Phyllis Zimbler Miller's Blog: Phyllis Zimbler Miller Author, page 7

Learning to Write Emotional Pitches

Novella on Wattpad of dystopian sci fi screenplay THE MOTHER SIEGE

Roadmap Writers is an online site for screenwriters, and I have taken several paid courses via this site. Most recently I took a two-session course MARKETING YOUR SCRIPT taught by Ben Everard, executive producer of the horror film LIGHTS OUT. Everard provided extremely valuable insights including the importance of getting emotion into pitches. After two weeks of Everard’s coaching, below is the pitch that I wrote for my sci fi thriller THE MOTHER SIEGE:

THE MOTHER SIEGE is a sci fi thriller — think GATTACA meets CHILDREN OF MEN.

Adapted from my sci fi novella, THE MOTHER SIEGE was partly inspired by my own experiences as the mother of a child with health issues. I wanted to explore how the current advances in genetic engineering and government monitoring could go wrong.

In the near future of THE MOTHER SIEGE a corporation has figured out how to completely encapsulate a large portion of the U.S. In the 20 years that the corporation has controlled this land mass, government sperm banks have been set up to provide women with two live births, and fathers are now totally anonymous.

As the story opens, the next step of total mind control has just been announced. Mothers must surrender all their children from ages six months to 18 years to government propaganda centers where the children will be totally cut off from any contact with their mothers.

One mother — a pediatrician who has hid her undocumented asthmatic child since the child’s birth — dares to resist. (Think Charlize Theron or Angelina Jolie.) She bands together with two other mothers — including a surveillance expert (think Gina Torres) — and a mother-to-be to escape with their children from the encapsulated land mass.

The mothers must risk their own lives and those of their children without knowing what, if anything, exists outside the encapsulated land mass.

And if they do manage to escape to “something,” will they only be jumping from the frying pan into the fire?

If you want to read the actual screenplay of THE MOTHER SIEGE on Amazon Studios, click here. Or read the novella of THE MOTHER SIEGE on Wattpad at http:/budurl.com/MSintro

Click here to learn about Roadmap Writers courses and contests (NOT an affiliate link).

© 2018 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

The Seven Essential Tips for Marketing in Today’s 24/7 Digital World

Business Express Press has now published my article “The Seven Essential Tips for Marketing in Today’s 24/7 Digital World” at budurl.me/7marketingtips and here is the first point as excerpted from the article:
1. Marketing Is Not Sales

While sales are very important to a business (or donations to a nonprofit organization), usually there are few sales if no one knows about your products or services. And that’s where marketing comes into the picture. Marketing is everything you legitimately do inside and outside your organization to get your products and services in front of the people who want and need what you have on offer.

Yet in my experience there is often confusion over the two areas of sales and marketing. Let’s look at an example to clarify the difference:

Imagine you have a tech company for which your sales team members give one-to-one online demonstrations of the product. While a subset of marketing takes place during the demonstration – “Our product performs faster than our competitors’ products,” the actual demonstration is a sales activity done as a follow up to marketing efforts that first brought your product to the attention of the potential buyer.

This is why marketing must be considered from day one of the creation of any new business or the introduction of any new product or service. It’s not enough to have the greatest new product or service. You first need to figure out who will want or need this great new creation and how you will get it in front of these specific people.

For the purposes of this discussion I’m assuming you may not have the largest marketing budget in the world, and this reality can lead to the downfall of many businesses with great products or services. If you know that you will be going up against competitors with huge marketing/advertising budgets, you have to figure out – before you ever invest money creating your products or services – how you will get the attention of your potential buyers in spite of a limited marketing budget compared to your competitors.

A cautionary note about competitors: You may believe you have no competitors in the whole world because your product – at this moment in time – does something that no one else’s similar product does. Yet here’s the rub: Do your targeted audiences understand that your product is the only one that does such-and-such? Or to your targeted audiences does your product seem not much different than that of the competition?

