Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1111

It's Hard, Being Your Own Pimp

 Everyone knows that the first book ever printed was The Gutenberg Bible. Do you know what the second was? 

 What's Wrong with the Publishing Industry

 By the time I was ready to write my first novel, the publishing industry was, if not on it's deathbed, at least feeling very poorly. Hence the decision to self-publish. Which has been fun; I won't say easy, because as the Little Red Hen learned, it's only EATING the bread that's easy. Everything else is work. But I did it, and I'm happy I did. 

Now comes the part I don't like, don't have the resources or aptitude for, and yet which must be done: marketing. 

My best idea is to just keep on shamelessly plugging away at shamelessly plugging.  Like this.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/community/press-releases/2614/#axzz2UEuH86Qg

 

 

Area Writer Debunks Feminists’ Claims Men Face Extinction

 
 
Writes Novel, Spunk, a Fable, Defending Gender



May 23, 2013

Las Vegas, NV— When it hit bookshelves in the fall of 2012, journalist Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (Riverhead, 2012) provoked debate about her premise that women are becoming the dominant sex. “It certainly got me thinking,” says Las Vegas author Helen O’Reilly. Thinking and writing; O’Reilly’s resulting novel, Spunk, a Fable, has just been released (Createspace, 2013), and it’s available in paperback and kindle versions from Amazon.com.

“As a heterosexual woman who has married two of them, buried one of them, and given birth to three of them—men, that is—the idea of a world without men irked me. Of course that’s not literally what Rosin’s book is about. But after all, technology has now made it possible to start with a cell, replace its DNA, and cut papa out of the picture. I began to think about the kind of world that would create, and Spunk, a Fable was the result.

Described by early readers as “The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games,” “a twisted, wry, post-modern fable,” and “a delightful read that shows powerful women in desperate circumstances, hanging on while letting go,” Spunk, a Fable is O’Reilly’s first foray into adult fiction, although as Helen H. Moore she is familiar to readers as the author of numerous titles for educators and children, published by Scholastic, Inc., and others, as well being as a contributor to Desert Companion Magazine and other publications. She works as a book editor in Las Vegas.

She is seeking media interviews and publicity. "Authors today must take the lead in marketing their own books," she says. "We have to leverage every contact."

###

Contact: Helen O’Reilly
email:
helenhavlin@hotmail.com

website:
http://helenhavlin.wix.com/spunky

It's Here! My First Adult Novel: Spunk, a Fable

http://www.amazon.com/Spunk-Fable-Hel...

 

I had to wait until both my parents were dead, both my marriages were over, and all my children were too old to be traumatized by anything I could do in order to write my first novel for adults: Spunk--a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, urban fantasy about an Amazonian world and the woman who dares to defy its authority.

As Helen H. Moore I've sold thousands of books for children and educators, for such publishers as Scholastic, Mondo, and Central Recovery Press, but this new venture required a new pen-name: Helen O'Reilly.

I'm branching out into self-publishing and self-actualizing simultaneously. As the traditional publishing industry morphs, self-publishing has lost its stigma; it's no longer vanity publishing; it's indie publishing: this is where the cool kids are.
A lifelong goal has been to expand my writing repertoire to include long-form fiction--in other words, I've published children's fiction, poetry, self-help, educational and non-fiction books, but THE NOVEL has been my white whale--my Moby Dick (which is also a novel). Now the writing is done and the second part of the goal is all that remains: to market, to market.

Nutella Is Not a Health Food

Some silly person back east is suing the good folks who make Nutella, claiming she thought their advertising campaign showing a family consuming a breakfast including a smear of Nutella scraped over a slice of whole-wheat toast, along with a glass of milk and an orange was false advertising, leading her to believe that Nutella was a sort of health food. 
 

 
Full disclosure; at several times in my life I have eaten entire pumice stones, and I've been known to eat the shells and throw away the eggs, however, as strange as some of my eating habits are, even I know that the times I've scarfed down entire jars of nutella with a tablespoon, I was not eating health food. 
 
This stuff is just too damn good, and is proof that there is a beneficent God who loves us and wants us to be happy.Not necessarily healthy. Happy.
 
It is also an A-1 marital aid. Which can also make you and your loved one very happy. And healthy.

Happy Birthday, Grannie Ginn

 

 

 

On this day in 1888 in Glasgow, Scotland, a female child named Helen was born to a young weaver named Helen Kelly and what we today would call her "boyfriend," a fellow whose name was either Bernard or Patrick Havlin. The child's mother, Helen Kelly, (called Nellie) would soon be sent back to her hometown of Dundee, in the cold north, but not before giving birth to another child, Agnes, to the same man.

