groups with young kids would arrange with us to visit room-to-room, spreading cheer by telling residents about school, troop activities, favorite colors, whatever. A little bit of singing won’t do anyone any harm, but let’s face it: the pleasure of watching a Brownie troop sing Christmas carols isn’t really about the music, which often has very little merit of its own. The pleasure comes from watching little kids be cute, no talent show required.

But seriously, don’t call us after Thanksgiving unless you want to visit in January.

***

N.S. Dolkart is the author of Silent Hall, available for pre-order at any bookstore in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand. It’s coming out in June, and it’s really good. You should buy it.

If you are interested in getting a signed copy, check out the events on my News page.

Excerpt and Review!

What an exciting day this is! Silent Hall has just received its first review, and what a review! I’m extremely flattered, and look forward to everyone getting a chance to read it!

Speaking of which…the Civilian Reader has kindly agreed to post an excerpt! If you want to read the first two chapters, which introduce two of my five main characters, you can do so here!

Seriously, it’s been a great day.

Bedtime Routine for a Thursday Evening

Whose juice this is I think I know

She doesn’t want to drink it, though

And now it’s time to brush our teeth

So I’ll just down it ere I go



My lovely wife must think it queer

To drink this juice, instead of beer

When for two hours I’ve complained

That I need six stiff drinks or so

But bedtime will not wait for booze

And our girl still has books to choose

I’ll read to her again tonight –

A dad must pay his parent dues

The darkness now is thick and deep

But I can’t leave or she will weep

There’s songs to sing before she’ll sleep

More songs to sing before she’ll sleep