Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 50

Yeah, it’s been great being a Leo, but really, I’m a winter person

If you’re celebrating the summer solstice (June 21) or Midsummer (June 24), you probably love hot weather or, at least fake loving hot weather just so you are part of the “we love summer” fad.

I was supposed to be born in Midwinter (December 21), but my parents wanted a dog-days-of-August baby, so Mother kept jumping out of airplanes to shake things up or to scare me into being born early. She was also a wing walker, but that’s another story.

Suffice it to say, I ended up a Leo, and while it’s been nice being the best of the sun signs, I’d trade away all that glory to have a winter birthday. A little-known fact about my reign as a Leo is that I’m the one who posed for the MGM logo. (My stage name was “Tanner” to help the family duck all the taxes on royalties.)

Frankly, I don’t understand the unwashed’s preoccupation with summer, the days when people sweat like pigs and/or lie around nearly naked and get sunburnt–or worse. Otherwise, they stay inside with the A/C running full blast and then complain about the power bill. The smart summer lovers invest in companies that make sunblock creams and lotions (aka sunscreen) and laugh all the way to the bank while ignoring stories like this: About 75 percent of sunscreens have inferior sun protection or worrisome ingredients.

I was so ticked off about being born in August that ultimately my parents couldn’t do anything with me and pushed me out the car door in the Everglades on their way to Key West. Ultimately, I was raised by gators (the real thing, not those University of Florida wusses). Papa Gator always used to tell me, “Bite first and ask questions later.”

I’m not making this up.

–

In other news, I unpublished my Facebook author’s page today since the powers that be who run the place have refused to fix the software fault that’s rendered the page nearly useless. There’s a two-week countdown before the page is gone for good.

—Malcolm

Sunday, and we’re having goulash again in this post

We had goulash when I was a kid, though it wasn’t cooked in a cauldron and seemed to be more of a stew with all the leftovers in the fridge stirred into it. It usually had paprika in it or, if it didn’t, I sprinkled it across the top of my bowl at the table.

In the novel in progress, the main character is a long-time student of Karate. How do I communicate what her outlook on life is like? I wondered. I’ve found Funakoshi’s book The Twenty Guiding Principles of Karate to be very helpful.  Those of us who appreciate a rather Zen-like approach to life, find much to like in this little book.When a friend learned I was just finishing Robert Galbraith’s (aka JK Rowling) Troubled Blood, she wondered whether I thought she might like it. I told her she was on her own this time in making that decision. Why? The book features an old-style detective and is very long, very British (people are always stopping for tea), has a lot of characters in it, and takes its time working through a complex plot to the final showdown. I liked it, but then I’m old and eccentric. I’ve read most of the books in the Comoran Strike series and will probably read the next one.My wife and I are staying away from the news, and have recently enjoyed watching “Bull Durham,” “No Time to Die,” and “The Great Escape” as alternatives. (A long Robert Galbraith novel will also distract you from the shootings and the ongoing blunders in Congress.) Ploughing along Sun Road – KULR photo

Our Georgia heatwave has backed off a bit from those 100° heat index days from earlier in the week to a balmy 89°. Meanwhile, Montana’s Glacier Park is having heavy snow with a chance of avalanches. Gosh, Mother Nature needs to get things under control. And then there are floods around Yellowstone. If I had a choice, I’d select the snow–but not the avalanches.

Today is Father’s Day, and my daughter and granddaughters are way up in Maryland while I’m miles away in Georgia. Thank goodness Facebook gives us a way to remember the holiday. My father has been gone since 1987. Not sure he would grok the Internet or Facebook, but he would remember this picture taken near Santa Cruz, CA when I was little. Yes, I come from the San Francisco Bay Area and had family all over the place in that area when I was little. I’m the kid on the right who seems to be either cold or scared.When I see these old pictures of my parents, I’m very concerned about the pictures of me my daughter and granddaughters will be showing people 50 years from now. I don’t think I’m going to look as good as my parents looked.In more mudane news, Facebook has yet to fix the software glitch on my author’s page. If they keep stonewalling me, I’ll probably delete the page before the week is over. c’est la vie

–Malcolm

Why I Work on My Own Website

Web Designer: I’ll create a knockout site for your books for only $50,000.