The first step in optimizing the marketing functions of your company is to understand for whom your products and services are best suited so that you can then know to whom to market.

Click here for all seven essential tips:


Marketing Is Not Sales
Your Products and Services Are Not for Everyone
What’s in a Name?
Your Website Is Your 24/7 Public Face
Social Media Is for Sharing and Social Proof
Make It Easy for Your Target Audiences to Say Yes
Everything Is Marketing

© 2018 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

Reported Sexual Assaults in U.S. Military at All-Time High

The December 29, 2017, print edition of The Wall Street Journal article “Assault Reports Rise in Military” by Ben Kesling begins:

Reported sexual assaults in the military are at an all-time high as the Pentagon wrestles with a problem officials say has only recently been addressed and critics say hasn’t been fully recognized.

The depth and persistence of the military’s problem has taken on new relevance this year as allegations of sexual assault and harassment have rocked other parts of society, including business, entertainment and politics.

The online version of this article, posted December 28, 2017, with the headline “Sexual Assault in Military Isn’t Going Away as a Problem” is a more complete article and includes these fuller paragraphs:

Many harassment victims said they still think nothing will be done if they make a complaint, according to a 2014 Rand survey.

The majority of women who step forward said they have faced retaliation, said Lydia Watts, CEO of the Service Women’s Action Network. She added that the military still has a culture of complicity that also protects offenders.

“People who would never commit a sexual assault feel justified in saying, ‘Why did you ruin my buddy’s career?’ ’’ she said, adding that peers need to speak up when they see wrongdoing. “If you’re observing this behavior, it’s not enough to just say, ‘Hey, don’t go have a drink with him alone.’ ’’

While sexual assault in the military is not news to me, the fact of an all-time high — years after this issue was brought to public attention — is very upsetting. Clearly environments that allow for sexual harassment and assault of both women and men are systemic throughout civilian and military society.

BlogTalkRadio show and documentary THE INVISIBLE WAR

On the BlogTalkRadio show “Your Military Life” that I co-hosted for a year starting in November 2008, my co-host and I interviewed a former female Army soldier who had been raped while she was the teen daughter of an enlisted man and then raped when she herself was enlisted. Both perpetrators were military personnel.

And on my site FilmsThatSupportOurTroops.com I have a page about THE INVISIBLE WAR — a compelling documentary about rape in the military. The page’s intro is:

The documentary THE INVISIBLE WAR produced by Tanner King Barklow and Amy Ziering — shown at Sundance 2012 — is a powerful film about the high incidence of rape in the U.S. military — rape that often goes unchallenged and unpunished.

Click here to watch the trailer of the documentary THE INVISIBLE WAR.

And click here for the entire documentary available to stream on Amazon. 

THE MISSISSIPPI DIVIDE near future sci fi book series project

Partly to work off my feelings of being helpless in this ongoing epidemic of sexual harassment and assault, I have just written a feature film screenplay — THE TRUTHFINDER — set in 2030 to discuss some of the issues in the “he said, she said” scenario.

The script is set in the near future sci fi universe on which I have already been working. I am now developing a sci fi book series THE MISSISSIPPI DIVIDE that will incorporate THE TRUTHFINDER script into the first book of the series.

I do believe that fiction can help change people’s perspectives on important issues in ways that training sessions and company rules cannot achieve. This is because fiction with its emotional portrayals can more effectively resonate than purely information programs.

Click here to read the proposal for my near future sci fi series THE MISSISSIPPI DIVIDE.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

Creating Diversity in Films and TV Starts With Mentoring High School Students

It is getting to be Oscar season in Los Angeles. On a shuttle ride from an auto servicing location, I shared opinions of new movies with one of the other riders, clearly a Hollywood insider from his comments including which films had the best Oscar chances. As he was African-American, I was reminded once again of the lack of diversity in Hollywood as represented by the awareness campaign #OscarsSoWhite.

