Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 169

Nobody cares: my SPAM queue is empty

When I log on, I normally see a WordPress notice that says there are 100000000000 messages in your SPAM queue. Basically, I think that if a spammer does such a poor job trying to comment on one of my posts that his/her comment ends up in the SPAM queue, s/he is sending substandard SPAM. But today, the queue was empty.

I felt so alone, discounted maybe. Perhaps spammers are boycotting my blog because they go in the SPAM queue where their efforts are all for nothing.

Here are some examples of the kinds of wonders I usually find in the queue:

I notice that you need some interesting posts in this blog. Get posts from our software and you’ll never write another one. (Hey clown, have you noticed that I’m a writer and can hardly call attention to my work by using canned posts?)
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[image error]Our off-grid investment plan is so effective and private that only 10% of our clients end up in jail for money laundering. (I hope those clients weren’t using too much bleach.)
I’m going to bookmark this post so I can come back and read it again. (Please don’t.)
Free burial insurance without having to list preexisting conditions. Many of our clients have been dead for weeks before a well-meaning relative forges their signature on the application. We guarantee that only 10% of our clients wind up in the wrong grave yard. (Tempting, but no.)
We’re selling real SPAM at a discount. This week, 50% off “SPAM® with Portuguese Sausage Seasoning” that normally sells for $3.50. Free “Wood SPAM® Brand Piggy Cutting Board” with every thousand dollars you order. (Okay, you’re Hormel Foods trying a new marketing approach, right?)
Scientists have proven it’s now safe to brush your teeth with Saniflush if you don’t use it 100 times a day. We have a warehouse full of the stuff we snapped up when the brand was discontinued, and that means a deal for you. (No.)
New home security system test. Our pros will attempt to break into your house to see if your system works. If you don’t see us, your system failed. If you do, your system is effective. Send $1000 and your address along with the typical times of day when nobody’s home. (You guys work for SNL right?”)
Guard your Internet connection from fake news. Download our $56.00 virus and you’ll never see another phony news story again. (Will I see any more SPAM?)

If your comments ever end up in my SPAM queue, try again, you know, if you feel lucky.

–Malcolm

Malcolm is the author of the satirical crime novel “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.” (Only 10% of his readers go nuts before getting to the end up this novel.)

Should our fiction focus more on why you should beware of those you love?

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.” – Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You’re more likely to be hurt or killed by someone you know or love. And you’ll probably be at home when it happens.” – Mother Jones Magazine

“Over half of the killings of American women are related to intimate partner violence, with the vast majority of the victims dying at the hands of a current or former romantic partner” – The Atlantic

“Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. That is nearly four times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.” – SPCC

As I look at articles written for and about writers and their work these days, the focus of late seems to be mirroring the political issues debated in the press, in Congress, in churches, and in social media.  I am seeing more essays, poems, and short stories by writers who–like everyone else–are trying to make sense of environmental problems, personal rights, racial issues, economic imbalances, health care priorities, terrorism, immigration, and religion as it impacts governmental policies.

[image error]Some writers write to figure stuff out: the resulting poem or short story might help readers figure stuff out. And if the writer is good, this can be done without making the poem or story sound like a political tract or a news release from a social service organization. It’s been said that many people learn more history from well-written historical novels than they do from the basic history courses they were required to take in high school and college? Why? The drama of the story catches their attention. The same can be said about fiction that focuses on the issues of the day.

For those of us who haven’t yet become immune to the horrors reported in the daily news, the quotes at the beginning of this post are shocking. The thing is, most news stories about family-related abuse and murder focus on one family or one person. So, while the numbers of the dead, dying, and traumatized continue to add up through the calendar year, nothing focuses our attention on them with high amount of impact of terrorist shootings such as 58 people killed and 546 injured at the Las Vegas Harvest music festival on October 1.

We lost our innocence a long time ago, those of us who–as children–believed that the world would be better off by the time we grew up than it has turned out to be. We believed in Superman and other heroes who would find ways to prevent every potential Las Vegas horror without infringing on our liberties. And we believed in the power of churches, laws, social service institutions, education, and the general evolution of society to end the abuse and murder of family members, especially women and children.

So here we are today, focused on terrorism–which we seriously do need to sanely address–while deaths and injuries of family members stack up like cord wood with fewer headlines to remind us that those we love are more likely to hurt us or kill us than a terrorist or some other thug on the streets. I’ve seen novels and poems about this, but not enough. It’s easier to find novels about fighting terrorism than fighting child and spousal abuse. I’m not surprised: after all, a government security contractor that isn’t bound by the rules governing police/FBI fighting a group that wants to blow up Washington, D. C. is more likely to be a bestseller than a novel about a woman who keeps calling the local police department with fears about what her husband might do.