Me: Will it sell $50,000 worth of books?

Web Designer: Probably not.

Me: Then what good is it?

Web Designer: It will get me more work from the people who see it.

Me: Where does that leave me?

Web Designer: Where you are now with a website that looks like the inside of the kitchen junk drawer.

I run that conversation through my head every time I redesign my website and realize that redesigning it didn’t do any good. In fact, I run a similar conversation through my head any time somebody proposes a great marketing deal for authors: basically, I ask, will this promotion, ad, or publicity package sell more books than it costs me?

If not, then I’m going to be running at a loss in a way that I can’t, as the old joke goes, make up on volume.

The home page of my website has a dark picture of a forbidding forest. Seriously, that tells you more about me than thousands of words. Also, it weeds out the kind of people who are scared of walking into such a forest. If they are, they won’t like my books.

Will it sell any books? Probably not. Writing gurus say every writer needs a website, preferably one they can charge $50,000 to design. So what’s it for? Presence. However, you’ll see just how much presence you’re getting by noting that the average length of your site’s visits is less than a second. Wow: bots and speed readers.

And yet, magazine and book publishers won’t look at you unless you have a website that they probably won’t look at. They just need to see that you have it.

Bookselling is really quite humorous if you last long enough to see how it works.

—Malcolm

One thing and another

I usually save these catch-all posts for Sundays, but then I realized I have nothing earthshaking to talk about (not that that’s stopped me from posting in the past).

No, Facebook has not fixed the software fault on my author’s page. The page is fairly worthless if I cannot post links. If they continue to do nothing, I’ll delete the page. I’ve been updating my website. There’s more I want to do, but for now, I think the books are easier to find now that I’ve moved the books in the folk magic series to a separate page. Now there’s room to display more information about each book.Our heat wave in north Georgia continues with 100° temps. What’s odd is that the daily weather report keeps forecasting an afternoon thunderstorm that never shows up. Well, nothing is promised for today, but tomorrow there’s supposed to be a cooling shower. Yeah, no, like I believe that.  The only consolation here is that we’re not the only ones who can fry eggs on the sidewalks.We watched “Bull Durham” on TV last night and think it’s held up well during the last three decades. Of course, Susan Sarandon’s character made a big splash in that, though what I liked best was how well the film portrayed baseball in the minor leagues. The team reminded me of the team in the movie “The Natural” that was also inept until somebody came along with the competence and charisma to change everyone’s attitude.On a personal note, I’m getting fed up with news stories and Facebook posts that say “legacy media” is spreading hate and lies. I think newspapers and local TV outlets have a long way to go to “catch up” with the slanted news on CNN and Fox.I still haven’t finished Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) and, on balance think it includes a lot of digressions about the detective agency’s cases that get left out of most novels. To enjoy the book, you have to be willing to tackle a long haul in the novels (four, at present) in the Cormoran Strike series.If you ever watched the “Star Trek – Deep Space Nine” series, you may remember that when Dax and Worf had sex, they ended up so badly injured that they needed to check in to the infirmary the following morning. I have a scene like that in my novel in progress and have started wondering how my publisher is going to react when she sees the manuscript.

—Malcolm

Dear Facebook: Fix My Page

Hello Facebook,

I appreciate the hundreds of ways you’ve provided to allow me to report people doing nasty things on your site. What bothers me is the fact you provide no ways to report a software fault, i.e., when something is broken. My page will no longer display links properly. Without it, my page cannot display links to my work and other relevant sites.

This isn’t a general feedback request, it’s a fault report and it needs to go to a help desk where the fault will be fixed or turned over to the software engineers who will fix it. The URL for my page is: https://www.facebook.com/newspaperblues

If you can’t/won’t fix the fault, I’ll delete the page because it serves no purpose if it doesn’t work, and all the so-called business tools you want me to try out aren’t going to help me until you resolve the fault.