The diversity issues cover two important areas:

More opportunities for diverse actors, writers, directors, producers, make-up artists, set designers, etc.
More opportunities for portrayal of diverse stories on screen, which can foster understanding among different communities.

In the CBC News article “For a more diverse Oscars, Hollywood must go back to high school” by Kim Brunhuber posted February 26, 2017, then 17-year-old Kimberly Villaseñor talked about her mentoring experience at an LA inner-city high school.

Till now, she imagined that few successful directors of photography were regularly jolted awake by gunshots. But now she feels that her background isn’t a drawback, it’s an asset.

“Because then I have a connection, I have a story to tell,” Villaseñor says. “Everything in movies is fake, but when you see, these (mentors) are real people, you see these are actually jobs that I can do myself.”

The CBC news article also talks about Film2Future, a nonprofit program mentoring LA inner-city high school students interested in the entertainment industry and founded by Rachel Miller (full disclosure: she’s my older daughter). Film2Future has now run two summer programs and is working on funding for future programs.

If you want to help inner-city high school students have a possible future in the entertainment industry, consider donating to Film2Future.

Click here to learn more about the Film2Future.com program.

Click here to read the entire CBC article about mentoring inner-city high school students.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault, and the Future of Truth

Before I go any further in this blog post, let me clearly state my position: As a long-time feminist I am quite aware of many of the sexual harassment and assault issues women face on a daily basis — yet I am also aware that, as in any case of “he said, she said” with no reliable witnesses, not everything is crystal clear.

I have also read Arthur Miller’s play THE CRUCIBLE, a fictionalized account of the real-life Salem witch trials of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692/93. Miller’s play was first performed in 1953 and Salem was a stand-in for the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Although powerful men in many walks of life have been getting away with despicable sexual language and acts against women, there is always the risk of going overboard and “tarring the innocent with the same brush.”

While pondering how to determine the truth in cases without reliable witnesses, I saw a screenplay listing asking for single location film scripts.

My first thought was that I couldn’t think of a topic for a single location film story. Then I realized that, using the near future sci fi universe I had already been developing as well as recent news out of China about citizen monitoring, I could write a sci fi script set in 2030 about finding the truth.

THE TRUTHFINDER is the result, and I wrote and revised it in one week, fueled by the news each day of another man or men whose sexual behavior was egregious and yet known for years.

As I followed the logic of my screenplay to its conclusion, I shocked myself at what I had written. And yet, the more I thought about “he said, she said” in the future, I realized that my shocking ending may not be so far off.

Click here to read the entire screenplay THE TRUTHFINDER (set in 2030) on Amazon Studios — and if you find it thought-provoking, please leave a positive review on its Amazon Studios’ listing.

You can also click here to read the film screenplay THE MOTHER SIEGE, which is the first installment of my near future universe — this time in 2049.

And click here to read my second near future universe installment — the TV drama pilot series script of THE UPHEAVAL, which begins at the moment in 2029 that leads 20 years later to THE MOTHER SIEGE.

A special thank you to Joanne Mardesich, fellow book club member and first reader of THE TRUTHFINDER, who gave me very encouraging feedback.

And if you want to read the very beginning of THE TRUTHFINDER to learn the premise of the single location, here it is:

FADEIN

INT. TRUTHFINDER TEST ROOM — DAY — EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI

A rectangle room with three doors — one on the back wall that we will learn leads to a small toilet facility. One door each on the two sides of the test room.

The fourth wall is actually a one-way glass wall although we don’t yet know this.

The only furniture in the room is a double bed and two chairs at a small table placed next to each other so that the two chairs face towards the glass wall.

At this moment an African-American woman — MARIAN — in her early 30s enters the room from the left. She is neither beautiful nor ugly — an average-looking young woman. She is clearly confused as to why she has entered this room. She wear a knee-length skirt and medium-high heels with a scoop-neck collar blouse that doesn’t reveal her cleavage.

