Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 126

Pay it Forward, Give Back

Nice concepts. But, there are so many worthy causes not even counting family and friends. Hard to choose. And then, if you’re so inclined, there are political campaigns now on top of all the charities, funds, non-profits, and other organizations asking for cash.

Some say every dollar helps. So they ask for $25. That’s not too bad–unless you tally up how many requests for $25 you get every month. Sometimes I get multiple requests from the same place and feel like sending back a note that says, I’m not Jo Rowling, Bill Gates, James Patterson, or an oil baron from Saudi Arabia. How much do you think I have after paying the rent?

[image error]Some requests bother me, and those are the ones from everyday people like me who get behind on their mortgage payments (or whatever) and put up a crowdfunding link on Facebook and we’re all rather shamed into kicking in to help somebody we don’t know make ends meet. Yet, I read how they got into debt–because I’ve been there–and wish I could contribute.

I tend to contribute to environmental causes–the National Parks, a “Friends of” group for a specific park, the National Parks and Conservation Association, etc. Like many, I try to keep up with which general charities use an exorbitant amount of the money donated for administrative costs (and goodness knows what).

There’s so much to be done, doing it seems overwhelming. Personally, I don’t care for the size of the defense budget and think a lot of that money could be better used in other programs. All of us probably have our own pet peeves about “bad” uses of government funds that we think could be put to better use somewhere else. So, as a lover of National Parks, it ticks me off that Congress won’t appropriate enough money to keep them running, and this causes those of us who really can’t afford to do it to contribute to programs the government ought to be funding.

Whatever your favorite causes are, there’s always a chain of events that created the problem, e.g., people with high medical bills going bankrupt and needing help. Yes, we can and should speak out for change, but until that change occurs, we have a lot of pieces to pick up that aren’t being covered by the government, churches, charities, and “Friends of” organizations.

I felt rather discouraged when some financial organization or other said, in response to “tax the rich” campaigns, that even if the government took all of the rich’s money, it would be a drop in the bucket insofar as the deficit and/or funding needs are concerned. That makes my $25 contribution to Glacier National Park seem rather inconsequential. All I can hope is that my $25 along with a $25-dollar check for several thousand other people actually will help make things better whether we’re paying it forward or giving back.

Does anyone else wrestle with the amount of money needed vs. the amount anyone of us can contribute?

—Malcolm

My novels “The Sun Singer,” “Mountain Song,” and “Sarabande” are te in Glacier National Park, so I try to support the park’s projects when I can.

Excerpt from ‘At Sea’

[image error]If you were around during the Vietnam War, you’ll probably remember that much of the news coverage dealt with body counts, to show the progress the U.S. was making in ridding the country of the Viet Cong. In my novel At Sea, the protagonist’s grandfather (“Jayee”) keeps his own listing of those from Montana who were killed in the war.

Jayee’s Lists

 

Jayee’s Lists (The Poor Sons of Bitches who Died) lay faded in a low kitchen drawer beneath batteries, broken pencils, expired dog food coupons, forgotten pink birthday candles, gum erasers, and other unsorted miscellany.

Superimposed over the small battlefield of the ranch, where lambs and eagles met largely unrecorded deaths on a rangeland framed by fences, box elders, cottonwoods, and a narrow creek carrying water off the backbone of the earth in years of drought and years of flood, the old man recorded soldiers’ names and souls.

He read the news from Vietnam with morning coffee and evening spirits, and with a fine surveyor’s hand, he tallied the bare bones of body counts between narrowed-ruled lines in lightweight Bluehorse notebooks intended for the wisdom of school.

After dinner, he walked out through the bluebunch wheatgrass and settling sheep to his ancient Studebaker pickup truck. He carried a sharp yellow pencil and a pack of Chesterfields, tools for doing his sums, “calculating Montana” in a cloud of cigarette smoke from “vintage tobaccos grown mild, aged mild, blended mild.”

On the first page of the first book he wrote, Here are the poor sons of bitches who died. On the last page of the last book, he wrote, The dead, dying, and wounded came home frayed, faded, scuffed, stained, or broken.