In case it helps you to know, my personal profile page will properly display links when I type in a URL, but my page won’t.

I used to work in support for major computer companies, from testing to manning the phones, so I know what you need to do if you value my business.

This boilerplate on your “support page” is not an answer:

Sincerely,

Malcolm R. Campbell

PEN AMERICA OPENS SUBMISSIONS FOR 2023 LITERARY AWARDS

Over 20 Distinct Awards and Grants are Conferred Each Year: $380,000 to be Awarded to Writers & Translators in 2023.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 1, 2022(NEW YORK)– The literary and free expression organization PEN America today announced the opening of submissions and nominations for the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards. Submissions for book awards will be accepted in 10 categories, from fiction, poetry, biography, essays, and science writing to debut novel, short story, translation and multi-genre. Publishers and literary agents are invited to submit books published in the 2022 calendar year.

Since 1963, the PEN America Literary Awards have honored outstanding voices in literature across fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, biography, children’s literature, and drama. With the help of their partners, the PEN America Literary Awards confer over 20 distinct awards and grants each year, and will be awarding some $380,000 to writers and translators in 2023.

PEN America also opens submissions to the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, offered every two years. Nominations are now open for the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award

Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, Senior Director of Literary Programs, said: “It was a special honor for all of us at PEN to celebrate the extraordinary writing among this year’s winners of our literary awards, as we returned to the Town Hall stage for the first time in two years. We can’t wait to do it all over again next spring to honor a new group of literary stars whose novels, biographies, memoirs, poems and translations will define the meaning of excellence for readers everywhere.”

Award and prize winners will be celebrated live during the Literary Awards Ceremony, which will take place in-person in the spring of 2023.

Detailed submission guidelines and instructions for the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards are available here. For more information on the Literary Awards, visit our website.

The 2022 PEN America literary awards were celebrated in New York City’s Town Hall on Feb. 28 the first in-person awards ceremony since March 2020. Emmy Award-winning late night host Seth Meyers hosted the event, with writers and translators receiving 11 juried awards, grants and prizes. PEN America conferred its annual career achievement awards to Elaine May and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, two visionaries whose influence has resonated across generations, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.

Points not worth pondering

I’ve learned my lesson. I should have included J. K. Rowling in the title of my post about reading another Galbraith novel. As it was, nobody knew who I was talking about.It didn’t take long for me to get really tired of people saying the weather is “Chili Today, Hot Tamale.” Thank goodness most of them didn’t know it was a song and had lyrics, &c. Actually, we’re having chili tonight and it’s raining tomorrow.Would most people have forgotten Carly Simon long before they did if she hadn’t written ‘You’re So Vain’? I never thought the song was about me. Always thought it was probably Lorne Greene. Or, maybe Dan Blocker.The Big Mac has left Russia.The Supreme Court should replace Roe V. Wade with a stronger decision that states abortion is not the business of any level of government. Okay, you can ponder this point.According to CNN, the Senate has announced a bipartisan agreement on guns. Strong legislation seemed like a no-brainer to me, but then we are talking about Congress.If your parents forced you to listen to or (worse yet) to sing along with anyone singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” there’s nothing any of us can do to help you.It’s always a bad idea to ask for whom the bell tolls.If “paper boy” isn’t the first job on your resume, you’re not management material. By the way, that’s not me in the picture.If you still remember the “Hut-Sut” song, you’re really old and should check with the authorities at your nursing home to see if it’s okay for you to be reading this blog. Or singing, “Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit.”If you’re still reading this post, you might want to check yourself into an asylum or a home or whatever to make sure you’re still sane. If you’re insane, this blog is the place for you.

—Malcolm

My Facebook author’s page is not all about me

I promise it isn’t. It’s filled with links to book reviews, writing how-to, author interviews, obituaries, books being made into films, and other books and authors’ subjects. There are usually five or six links there per day, so it’s not overpowering. This blog usually has a link there as well

Today I included a link to the rather scandalous film “Deep Throat,” one of those anniversaries, looking back in time kinds of articles. So far, Facebook hasn’t told me the link doesn’t meet community standards. There’s also a review of Two Nights in Lisbon and an article about the disturbing biographies of children’s book authors.