The next moment from the right-hand door an average-looking white man — PAUL — in his 50s enters. He wears tailored pants and an open-neck polo shirt.

It is clear from the amazement on both their faces that this is not a meeting either planned or desired.

INT. EVALUATOR BOOTH — DAY

Now the camera pulls back and we see that we are in an evaluator booth that enables us to look through a full-wall glass window to watch the actions in the truthfinder test room.

Standing looking through the glass are: SANDRA, in her 40s, and CHARLIE, a Chinese man in his 30s who speaks with an understandable Chinese accent.

Sandra has a personal comm unit on her left wrist. Neither Marian nor Paul has this unit. (Presumably Charlie’s Chinese personal comm unit is implanted.)

Click here to read the rest of the screenplay THE TRUTHFINDER (set in 2030) on Amazon Studios.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

Survivor: Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Diary

February 23, 1973 Friday Forum – firsthand account of “The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan”by Abraham K. Katsh

When this article was published in February 1973, Dr. Abraham I. Katsh was president of The Dropsie University in Philadelphia as well as the translator and editor of the Warsaw diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, who was born in White Russia and was a Hebrew teacher and author in Warsaw before WWII. (Kaplan wrote his diary entries in Hebrew.)

Dr. Katsh had first authored a hardcover English translation (of part of the diary) published by Macmillan in 1965 under the title “The Scroll of Agony.” This Friday Forum article was Dr. Katsh’s introduction to the paperback edition that Macmillan Company’s Collier imprint planned to publish in March 1973 under the title “The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan” and which would include additional portions of the diary that had recently become available.

While Kaplan’s diary survived the Holocaust, Kaplan himself did not. Kaplan and his wife are believed to have died in the Treblinka extermination camp in December 1942 or January 1943.

For his record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, Kaplan wrote in small notebooks, and the surviving entries covered the period from the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, to August 4, 1942.  The notebooks had been singly smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto by a Jewish man who worked outside the ghetto as a forced laborer. He gave the notebooks to a Pole for safekeeping and these were preserved in a kerosene can found after the war.

Dr. Katsh explains in the introduction that Kaplan never mentions his own name in the entries. For this reason it took Dr. Katsh a year and a half of detective work to ascertain the author’s identity beyond a doubt before beginning to translate and edit the diary.

The Warsaw Ghetto — established by the Nazis in the Polish capital between October and November 16, 1940, in German-occupied Poland — was the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII.  The Jews who didn’t die of starvation or disease or direct killings in the ghetto were shipped to death camps.

On April 19, 1943, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Pesach (Passover), the remaining Jews fought back against the Nazis in what is now known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which officially ended on May 16, 1943.  A small band of emaciated Jews had managed to fight off the Nazi death machine for several weeks.

After the Friday Forum editor’s note for the article, this quote from Kaplan’s entry of January 16, 1942, appeared:

The whole nation is sinking in a sea of horror and cruelty … I do not know whether anyone else is recording the daily events.  The conditions of life which surround us are not conducive to such literary labors … Anyone who keeps such a record endangers his life, but this doesn’t alarm me.  I sense within me the magnitude of this hour and my responsibility to it.  I have an inner awareness that I am fulfilling a national obligation … My words are not rewritten, momentary reflexes shape them.  Perhaps their value lies in this … my record will serve as source material for the future historian.

Later in the article Dr. Katsh quotes this entry from the diary:

Some of my friends and acquaintances who know the secret of my diary urge me, in their despair, to stop writing. ‘Why? For what purpose? Will you live to see it published? Will these words of yours reach the ears of future generations? How?’ … And yet in spite of it all I refuse to listen to them. I feel that continuing the diary to the very end of my physical and spiritual strength is a historical mission which must not be abandoned.  My mind is still clear, my need to record unstilled, though it is now five days since any real food has passed my lips. Therefore I will not silence my diary!