In the absence of their mother, little Helen and Agnes were left to the untender mercies of their paternal grandmother, an old targe named Dinah Callender. She treated Helen and Agnes as unpaid labor as soon as they were old enough to walk. When their father eventually did marry, he had more children with his second wife, who is reputed to have been an alcoholic named Maggie Brawley. These children, being "legitimate," were treated well by old Dinah, but Helen and Agnes continued to be punished for the "sins" of their mother, until finally they were of marrying age and could remove themselves from old Dinah's reach.

Helen (now also called Nellie), found employment in the gutworks section of a slaughterhouse (or abbatoir), where a redheaded young man with a wheeze in his chest caught her eye among the guts. Did their hands meet while squeezing the offal? or were the guts hung on hooks, and did John and Nellie steal glances between these sanguine draperies? Who knows; the ways of the Glasgow gutworks are lost in the mists of time. Nevertheless, despite Auld Dinah's warning: "That fella's got a wheeze in his chest," Nellie loved his red hair, and anyway, as she said later, "I'd have married a darkie tae get oot'a there."

In later years, Nellie McGinn would advise young women to always favor a goodlooking man over one with money. "That way, if ye have nothin' tae eat, ye'll have somethin' tae look at."

John had come by his wheeze honorably, on the battlefields of WW I, where he was gassed by the Kaiser's troops. It stopped him from gainful employment in the between-wars years, but not from being able to get Nellie Havlin, now Nellie McGinn, pregnant. Numerous times.

Eight children survived, and when the oldest, a son named James, died in a fall through a factory's glass roof, Nellie lost the child she was carrying from the shock. In a case of miraculous timing and the unavailability of reliable birth control, Nellie Havlin McGinn's oldest daughter, Nellie McGinn, gave birth to a child whose approaching arrival she had been hoping to hide from her family by the expedient of wearing larger and larger clothing until the child, as all children must, made itself evident. So the family of John and Nellie McGinn settled at nine children, Nellie jrs'. son, named James, being subsumed into the brood and raised as its youngest member.

Today is the birthday of my Grannie McGinn. She would have been 125. She raised James McGinn, her grandson, as her own son, and he became a successful Glasgow businessman. Her son Matt McGinn is still remembered around the world, having made his mark as a folksinger, author, actor, and raconteur. Her great-grandson Paul McGinn is a well-regarded Glasgow tavern-owner. Her grandchildren -- including me, her redheaded namesake, are entrepreneurs, scholars, educators, and authors. Most of us love each other. Some of us drink too much. All of us are happy that she married a goodlooking man; we are far too handsome for our own good.

Happy Birthday, Grannie. Here's tae us! Wha's like us? Damn the yin!  

Spunk--Is It in You?

 

 

Writing is the easy part. After 17 or 18 traditionally published books, I've pretty much got the writing part down pat.

Book design, cover art, layout, etc., are probably better left to the pros, but I can't afford pros, so I'm doing most of it myself, with the help of a generous ex-husband and a young artist friend who is giving me the "friend's mom discount" (that's his work, illustrating this post). 

Marketing the book will be the really difficult and expensive part; if you write it, readers won't automaticaly come. You have to, as Stromboli said to Pinocchio, "push it in the pooblic's eye." 

So here I am, at a freshly-minted sixty, embarking on a career as an author-publisher. 

 Sometimes I feel like the little Red Hen.

 

Ban ALL Marriage

At the risk of alienating, or at least, annoying, many of my friends, both gay and straight, who have turned facebook red in the last day or two, wondering, why has being married taken on such social significance that gay men and women, who once celebrated their outlaw status, feel that they will not be fully human or fully American unless and until they can marry? Now, I do realize that part of the wish to marry, on the part of gays, is the reasonable antipathy to being told "you can't." I get it.

But after the social gains made by the civil rights and women's movements, I'm kind of bummed that the way to freedom is now seen as being free enough to be bound in marriage. (Irony.) Marriage is a great institution for those who can handle it, but most of us can't. If there were a movement in favor of banning all marriage, I could get behind that, and fast!

That said, I do not agree with the arguments of the right wing, and agree more with the arguments of the left, and so I will gladly support the liberals and progressives in this as in most other social issues.

Boi, Oh, Boi. That Michelle Shocked IS . . . Somethin'.

After at least two decades fending off the fame enjoyed by her more talented, or at least less oddly unsettling, musical contemporaries, folk singer Michelle Shocked is getting more publicity than ever. Sadly, it has nothing to do with her music, which was usually classified as "indie- or indy- folk, a genre that was once almost popular.) 

The 51-year-old, prettily androgynous singer allegedly made anti-gay statements from the stage during a performance on Sunday, St. Patrick's Day. To wit:

"I live in fear that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry," Shocked told the crowd at Yoshi’s, in San Francisco.