On the pages in between, he wrote the name of each Montana soldier who was killed or missing in recorded battles far away. Sipping bourbon, smoking like a lotus in a sea of fire, he ordered, numbered, and divided the names by service branch, by casualty year, by meaningful cross-references, by statistically significant tables, by the moon’s phases and the sun’s seasons, and by the cycles of sheep.

Jayee remarked from year to year that the notebooks grew no heavier with use. He saw fit to include the names of the towns where the dead once lived, fathered children, and bought cigarettes. These names he learnt were also lighter than the smoke.

The current of his words between the pale blue lines of each thin page arose in fat, upper case letters that scraped the edges of their narrow channels. They began as a mere trickle from 1961 to 1964 that grew in volume in 1965 before the first spring thaw, to become a cold deluge that crested in 1968, wreaking havoc across the frail floodplain of pastures and pages, carrying the dark, angry names scrawled with blunting pencil, and broken letters, through irregular gray smudges, over erasures that undercut the page deep enough and wide enough to rip away the heart from multiple entries. There was little respite in 1969. After that, the deaths receded and most of the physical blood dried up by 1973.

The pages were dog eared, marked with paperclips already turning to rust, and fading to pale dust behind the list of towns: RICHEY, WHITEFISH, HELENA, CHOTEAU, BOZEMAN, BUTTE, KALISPELL, THOMPSON FALLS, THREE FORKS, STEVENSVILLE, TROUT CREEK, BILLINGS, CHOTEAU HINSDALE, GREAT FALLS, HARDIN, SACO, SIDNEY, HAVRE, HELENA, GREAT FALLS, HELENA, BOZEMAN, BUTTE, DODSON, ARLEE, REEDPOINT, HAVRE, BIG  SANDY  MISSOULA, BILLINGS, WHITLASH, ROUNDUP…

Jayee’s tallies added up like this: USA—169 USAF—16 USMC—59 USN—23 TOT—267

The old man made 267 trips around Montana between 1961 and 1972 that no surveying jobs could account for. He said little to the family about it and they didn’t often ask.

During Jayee’s second trip to Havre in 1966, Mavis, a waitress at the Beanery, noticed a stack of 44-inch white crosses sticking out from beneath a tarp in his truck. On each cross, there was a name. When she suggested that Jayee was stealing them from roadside accident scenes, he said he made them per spec to repay old debts.

Mavis asked Katoya if Jayee was all right and Katoya said: “right enough.” He returned to the restaurant multiple times to prove he was right enough and was sitting there on August 31, 1967, when the 77-year-old Great Northern restaurant served its last bowl of Irish stew and closed its doors for good. When the building was torn down the following February, he pounded “an extra cross” into the rubble where the counter once stood and said it was the best he could do.

Months passed and additional stories surfaced about an old man crisscrossing the state searching for the families of the fallen, and of warm conversations lasting long into the dark hours. Jayee remained solitary and taciturn in the face of public or private praise or blame and traveled from town to town methodically, as though he was marking chaining stations along an endless open traverse.

After each individual’s name, he wrote XD (cross delivered), XR (cross refused), or CNF (could not find).

On October 18, 1974, Jayee died (surrounded by old relatives and the close perfume of vintage tobacco) with a freshly sharpened yellow pencil, with a half-smoked pack of Chesterfields, with lists and spirits close at hand, waiting for closure, he always told those who asked about them.

Reverend Jones stood before the mourners in the small church and read the names of those who wished to remember and to be remembered, and one upon one, they created a great hymn that rose up over the banks of their consciousness and flowed down the rivers of their perception in a crowned deluge.

Copyright © 2010, 2016 by Malcolm R. Campbell

 

 

Housekeeping (after all, it is Saturday)

[image error]Since I’m not a fan of housekeeping, I procrastinate on the housekeeping chores that go along with having a website and a blog. On the website, I’m likely to let pages sit for a while without a constant supply of fresh material so that return visitors have something new to read. Here, I’ve uploaded quite a few posts, but didn’t touch the pages that display on the menu across the top of the screen for a long time.

Now, the website is looking better and I have two new pages–replacing two out-of-date pages–that I’ll try to keep current with excerpts and pictures.