“The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan” by Abraham I. Katsh can be obtained from third-party sellers via Amazon. Click here for the book’s page on Amazon.

Click here to read the formal proposal for the Holocaust memoir SAVIORS AND SAVIORS, in which the above firsthand account is included.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

U.S. Military Facing New Cold War?

The Dec. 7, 2017, online Wall Street Journal article “General Leaves Legacy of Rebuilt U.S. Army in Europe” by Julian E. Barnes features Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the commander of the U.S. Army forces in Europe. The article reviews what Gen. Hodges has done from his base in Wiesbaden, Germany, for the past three years before he retires this month after “overseeing the first buildup of America’s military posture in Europe since the Cold War.”

(Note that a shorter version of this WSJ article appeared in the Dec. 8, 2017, print edition with the headline “Cold Warrior’s Lessons for the Future.”)

The article notes about Gen. Hodges:

The army commander’s mission, he has often said, was to make America’s 30,000 soldiers in Europe look like the 300,000 deployed during the Cold War.

As the spouse of an Army officer stationed in Munich from September 1970 to May 1972 during the Cold War and as a Department of the Army civilian working at that time for an Army counterintelligence unit, I found this information on the current low troop levels distressing. Russian aggression has been building steadily, and it is important that the U.S. does not ignore the renewed threat.

My husband and I knew when we were stationed in Munich that we were on the frontlines of stopping the “Red menace.” Today the 30,000 troops and their families are again on the frontlines and without the strength in numbers that existed during the Cold War.

The Journal article explains:

Gen. Hodges took command in November 2014, a few months after Russia annexed Crimea and as the U.S. and Europe began to recalibrate their security posture following Moscow’s military shift. Since then tensions between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have increased markedly across the region, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the east.

While there are many areas of concern around the globe for the U.S., this creeping encroachment of Russia needs to be contained sooner than later.

The Journal notes:

[Hodges] helped bring additional U.S. tanks to Poland and crafted a procedure for moving those forces around Eastern Europe. He pushed Washington to send more helicopters, rebuilt weapons stocks and reopened closed Cold War storage facilities.

It is to be hoped that what Gen. Hodges has accomplished will be augmented by his replacement, and that the U.S. will increase the 30,000 to a larger deterrent force. Even in the era of cyber war, the U.S. needs boots on the ground.

We must remember that, regardless of whether we would wish it differently, history has a tendency to repeat itself.

Click here to read for free my Cold War memoir OCCUPYING GERMANY: ON THE FRONTLINES OF STOPPING THE RED MENACE.

(I am looking for a book agent and publisher for this Cold War memoir. If you are interested in the project, click here for the formal book proposal.)

And if you have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal, you can read the entire article about Gen. Hodges here.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

Survivor: The Last Jewish Child

October 6, 1972, Friday Forum – firsthand account “The Last Jewish Child” by Albert Kowit.

Kowit’s account begins with this paragraph:

As long as I live I will recall the following horrible episode and relate it to my children and grandchildren. I will do everything possible to inform my fellow Jews and non-Jews about what happened to the six million martyrs who perished through all kinds of tragic and cruel deaths at the hands of the German murderers and their collaborators. Especially do I want to impress my children with the account of the liquidation of a million and a half Jewish children along with my own entire family. The Nazis and their collaborators stand eternally damned for the death of the small three-year-old Shlomele who wanted so much to live.

Kowit then describes the following incident in the Nazi concentration camp Eleya in Latvia:

Kowit was in the infirmary with double pneumonia when a medical assistant burst in shouting to get out if they wanted to save themselves. Kowit fled outside to find the entire camp surrounded by SS troops aiming their machine guns at the Jews. The camp commandant arrived with the Gestapo, and orders were given to tear children out of their mothers’ arms and take the children away in trucks to their deaths.

Three-year-old Shlomele understood what was happening. He freed himself from his mother and ran to the barracks, tearing open a pillow to creep in among the feathers.