 

 

 

She then reportedly added: “You can go on Twitter and say ‘Michelle Shocked says God hates fags.”

(For myself, I don't believe this. If God hates fags, why does He keep making them? They're all over the place. More and more every day, it seems like. He must at least LIKE them. Come on, people. Use your heads.)

Since this unexpected and inexplicable outburst, it seems many music venues don’t want to be linked to the formerly lesbian (well, that's what I heard) singer, and several of her scheduled shows have been cancelled, including two in California and at least one in Seattle. Words like "publicity stunt" and "self-loathing," as well as "born-again Christian" have been bandied. I mean, REALLY bandied.

Shock first gained attention in 1986 with the album "Texas Campfire Tapes" and had several delightfully irony-free, proto feminist charting albums dating into the early 1990s. (Who knew? Not me; that's why I thank God for inventing Wikipedia!)

Apparently, the seemingly gender-free singer was continuously questioned about her sexuality over the years, but refused to say whether she was gay or straight. "Is she a grrrrl?" "No, she's a boi!" (it was the 90s, come on!) Speculation was rampant. (She didn't make it easy for ya, not like that Boy George! No sir. Ma'am.)

However, just like Marcus Bachman, she was once involved in a sham marriage. However, she was once married. To a man.

Well, whatever. If Kim Kardashian hasn't yet destroyed the sanctity of marriage, I doubt that legalizing gay marriage will do it. And as for Ms. Shocked, well, rock on.

White Smoke, New Pope, Who Cares?

I may have become so sophisticated that I look back with bemusement at my devout Roman Catholic girlhood, when I attended Mass on Sundays and my bedroom wall was hung with a portrait of Pope John XXIII sprigged with a bit of Easter palm.

When I had a small, white plastic altar (with removable gold plastic chalice) purchased at Walsh's Religious Goods on 164th Street in Jamaica, Queens.

When I knelt with other small girls, in stiff white dresses, at the altar rail, ready to take the Body of Christ into my mouth, on my tongue, like a lover.

I may have become too anguished, too neurotic, too depressed and fearful and guilt-ridden to be a true believer anymore. I may have tapped into the anger I once buried as a physically (if not sexually), emotionally, and mentally abused child, and through exploring it, expunged it. 

These things may all be true. I may now say "I'm spiritual, not religious," and take solace in the notion that more and more of my fellow Americans feel the same way each year, that the "unaffiliated" designation fits more of us than ever before. 

So why should I care that some old men in red dresses sent up white smoke signals indicating that the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church has a new leader? Because 1.18 billion other people in the world care. That's about one in five of the global population.

The more I understand of myself as a spiritual being having a human experience, the more I understand that what affects you affects me. What affects Muslims affects me. What affects Catholic, Jews, Protestants and Atheists affects me. I can mock all I want, but in the end, it will affect me. 

 

North Korea, Little Imp of a Nation,Why Won't You Behave?

North Korea is said to be a desolate, frozen, land, with a terrain like a charcoal briquette, and populated by an angry, starving, dwarf-like people, led by a demented, overweight son-of-a-despot. Can it be so different from its southern neighbor?

The Imperial Spa, located north of Sahara Avenue and east of the Las Vegas Strip, is my entryway to Korean life. Tiled and gleaming, a stark opulence its hallmark, it is where I go when I need to get clean and shiny, body, mind, and spirit. 

Television screens present happy, singing south Korean teens in musical competition, or frumpy, misunderstood south Korean housewives yearning for good marriages for their beautiful daughters and wayward sons. Both singing and soap operas are suited for a place devoted to bathing, I think.

In the year that I have been visiting the Imperial Spa,  I have learned nothing of the Korean language. But I have learned Korean. I have learned a Korean love for music, for cleanliness, for laughter. I have learned a Korean comfort with nakedness, watching daughters work lather over their mother's backs, and the mothers do the same for them, chatting or silent, but deeply matter-of-fact. I like these people, whose nods "hello" have a truncated quality, as if they are keeping themselves from bowing hello to me. I nod back. I like it here. 

I like kim-chee and K-pop, Gangam Style or not. I like the hush of the steam room and the giggling of the small girls, sleek as eels, who come to the spa with their mothers on Sunday afternoons. I like to let my fingers turn pruney as I soak in the tub and watch the evil Mr. Jae-hun plot to keep his son from marring the poor girl he loves. 

I think I would like Korea. Maybe not the frightening, bellicose north. I was born in 1953; North Korea has always been in my mind. Cuba, Russia, North Korea.

Maybe Dennis Rodman was right. Maybe I should just go there.