[image error]My view of websites and blogs is that, other than talking about my books and related subjects, they are all about you rather than all about me. I wrote an article for a magazine for nonprofit organizations in which I said that many of them were missing the boat when they advertised events and exhibits. Like commercial advertising, nonprofit news releases which appeared in the newspaper should be about the reader, that is, showing him/her why the event would be fun, entertaining, and otherwise worthwhile.

Author C. Hope Clark, who sends out a weekly newsletter from her Funds for Writers website said that author newsletters seldom do much good because instead of talking about books and interesting subject matter, they often degenerate into monthly updates about the authors’ kids and pets. That’s not what the readers want to see. As Clark but it, they didn’t subscribe to be a buddy, they subscribed to find out about exciting new releases and, in some cases, book signings and other events the author would be attending. So, I try to use my website to show prospective readers why they might enjoy my books rather than having, say, a page about what my cats are doing.

This blog is a bit more relaxed. Since I’m disorganized, I’m likely to talk about anything here and sometimes it is about what my pets are doing.  Sorry about that, if you’re not a cat person.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy the improving website and the two new pages on this blog. And, if there are certain kinds of posts you want to see more of, let me know in the comments section

–Malcolm

Pirating Books: Graycity.net and others

A friend recently notifie [image error] d me that there was a site offering eBooks for free download, and several of my books were among those offered. The site is called graycity.net, and it’s got quite an extensive library of “free” books— extensive enough to have ten of mine and several of many other indie authors I know.

Source: The Business of Pirating Books: Graycity.net ‹ Indies Unlimited ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

Book piracy sites seemed to be a dime a dozen. They spring up like weeds. This particular site got taken down a day or two ago, and now it’s operating again.

This post from Indies Unlimited gives you some of the basics about dealing with such sites if you’re an author and find some of your books there. And also, Melissa points out that if you’re a reader who thinks it’s okay to rip off an author there are some hidden dangers in many of these pirate sites.

Gray City is run from a country far away and that cuts down our options for getting rid of them once and for all.

I keep hoping that an author who also knows how to write flawless malware will target book pirate sites and tear them to shreds.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed about that.

–Malcolm

Weather or not

I was going to gripe about the rain, but that seems a bit lame while Florida and the Carolinas are getting way too much. Here, the grass grows incessantly when there’s no rain, but the smaller trees have to be watered during dry spells.
For those of you scoring at home–as opposed to elsewhere–I am now at 15 out 40 days of radiation therapy. Quite tedious, actually, though the people there are friendly and professional. One of them actually loves tennis: that’s a plus.
[image error] My contemporary fantasy novel The Sun Singer will be free on Kindle September 6 through September 10. This was my first novel and I still like it. OMG, I was actually talking about it back when MySpace was the place for writers to hang out.
This is a hero’s journey book. The sequel, Sarabande , is a heroine’s journey book. Both of them are greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces . No, Joseph Campbell and I are not related.
Small publishers and self-published authors are still waiting to see what happens with Audible’s attempt to add closed-captioning to our audiobook without paying for it. There’s nothing in our contracts that allows them to do this. Major publishers are suing and those who represent small publishers have supported the suit. We shall see.
I must be out of touch. Several writer’s magazines I subscribe too are heavily supported by advertising from schools with MFA programs. These ads list “distinguished faculty.” Usually, I haven’t heard of any of them. Out of 15-20 names, you’d think somebody would be a known writer. If you saw that the program director was named Bubba Smith, would you be in a hurry to sign up? (Me, neither.)
Amazon is getting some flak for releasing copies of Margaret Atwood’s Testaments prior to the official release date of September 10. A clerical error? A misunderstanding? Another way to harm independent book stores? What do you think?

—Malcolm

[image error]The sequel is a Thomas-Jacob Publishing release.

 

 

 

I worry about all the shouting these days

Politics has become very confrontational these days, so much so that the Congress would rather provoke the opposition with tirades rather than work together to actually accomplish something. Even a watered-down improvement in a major issue is likely to be better than inaction.

Most of us know that when a business meeting, city council meeting, or family discussion turns into exaggerations and shouting matches, nothing good will come out of it. Protestors and members of Congress seem to have forgotten this.