We can do better, I think. We can look at family-oriented abuse and murder and–perhaps, first–join nonprofit groups that are fighting it and educating the public about it. But writers can take another step. They can experiment with themes and plots and characters and find compelling ways to tell stories about individuals who are–so to speak–living in hell next door while we focus on people caught up in the national news miles away. We need writers creating short stories, essays, memoirs, and poetry about this as a means of figuring out why it’s happening, and of reminding readers that it’s happening closer than they think.

–Malcolm

News: Free book and a new title

For your consideration when you’re looking for something to read:

[image error]Mountain Song is free on Kindle December 2 and 3: David Ward lives in the Montana mountains where his life was impacted by his medicine woman grandmother and his utilitarian grandfather. Anne Hill suffered through childhood abuse and ultimately moved in with her aunt on the edge of a Florida swamp. Their summer romance at a mountain resort hotel surprises both of them. But can they make it last after the initial passion wears off and they return to their college studies far apart from each other especially after an attack on a college street changes Anne forever?
Quotation: “After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.” – Alice Hoffman
A Shallow River of Mercy, a new title from Robert Hays, released December 1 by Thomas-Jacob Publishing: Ernst Kohl has spent nearly half his life in prison after being convicted of murder as a young man. Upon his release, with nowhere else to go, Kohl returns to his old family home on the outskirts of a small Michigan town, hoping for redemption, or at least understanding. [image error]He finds a dog, a girlfriend, and a job in quick succession, and it seems as if he might finally be able to leave the past behind and make a quiet life for himself. But some of the residents, including the town’s corrupt deputy sheriff, are less than thrilled to see him, and will stop at nothing to rid the town of its infamous resident. As events hurtle to an inevitable conclusion, Kohl is left to decide: At what point might a man break, and at what cost to himself? 
[image error]Thanksgiving: I hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving or–if needed–survived the relatives. We enjoyed a nice visit with my brother and his wife who drove up from Florida, shared wine and food and a thousand-piece puzzle, and provided a lot of great conversation. The lights and wreath went up (not by themselves) on the front door today while inside we’re wrapping gifts to hand over to the post office, hopefully for delivery.

—Malcolm

Walking off Thanksgiving dinner

According to statistics–which I don’t feel like looking up right now–Americans are generally heavier than they should be. And, we don’t get enough exercise (which is probably one reason we’re heavier than we should be).

[image error]I live in the country with an office on the front of the house, giving me a front row seat on the road where a lot of people walk, ride bikes, ride horses, and sometimes walk their dogs while they (the dog owners) ride horses while holding onto long leashes connected to the dogs. We have an old house sitting on the far end of the property and it still has a separate mailbox. I made a vow two years ago to walk down there to check the mail a couple of times a week. I’ve done that once or twice, preferring to use the riding mower to save time. It’s a good thing that vow wasn’t a formal resolution or a promise to Santa Claus.

My brother and his wife take walks several times a week. Fortunately, they do this in central Florida so that I don’t get trapped into participating in their bad habits. They walk (who knows where) away from the house for 25 minutes. Then they walk home for 25 more minutes. During that time I can eat an entire box of Kispy Kreme doughnuts. Trouble is, when they visit us for Thanksgiving, they continue this notorious walking hobby and want me to go with them. This past week, they walked four times, conning me into going on two of them.

Talk about tired. I suppose I could claim it was “a good tired” and that I should feel virtuous. On the the plus side, it (the walk) burnt off calories. According to my brother and this wife, calories are bad. I tried to point out to them (my brother and his wife) that I’ve been slowly losing weight for the past year using a mind control/positive thinking program that didn’t require walking along country roads where everyone’s dog barks at you and speeding pickup trucks almost knock people into the ditch.

[image error]We’re lucky to be alive.

They (my brother and his wife) set a fast pace. Even the trucks have to go into overdrive to get around us. If you’re paranoid while walking in the country, you’ll get worse because every cow and horse along the route is going to be staring at you. I’m not sure just why four, puny little humans should be a threat to an entire herd of heavy black Angus cattle, but all those eyes focus on us until we’re out of sight and out of mind. Those eyes watch us again on our way home. And the same dogs come racing out to the highway thinking, “WTF, I thought I chased those clowns away 25 minutes ago.”

One dog chased us for 15 minutes, disappearing into the woods again and again and then lunging out at new spots to take us by surprise. His owner was chasing him, ticked off–by the expression on her face–that we dared walk by her place and disturb the 200 dogs they have there keeping watch on things.

We had plenty of Thanksgiving food to eat along with some Scuppernong wine, but I’m in the clear because I walked it off. I’m seeing a lot of whining on Facebook from people who suddenly gained 25 pounds last Thursday afternoon. They’re on treadmills when they’re not heading off (in their cars) to the gym. Poor bastards.