When the murders finished the ‘action’ with the children, they removed all the elderly men and women in trucks and took them on their last journey – to death. Upon the completion of this selection, the Nazis with their usual exactness started counting all the victims, and realized that they were still short of the required quota of victims. They then turned upon us with unusual ferocity. We wrestled with them like cattle before slaughter. Whoever was caught was led away to be killed. As they approached us, we retreated against the wall of barbed wire where our backs and arms were torn and pierced until we were drenched with blood. This continued until the ‘quota’ was attained and they had the desired total for the Angel of Death.

Shlomele’s mother was overjoyed to find her son alive – the sole survivor of the child “action.” Yet this was a short-lived reprieve.

The following morning Leon Danziger, a Jew who was the head of the Jewish police, learned that Shlomele was still alive and that he had survived the child ‘action.’ He immediately proceeded to inform the camp commandant, who permitted the child to live three more days. On the morning of the third day when he left to obtain provisions form the central storehouse in Riga Kaiserwald, he took little Shlomele while Shlomele’s mother was working and led him away on his last journey.

Click here to read the formal proposal for the Holocaust memoir SAVIORS AND SAVIORS, in which the above firsthand account is included.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

China Surveillance Agenda Makes My Sci Fi Story Seem More Likely

The November 30, 2017, Wall Street Journal article “China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People” by Liza Lin and Josh Chin would have been truly chilling for me except for the conditioning that those of us who read and write sci fi stories have to total government surveillance.

On the other hand, is it time to panic when the science fiction becomes reality?

Here’s one significant paragraph from the article:

Companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. are required to help China’s government hunt down criminal suspects and silence political dissent. Their technology is also being used to create cities wired for surveillance.

The boldface is mine because, in my sci story THE MOTHER SIEGE that takes place in 2049, the totalitarian government can monitor all citizens. When the protagonist of the story decides to risk her life and those of her three children to prevent the government from getting control of the children, she does so with the knowledge that the government is all-seeing and all-hearing.

(You can read THE MOTHER SIEGE for for free on Wattpad at http://budurl.com/MSintro)

According to the Journal article:

On June 1, a new cybersecurity law went into effect that requires companies running internet platforms in China to help authorities ferret out content that “endangers national security, national honor and interests.”

That goes far beyond U.S. government demands on internet service providers or platforms, which are required by law to report suspected instances of child pornography when they discover it and take down material that has been found to infringe on copyrights.

And what does China want to do with all the information collected? The Journal article reports:

Along with access to online data, China’s government wants something else from tech companies—the cloud computing prowess to sort and analyze information. China wants to crunch data from surveillance cameras, smartphones, government databases and other sources to create so-called smart cities and safe cities.

While this heightened surveillance is happening right now in China, does it mean that this level of personal monitoring will come to the U.S.? Only time will tell.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller

Survivor: The Unlikely Hero

For many years in Los Angeles survivor Sol Bendik was my husband’s tailor. I learned of Sol’s amazing survivor story and wanted him to preserve it as part of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation first-hand survivor accounts project. Yet Sol would always refuse, becoming emotional whenever I spoke about this.

Finally Sol agreed to be interviewed, but it was too late. The Shoah Foundation had closed the video interview portion of the project. Yet Sol’s story was in part amazing because he had chosen to fight back, and I wrote the Shoah Foundation a “pitch” as to why Sol’s account needed to be preserved.

My pitch worked, and I was even allowed to be present at the video recording, which was not standard procedure, in order to give Sol the courage to get past the part that always caused him to break down – where the German stuka planes strafed fleeing civilians.

Later I tried to get Hollywood interest in Sol’s story for a feature film using this pitch:

This is an unusual saga of the incredible courage and daring of an ordinary schoolboy who becomes a man and refuses to give up his fight for justice – and then when he is successfully set for life at the age of 24 gives up everything to live in freedom.  The story offers strong identification for people of all ages with an involving historical perspective of World War II not frequently portrayed.