[image error]In a Facebook discussion yesterday, I got into a debate with somebody who said we are duty-bound as citizens to become counter-protesters whenever a group we despise holds a rally or a “parade.” I disagreed. When certain groups, and their opposites, meet on a city street, the result is shouting. By itself, that accomplishes nothing. Sometimes it leads to violence and property destruction. The news media has a field day and the group that scheduled the march gets a lot of publicity.

I would rather ignore them. Let them have a march that’s met with absolute silence. That hardly makes the news. I grew up in a county where the KKK had a march about once every month or so. Those who supported the KKK stood and watched them go by on the street. Those who didn’t support them stayed away. The result: the news media had nothing to report and nobody got killed or arrested.

Then, as now, anyone yelling verbal threats at the marchers (or getting in their faces) is committing a crime (assault). Is it worth getting arrested to tell members of a group one doesn’t like that they’re really full of it? That’s what they want you to do. That gives them news coverage and lends some of their opposition in jail. Who’s the winner here?

When this kind of thing happens, we all lose. Instead of dialogue that might lead somewhere, we maintain the angry status quo where nothing gets fixed.

–Malcolm

Why can’t bars have poet laureates and writers in residence?

The phrase “scattered, smothered, and covered” has a certain poetic ring, so it’s fitting that Waffle House has its own poet laureate. Georgia Tech poetry professor Karen Head is the first to lay claim to that title. – Atlanta

Followers of this blog know I like Waffle House food, especially their coffee. Yet “the elites” tend to turn up their noses up at Waffle House while supporting White Castle, Krystal, and Burger King. Yeah, those are the best places for health nuts.

At any rate, if Waffle House can have a poet laureate, why can’t Publix, Taco Bell, and Sears? Maybe Sears could save itself by embracing the arts. A poet, perhaps. A writer in residence. Soon, these poets and authors would become famous and people would flock to Sears for book signings, bedding, and a new dishwasher. You heard it here first.

Michael Shaara, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Killer Angels, taught my college creative writing class. He had a theory–one that we could never test in a university environment–that if people who were too introverted to write good stuff got drunk, they might write good stuff. Drink a shot, write a line, slam down another shot, slam down another line.

Let’s say the theory works and we learn that drinking really does lead to bestselling novels.

[image error]

Look at this. Nothing happening. It’s deadsville. A writer would fill the place.

Authors could sit at the end of the bar with a laptop or legal pad and pencil and write. All they’d need from the bar would be a bottle of Scotch or a pitcher of the region’s best microbrew. Every 30 minutes or so, the author would write one of his/her latest lines on a bar napkin and sail it into the crowd. The bar would get more business and maybe a cut of the action from the next bestseller.

This is win-win for everybody. The bar sells more booze. The authors get drunk for free. And creativity goes off the scale. What could possibly go wrong? Today’s bestseller is brought to you by Alfred Knopf and Joe’s Biker Bar and Brothel.

If you own a bar and think the idea has promise, please contact me by private message on Facebook. To prove you’re sincere, send me a bottle of Talisker single malt Scotch.

Seriously, what better way to support the arts?

–Malcolm

[image error]Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Special Investigative Reporter.”

 

 

Tinkering with the blog and the website

One never knows for sure what works.

So, this weekend, I got rid of two of the pages on this blog and updated the “About Me” page. One new page will rotate through a series of excerpts from my novels. The other will have related pictures of all kinds. Right now, it’s showing examples of the page proofs for the dust jackets when we came out with the hardcover editions.

[image error]When I first came out with Conjure Woman’s Cat, my website included a page about conjure. I decided that after adding two more conjure novels to the series, I really didn’t need a “conjure page” per se. Initially, I thought such a page would attract people interested in conjure who would then discover the novels. I don’t think that happened.

That page is now a page for excerpts. There are three there now. I hope to remain organized enough to change them from time to time so that there’s always something new on the website.

My publisher tells me that Thomas-Jacob Publishing’s hardcover books are selling. That’s certainly good news. My colleagues at T-J and I thank you.

My website is always in a state of flux. Frankly, that’s because I never know what information there attracts readers and what doesn’t. I also debate (with myself) how long something should stay there. I want more people to see items, but I don’t want them to come out to the site a few weeks later and find the same stuff. I’m winging it on this but usually, try to include something new every week.