–Malcolm

 

 

Linking Book Editions on Amazon’s Author Central

In case you’re not aware, Amazon’s Author Central is a FREE service. If you missed our very first tutorial on setting it up, see that HERE. If you haven’t already, read it. Do it. Then come right back here and I’ll show you how to merge your books. I heard that grumble. Yes, you need to merge your books. Here’s why.

via How to Link Book Editions on Amazon’s Author Central ‹ Indies Unlimited ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

Here’s a handy tip for using Author’s Central. If you’re an author and don’t have an Amazon author’s page, you’re missing a free opportunity for publicity. The page displays when a prospective reader clicks on your name on any of your book’s listings. The page not only shows readers all your books, but bio information and your latest blog post.

Naturally, as K. S. Brooks suggests, if you have multiple editions of a book, it helps to link them together on the page.

–Malcolm

Counting words and pages as you write is a real ‘who needs it’

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” – John Steinbeck

Who knows, maybe counting words and pages helps you when you write. National Novel Writing month emphasizes speed, and that helps some people. Personally, I don’t like worrying about speed, the number of words I write in a day, or a “count down” of sorts about the number of words I have left to write before the story or novel is done.

[image error]So naturally, I’m going to start this post with the quote from Steinbeck. If he were alive and well and writing in 2017, I suppose he’d say the same thing even though novels have gotten shorter and many authors are more prolific than the famous people we studied in high school and college literature classes.

Years ago when I was in high school, English teachers would give us classroom assignments in which we had to write an essay or a story with a minimum word count during the one-hour class period. Most students cared more about getting past that minimum word count more than they cared about style and substance. How do I know? We’d all write for a while with pencils on lined paper and then, suddenly, the silence would be broken by people using their pencils to count how many words they had so far. Tap tap tap tap tap, followed by a sigh or a groan if their work so far was well short of what they needed or a pleased smile if they had more than enough words down on the page.

Teachers always complained about this because the resulting work wasn’t cohesive. Sometimes it read well for a while, but then faltered when the student realized after lots of pencil tapping that s/he was twenty five words short of the minimum. So, more words were added, and they seldom fit because they were tacked on after the student thought s/he was done.

Novels can easily sound like that if we watch word counts too closely when we write. Sure, we know that novels are expected to be a certain length: maybe your genre needs 60,000 words or maybe it needs 100,000 words to fit what publishers expect. So, ultimately, you’ll need to know your word final word count. But you don’t need to know it every day. Well, of course you know it because–if you’re writing in Word, for example–the word count is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Personally, I usually have a sense about a story from the beginning even though I never outline or know how it’s going to end when I start out. That sense is this: is the story long enough for a novel, novella, or short story? That way, I just tell the story and the number of words written at any given moment really doesn’t matter. Again (personally), I don’t like writing advice that suggests that I should complete a specific number of words/pages per day. I tend to write scenes from start to finish because that’s how I view the story. That might not work for you.

I guess I prefer the natural approach. When you’re sitting around a dinner table or at a bar swapping yarns, you just say what you need to say without worrying–half way through it–how long it is. You tell it until it’s done. Or maybe you tell the most important part of it until you’re done with that. You’d probably get tongue tied if somebody had a computer at the table counting your words, one with a gong or a buzzer on it if you used too many or didn’t use enough.

The tellers of tales have a sense, I think, about how long they can talk. If people ask for a story about the time you were on a sinking ship, you know you can talk longer than you might talk if you were telling a joke. And, unlike the writer alone at his/her computer, you can see the expressions on people’s faces and sense whether you’re losing them or keeping them interested. But mainly, you tell the story.

That seems to me to be more important than finishing the novel in a month or dutifully basing one’s writing schedule on completing 1,000 words every day. However, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that outlines, schedules, and deadlines bother me and that I think they are harmful to the story you’re writing. If they work for you, keep using them!

I want to concentrate on the story as it unfolds because that’s what works for me.

Malcolm

 

 

Reading separate books together

“Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn’t bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.” ― Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House

People who read together in silence–except for the sound of pages turning–in the same room are usually comfortable together. I’m thinking of families and friends, not passengers on a plane or people in a waiting room at the train station.

Some say that when you use the technique of astral projection, you imagine yourself away to other worlds as a shaman does, leaving your body unattended. To some extent, this happens when we read. Books carry us away upon spells of words just  as surely as dreams carry us away while we’re sleeping.

[image error]During a family visit, we all sat in the living room reading our very disparate books. We weren’t there, yet we were there, linked both by our trust in leaving our bodies unattended and by our common, quiet activity. It’s a good feeling, almost as good as lovers who feel secure in silence while they sit on a park bench and day dream, holding hands or leaning against each other.

In the evening, the living room lamps create pools of light where each reader sits. Yet those pools overlap and we are all one within our shared light. I suppose we could each do this with laptop computers or phones for texting, but the books truly have more magic in them making for a deeper experience.