At any rate, if you follow authors and books, I hope you’ll stop by and take a look. If you find something you really like once or twice a week, count yourself lucky!

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of a bunch of stuff. Click on his name to find out what.

Enjoying another Robert Galbraith Novel

Troubled Blood (2020), at over 900 pages, will take me a while to finish. But that’s good. I enjoy the series about an old-style private detective who doesn’t solve cases by hacking into traffic cams, bank accounts, or FBI databases. Instead, we have stakeouts, interviews, following suspects, and a lot of experience on the resume of British Detective Cormoran Strike. If you know the novels by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P. D. James, you’ll have an idea of how Strike works.

This is the fifth book in the series that began with The Cuckoo’s Calling in 2013 and that will continue this August with The Ink Black Heart. The books are long, well-written, and credible within the genre. By now, everyone who reads these books knows that Galbraith is J. K. Rowling’s pseudonym. She got panned for The Casual Vacancy in 2013, mainly because readers expected something magical like the Harry Potter series. I liked the novel a lot.

But after that experience, I can understand why she would want to start fresh–as she said with no expectations–with the Galbraith pen name for her detective series. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to do it because her lawyer’s office spilled the beans, although in what was supposed to be a private conversation. She sued and the lawyer was fined.

I’ve read all the books in the series but one. I plan to keep reading when the next installment comes out in August. Several of the books have become movies, though I haven’t seen them.

Publisher’s Description for Troubled Blood

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough—who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
 
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
 
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly . . .

Typical of Rowling, the Robert Galbraith website will tell you everything you want to know (and then some) about the series.

—Malcolm

Leave witches alone

The persecution of people, mainly women, isn’t something that just happened centuries ago in Europe or in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693. It’s still happening today In Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Tanzania, Gambia, India, Uganda, New Guinea, and probably elsewhere.

This is one of my hot-button issues and it makes me see red especially when Christians are doing it, often outside the law, and today it came to mind because it’s part of the plot of the novel The Witches of New York (Ami McKay) that I just finished re-reading.

Over the years, the organized Christian church has characterized witches as Satan worshippers. The flaw behind this slander is that Satan is a Christian belief, not a concern of witches who (generally) don’t believe in him. In modern times in the U.S., hate groups still think witches believe in Satan. But then, if they wanted to, they could since we have freedom of religion, not freedom to practice what Christianity says is okay.

I generally like witches because they practice folk magic, know how to use plants for healing, and–like conjure women–often have strong Christian beliefs as well. They also use various methods for looking into the future and protecting themselves from negative people.

I’m not a witch (traditional) of a Wiccan (man-made alternative to true witchcraft) or a conjure doctor. I know enough about them to know neither set of beliefs is “mere superstition.” But, I suppose if one had a choice, it’s better to be disliked for practicing superstitions than purportedly worshipping the Christian devil.

I am very intuitive, use tarot cards, and believe in reincarnation (something witches don’t accept). So, I am used to being “on the outside” in terms of my spiritual beliefs and suspect strongly that is one reason I get upset when others are persecuted for beliefs that are different than the mainstream faith in the countries where they live.

Plus, as a young man, I was strongly impacted by Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and while it’s not a true factual account of Salem, it was horrifying to me then. Still is.

In Salem and elsewhere, most–if not all–of the people persecuted as witches weren’t witches and wouldn’t have a clue how to become a witch if they were tempted. They are suspected, imprisoned, and killed due to what always appears to be mass hysteria and hatred of people who are (or might be) somehow different and, therefore, probably communicate with Satan. I don’t know why this mythical entity is so greatly feared by some denominations. I grew up in a mainstream Christian church, where we seldom mentioned him.

We knew enough to know that “he” wasn’t the god of the witches. In fact, our preacher spoke out strongly against modern-day witchhunts by hate groups. He said we should leave the witches alone and all these years later, I still agree with him as much as I fear the kinds of people “The Crucible” was about.

—Malcolm