My blog posts and tweets have feeds on the website. I have no clue whether that’s bad or good. At the very least, those feeds represent “new material.”

Most days, I think that bookselling is more of a gamble than either an art or a science.

—Malcolm

Review: ‘The Nickel Boys’ by Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This powerful story needed to be told. That power comes, in part, through Whitehead’s restraint as he tells a fictionalized story about Florida’s notorious Dozier School (called Nickel in the novel) in a straightforward, almost deadpan style. That is, he lets most of the atrocities speak for themselves rather than resorting to purple prose and sentimentality.

Floridians, who grew up in the panhandle and knew Dozier was a hell hole before the authorities knew (or admitted) it was a hell hole, will appreciate the care Whitehead took with his research into the school itself, the environment, and the Tallahassee neighborhood where college-bound Elwood Curtis grew up. The random and unfair vicissitudes of life for African Americans are aptly and horrifyingly demonstrated early on via the event that sends Curtis to the Nickel School.

Yet, I was disappointed in this novel and ended up with mixed feelings about it. One flaw came from the sudden uses of an omniscient author to explain Nickel customs and realities that should have been communicated to readers via dialogue or through the actions of the characters. Suddenly, Whitehead was more reporter than novelist.

Without giving away a spoiler here, suffice it to say that the authorial trickery in several places where the narrative jumps into the future are intolerable. The sections are not only jolting when they suddenly appear out of sequence with the chronological story but mislead the reader so that Whitehead can enhance the drama surrounding Curtis near the end of the novel. The realities here are interesting and make for an engaging subplot that could have been written without lying to the reader.

The protagonist’s near-worship of Dr. Martin Luther King, especially King’s belief that no matter what was done to the African American race, it should return only love–serves as an effective counterpoint throughout the novel. Can Curtis love his tormentors? The Nickel School tests Curtis over and over again, making it difficult for him–and the other “students”–to maintain a true sense of self in a land where the realities inside the school are similar to the realities outside the school.

The book is strong. It could have been stronger. I recommend it in spite of the flaws.

View all my reviews

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell grew up in the Florida Panhandle in the era when the novel is set, delivered telegrams in the Frenchtown neighborhood where the protagonist grew up, and saw the Dozier school many times before it became a news story. He mentioned the Dozier school in his short story “Cora’s Crossing,” included in the collection Widely Scattered Ghosts .

This is the best blog since sliced bread

I have no idea what that means. But 99 out of 100 spammers can’t be wrong. They tell me, I’ve got what it takes to be their most visited blog in the galaxy. Oh, swell. They tell me they’re going to bookmark this place and come back often. Well, you won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t.

As I see it, I’m here to shoot the breeze about all kinds of stuff and keep readers up to date on my books. My goal has never been to help promote cheap loans, cheap Viagra, or cheap hookers. Fortunately, the Word Press anti-spam software throws most of your comments in the trash before I even see them. But, you gotta keep on trying, right?

Not that I think you actually visited this blog personally. You have bots for that, yes? Because, if you personally visited this site, you might (a) actually like what’s here, and/or (b) note that I’m not selling loans, Viagra, and hookers. We could have a dialogue about that and lots of other things if you came here and asked to talk.

[image error]If you did that, I would be here for you. We could try primal scream therapy, behavioural modification, transactional analysis, and Jungian analysis to root our the daemons that tell you to drop spam into innocent blogs just to make a buck. We could play the I’m Okay, You’re Not Okay game and see if that helps. I’m not a fan of Freud, but we can discuss when a cigar is just a cigar and whether or not you’re in love with your mother. No judgements here. All complexes welcome.

If you like, we can play the games people play and infuse the discussion with some of Eric Berne’s snarky comments. If you’ve read Erik Erikson, we can start with trust vs. mistrust, and perhaps when we get through all of his proposed life stages, you’ll no longer feel the need to SPAM my blog or if there’s some strange transference going on, I’ll learn to love your SPAM.

As an author, who really wanted to be a Jungian analyst, I’m forever trying to discover what makes people tick. As Jung could have said, “The Shadow knows.” Of course, it does, but the shadow and I aren’t always on speaking terms. Or, maybe that’s all BS and I should say I might buy your Viagra if you buy my books. What say you?

—Malcolm