I hope you have also found this to be true.

–Malcolm

Mexico empty as entire population moves to SoCal

Sacramento, November 21, 2017, Star-Gazer News Service–California officials confessed early today that they were “thoroughly gobsmacked” (completamente sorprendido) when the entire population of Mexico moved into the state’s sanctuary cities for “a brand new life” (vida maravillosa).

[image error]

Wikipedia graphic (Most people don’t realize California is a red state.)

“This is a form of CalExit that, frankly, wasn’t on our drawing boards,” said state planning director Frank Smith. “All we tried to do with our sanctuary cities initiatives was provide neighborhoods for the cheap labor our agribusiness companies need in order to survive.”

Mexican officials, who say they are no longer Mexican officials, said that the country chose a “free and reasonably lavish” California lifestyle over the stress of fighting poverty and drug lords south of the border.

“Some will criticize us for leaving our culture behind,” said a man who identified himself as Mr. Fox. “But that’s not true. We brought it with us, and that it includes real Mexican food (verdadera comida Mexicana) rather than the Taco Bell faux variety.”

While lettuce growers are applauding the fact that their workers will no longer have to fight border guards–and the proposed wall–on their morning commute, they admitted that most companies will shift their corporate headquarters to New Jersey to escape probable tax increases.

“Just think, we used to laugh about the once-famous government money grabs in Tax-a-chusetts,” said iceberg lettuce manager Jonas Wilkerson. “Now, the tax-and-spend experts have moved out here.”

Informed sources (personas informadas) believe many native Californians, who have been staying solvent by taking frequent trips to Las Vegas, will simply move to Nevada so reduce household expenses and state taxes.

“Hell (infierno),” one of the sources said, “just look at the state’s proposed pot taxes. They’re going to be so high that buying weed off the street will be cheaper than buying legal weed–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Wilkerson agrees. “I read in the newspaper several days ago that the legislature passed a law that allows the unemployed to form a union that gives members the right to not work along with the right to put up homes in other people’s yards without being arrested for trespassing.”

Smith said that he thought the Mexican population’s move occurred as soon as a district judge blocked the administration’s plan to cut off federal funds to sanctuary cities.

“I’m somewhat amused at the historic karma operating here as California returns to the days when Spanish was its official language,” Smith told reporters at an emergency press conference on the governor’s lawn, adding, “Este es un gran día para California.”

–Story by Jock Stewart, special investigative reporter

 

 

A bestselling author’s book piracy story

“A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’”

via Contents of Maggie Stiefvater’s Brain

A lot of authors dismiss book piracy with blasé misconceptions like those Maggie Stiefvater quoted above. They’re wrong. Maggie Stefvater almost lost traction her Raven King series (a series I like, btw) because pirated copies were diluting sales to the extent that her publisher thought the public was losing interest.

As she says, authors generally expect the first book in a series to sell the best and for sales to go down in the follow-up books. But she tried a nifty way of proving that there was more to it than expected reader attrition.

This is a cautionary tale for authors, especially those who think piracy either doesn’t hurt you or that it might actually help you. Click on the link to see how she saved her series.

–Malcolm

 

Review: Alice Hoffman’s ‘The Rules of Magic’

The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“The Rules of Magic,” the prequel to Alice Hoffman’s 1995 bestseller “Practical Magic,” sparkles with the same wisdom and magical realism as the witching story of Sally and Gillian Owens did twenty two years ago. The characters, stories and writing style of this stunning prequel fit hand-in-glove with the characters, stories and writing style of “Practical Magic,” not an easy bit of conjuring for an author to face when going back to a story she told before she truly knew the magical rules when she first wrote about them.

This backstory about Sally and Gillian’s aunts Franny and Bridget (AKA “Jet”) focuses on a theme about life’s curses and blessings and what individuals wish to make of the fate and destiny they are given. Early on, Franny and Jet’s mother asks the sisters whether they’re opting for courage or caution in their unfolding lives. Their answers make for a cohesive story. Clearly, Alice Hoffman opted for courage when she traveled back to 1995 to continue the story of the Owens family.

The book contains wonderful surprises, making it much deeper than a family tree tacked on to the front of a famous novel many years later. The book offers its own multiple levels of depth and angst and joy while changing in positive ways the way many of us who read it will view the characters and themes of the original novel. (Emerging writers considering magical realism as a potential genre for their work will find both novels to be a demonstration of how an author can utilize magic and realism seamlessly in novels set in today’s world.”

While the ending of “The Rules of Magic” represents the best of all possible worlds for the two novels and their characters, turning the last page might be depressing for some readers. The reason is simply this: nobody wants the story to end because when it comes down to it, we need these characters, their joys and sorrows, and their magic in our lives.

View all my reviews

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the magical realism novels “Conjure Woman’s Cat” and “Eulalie and Washerwoman.“