The following is a revision of the treatment of Sol’s story that I wrote for a film version (in addition to writing a film scene outline):

PRAGUE 1938 – Sol Bendik, a 14-year-old Jewish schoolboy in a middle-class family, is oblivious to the infamous Munich Agreement turning over the Sudentenland to Germany. Sol is not pleased when his father insists that the family – his parents, himself and two sisters – leave immediately for Romania even though the family does not live in the Sudentenland.  The Germans will not be happy with eating only a little his father says. [Nazi Germany occupied the Sudentenland part of Czechoslovakia in October 1938, and Sol’s father rightly predicted that more of Czechoslovakia would soon be gobbled up by the Nazis. In March of 1939 the Nazis invaded Prague.]

ROMANIA 1941 – A loudspeaker warns that the Germans are advancing and people should head east, farther into Russian-controlled territory.  Sol and his family set off with other refugees.  In the forest Sol searches for food, returning to the encampment to find everyone gone – fleeing down the road as German stuka planes appear in the sky.  The planes dive and machine gun the refugees.  Blood and body parts are everywhere.  Sol hides behind a tree – and when the strafing is over believes that his whole family is dead.

Sol is spotted by two German soldiers.  They interrogate him whether he is Jewish but he speaks in German and says he is a Volksdeutsch.  They inter him at the Nikolav work camp for railroad construction.  When he and another Jewish boy, Izzy, go to the fields with their German guards to get water, Sol convinces Izzy to escape through the high corn stalks.

For the next two years, constantly hungry and susceptible to capture, Sol leads himself and Izzy through German lines to the Russians.  When they finally reach a Russian army camp, the officer looks at Sol and asks in Yiddish, “Are you a Jew?”  The officer offers Sol and Izzy transport to safety in Moscow.  Izzy accepts but Sol wants to fight.  The officer sends Sol to an army training school for the Czech Brigade.  After basic training Sol volunteers for parachute training school.  On graduation day – Rosh Hashanah – Sol parachutes behind enemy lines into Slovakia.

At the airfield as they board the planes, Sol asks to get on the same plane as his buddy. The flight instructor refuses – there is not enough room and Sol has to take the next plane. As the planes fly towards Slovakia, the plane that Sol wanted to board explodes into a fiery ball from German antiaircraft gun fire. Once again Sol has miraculously survived.

Fueled by his need for revenge, Sol fights the Germans, stealthily attacking them wherever he finds them.  When his exhausted unit is offered a return to Russia, he and others choose to remain and continue fighting.  And then one day Sol is leading 12 men on skis when a wrong turn results in his capture by two Germans.  Talking in German, he convinces the soldiers to take him to headquarters.  On the way, he jumps over a steep cliff and falls down a mountain – but he is alive.

He evades recapture and for the third time he refuses to return to safety.  Instead he joins a tank unit heading west – and he is on the first tank to enter liberated Prague.  Sol is awarded the medal of honor for his valiant service in the Czech Brigade and given a pension and his own house at the age of 21.  He is reunited with his father and both sisters – the fate of his mother is unknown.

PRAGUE 1948 — Sol is summoned to Communist Party headquarters and told he must become a Communist Party member.  He has seen communism in Russia and is not interested in joining the party.  Warned he is to be picked up, he smuggles himself without papers over the border of Czechoslovakia and eventually into France.  It is 10 years since he first started running for his life.

When he reaches Paris, he calls his sister. The Communists had come for him.

P.S. In Paris Sol learned to be a tailor, immigrated to Australia, then to Canada and eventually to the U.S., where his tailor shop in Beverly Hills enabled him to be a tailor to the stars. He and his wife, also a Holocaust survivor, had two sons, one of whom is my family’s dentist.

Click here to read the formal proposal for the Holocaust memoir SAVIORS AND SAVIORS, in which the above firsthand account is included.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller