Ray Bradbury/ Ancillary Sword

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Oct. 19 Ray Bradbury: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “Prolific author’s best tales have a magical quality that endures” by David Pringle on Jun. 7, 2012.  I didn’t know about Bradbury until he passed away in 2012 and I was reading the newspaper about him.  Here is a really good article, because I bolded a lot of lines:

Ray Bradbury, who has died aged 91, was the 20th-century American short-story writer par excellence. Although he was also known for a few novels – principally the science-fiction book-burning dystopia Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) – as well as for children's books, plays, screenplays and poetry, it was for his short stories that he gained his widest fame, with his best-known collection being The Martian Chronicles (1950). His tales were collected in dozens of volumes and reprinted in countless magazines and anthologies, including many school textbooks, making his name familiar to younger generations.

Among his more influential admirers were the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who read his stories in Russian translations of the 1950s, and JG Ballard, whose introduction to his own volume of Complete Short Stories (2001) stated: "At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination."

Born in the small town of Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury arrived in Los Angeles with his parents, Leonard and Esther, in 1934, and lived there for the rest of his life. At the time of his graduation from Los Angeles high school in 1938, he was already publishing stories in amateur fanzines, and was an active member of the LA Science Fiction Society, where he rubbed shoulders with more senior writers such as Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett and Robert A Heinlein.

He had a reputation at that time as an amusing but pushy kid, always under the feet of visiting magazine editors, always asking his seniors for tips, coaxing them into reading his manuscripts and sometimes collaborating with him. Sustaining himself as a part-time newspaper seller, he continued to write furiously (at one point, it is said, he burned more than a million words of unpublished fiction), making his first professional sales in 1941 and styling himself a full-time writer from 1943. By 1947 he was sufficiently established in his career to marry Marguerite McClure, with whom he was to have four daughters.

The best of his early stories appeared in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, edited at that time by Dorothy McIlwraith. These were moody, macabre pieces which avoided the stock ghosts and monsters of supernatural fiction. The Crowd, about a conspiracy of ghoulish spectators at traffic accidents, and The Scythe, about a farmer who involuntarily takes on the role of Death, were typical of Bradbury's prolific output in 1943-44. These were collected, along with many similarly grotesque pieces, in his first book, Dark Carnival (1947), with some rewritten for his definitive collection of horror stories, The October Country (1955). He also contributed numerous stories to the crime and science-fiction pulps of the mid-1940s, some of them unreprinted to this day.

Not content to remain a master of pulp, Bradbury set his sights on more prestigious magazines. In 1945 he made his breakthrough when he sold a non-fantasy story, The Big Black and White Game (on racial and sporting themes), to the American Mercury. This came to the attention of Martha Foley, editor of the annual Best American Short Stories anthology, who reprinted it in her 1946 volume – the first of many appearances by Bradbury in that and similar anthologies.

Within a few years, he was selling stories regularly to the biggest and "slickest" magazines of the day – Mademoiselle, Charm, Collier's, the New Yorker (just once), Maclean's, Seventeen, Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Harper's and more. In an era before television held sway, the last heyday of the magazine short story, Bradbury flourished. His fantastical, whimsical stories, blending horror, humour and sentiment – instantly recognisable in style – appealed to editors and readers across the board.

Ironically, however, it was in the lowly science-fiction pulps that his second – and best – book had its origins. With The Million-Year Picnic in 1946, he began a loose series about pioneer settlers on Mars and, over the next four years, these appeared primarily in the gaudiest of poorly paying pulp magazines, Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. They were gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (known in Britain as The Silver Locusts).

The book was praised by critics, including Christopher Isherwood, and sold well (in its paperback reprints, it became a steady seller and has been in print ever since). Scarcely a "novel", and scarcely science fiction – his space rockets are like firecrackers, and his Mars people are Halloween ghosts, while his Martian landscape is a heightened version of southern California – it nevertheless became a classic science-fiction novel.

The Martian Chronicles was followed by The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953) and, a little later, A Medicine for Melancholy (1959; known in Britain as The Day It Rained Forever). These, along with his short novel Fahrenheit 451 (filmed by François Truffaut in 1966), remain the core Bradbury books. The best of their tales have a magical quality that endures.

Another of his finest books, Dandelion Wine (1957), like his earlier Mars volume, is a gathering of short stories furbished with linking passages and presented anew as a "novel". Like most of his work, it is about childhood, or the child's-eye view of things. Set in the fictional Green Town, Illinois (a reimagined Waukegan), during the long hot summer of 1928, it concerns minor domestic incidents which are made over in the feverish mind of a 12-year-old boy so that the town seems to become a realm of time-travellers and witches, of enchanted tennis shoes and impossible "happiness machines". The book is not a fantasy of the supernatural in any conventional sense, but a highly imaginative work that mines a deep vein of modern American folk-fantasy. There is much delightful whimsy, combined with an obvious nostalgia for a simpler, old-fashioned way of life, but there are also dark elements. The boy realises that one day he will die; an old woman is robbed of all the memories of her youth; a killer known as the Lonely One lurks in the town's shadows.

Although he continued to write to the end, most of Bradbury's work after 1960 was less successful. Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) were adequately entertaining mysteries. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) and From the Dust Returned (2001) were latter-day attempts at "fix-up" novels, put together in the same style as Dandelion Wine. The former was based on "Irish" short stories written in the 1950s and 60s, inspired by his experience of working on location with John Huston on the 1956 film of Moby Dick (for which Bradbury wrote the screenplay); and the latter on very early fantasy stories of the 1940s. Later collections ranged from The Machineries of Joy (1964) to Driving Blind (1997), One More for the Road (2002) and We'll Always Have Paris (2009).

Despite a 50-year decline from his peak of the 1950s, Bradbury remained a much-loved writer, his work often adapted for film and television. Never a great traveller (he preferred a bicycle to a car, and usually avoided aircraft), he lived quietly and was the recipient of many awards ranging from an O Henry prize in 1947 to a Bram Stoker lifetime achievement award in 1988 and, in 2004, a National Medal of Arts award.

Marguerite died in 2003. Bradbury is survived by their daughters, Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/06/ray-bradbury

Nov. 28 Ancillary Sword: I found this in the Edmonton Journal in Oct. 17, 2014.  It’s a book review of Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie and it’s reviewed by Daniel Kaszor.  Kaszor says:

“Good science-fiction informs and references the modern human condition, commenting on it and framing it to make you think about how we live right now. This can be done by speculating on where technologies will take the human race, offering fresh eyes to current events by presenting them through a lens of abstraction, or by framing our societal status quo against alternatives.”

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/10/17/ancillary-sword-by-ann-leckie-review/

Don Winslow "Savages"/ Richard Attenborough "Jurassic Park"

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Oct. 19 Don Winslow: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “Author found his muse in a sleazy time and place” by Charles McGrath on Jul. 6, 2012.  I was going to put excerpts, but the article was really good.  It profiled the author Don Winslow who wrote the book Savages and it turned into a movie.  It talks about all his life experience working as a PI to an author:

Don Winslow, whose book “The Kings of Cool” just came out, is a rarity among writers of crime fiction: He doesn’t just make it up. For years he was a private investigator, and he used to read writers like Chandler, Hammett and Elmore Leonard while sitting in his car on stakeouts. Eventually he worked his way up to high-profile arson cases in California (the background for his 1999 novel “California Fire and Life”), but he got his start in Times Square in the late ’70s, when, he likes to say, “the whole place was a glittering river of theft.”

The other morning Mr. Winslow — who now divides his time between Solana Beach, Calif., and a ranch near the old mining town of Julian — took a walking tour of his old turf, marveling at how much it has changed. No prostitutes, no porn palaces, no crack vials underfoot. “They used to crunch under your shoes like clamshells,” he recalled.

An especially startling development was a nearly block-long sign at 49th and Broadway advertising “Savages,” the new Oliver Stone movie (for which Mr. Winslow helped write the screenplay) based on his 2010 novel of the same name. But except for the 42nd Street megaplexes, he pointed out, there were no Times Square movie theaters anymore, and they were where he used to ply his trade. He was hired by the owners to keep an eye on the help.

“Everyone was ripping off everyone else,” he said, explaining that in those days theaters were an all-cash business. “Managers weren’t reporting the real box-office figures. Ushers were palming tickets and then selling them back to the cashier. I knew ushers who came to work in BMWs.”
Another of his jobs was looking out for pickpockets. “Everyone knew who they were,” he said, “but you couldn’t kick them out until they did something. I used to tip a big cup of soda in a guy’s lap. Either he’d get up and leave or he’d start a fight and then we could kick him out.” He was also hired to look for runaways and missing businessmen. “I guess you could say I was in the scandal-killing business,” he said. 

Mr. Winslow does not look like a private investigator, which may be why he was successful. He’s small, slight and soft-spoken: the kind of person who in most books hires the P.I.

Over lunch at Big Nick’s Burger and Pizza Joint, an Upper West Side hole in the wall that used to be one of his hangouts, he said he grew up in the working-class town of Matunuck, R.I., listening to his father, a career Navy man, tell stories. (His sister, Kristine Rolofson, is a romance novelist.) Like so many young people back then, he came to New York with the notion of becoming a writer, perhaps a playwright, and fell into the private investigation business by accident, after being fired from a job as an assistant manager of a movie theater. His mistake, he says now, was that he turned in a completely honest set of books. 

He didn’t publish his first novel until 1991, after a series of unlikely detours that included getting a master’s degree in African history from the University of Nebraska, a stint running safari tours in Kenya and more private investigation work, that time for high-end corporate clients. He did some industrial espionage, investigated drug use among a company’s employees and then moved on from what he calls dark work to becoming an arson expert. For three years he and his wife lived in California hotels on an expense account. “I was an overpaid migrant worker,” he said. 

That first novel, “A Cool Breeze on the Underground,” written five pages a day over a couple of years, was about a graduate student who also works for a detective agency, and it was followed by four others about the same character. “I thought that was what you did, you had a series,” he said. Mr. Winslow became better known with novels like “California Fire and Life” and “The Dawn Patrol,” about a detective who is also a surfer. His breakout novel was his 13th, “Savages,” published when he was 56.
The book, about three very hip Laguna Beach dope dealers who run afoul of a Mexican drug cartel, is full of attitude: lean, almost abstract at times, with very short sentences sometimes skittering down mostly white pages like modern poetry. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, praised it for fusing “the grave and the playful, the body blow and the joke, the nightmare and the pipe dream.” 

“I guess I rolled a grenade down the aisle with that one,” Mr. Winslow said. When he began the book, he was feeling fed up with the way thrillers lately have been overly defined into subgenres, each with its own requirements.

“I was a little tired of people telling me how to write, what’s going to sell and what isn’t,” he said. “I felt like throwing some elbows.” 

He added: “Without sounding too presumptuous, I thought I was hearing a new language out there on the West Coast and wanted to see what happened if I put it in a book. I also wanted to play with the fractured way we get our information now.”

Mr. Stone said it was precisely this elliptical style that drew him to direct the movie, which opens on July 6 and stars Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively and John Travolta. “Someone gave the book to me and said, ‘Pay attention to this, this is different,’ ” Mr. Stone said. “It’s a very original story: youth versus age, the younger generation coming to grips with the older.” About working with Mr. Winslow, he said, “I can’t say there weren’t moments of difficulty,” adding: “Don’s a strange one, a bit hermetic. But he knows this material.”

“The Kings of Cool” is a prequel to “Savages.” Told in the same pared-down style, sometimes even adopting a screenplay format, it picks up the same three characters — Ben, the hydroponic genius; Chon, the ex-Navy SEAL who does not believe in turning the other cheek; and O, their shared slacker girlfriend — at an earlier point and provides them with a back story that combines almost Sophoclean secrets with a multigenerational history of drugs in California. “I realized that I wasn’t done with these people, and that there was more to tell,” Mr. Winslow said. “Plus I’m kind of a freak about origin stories.”

A waitress came by to ask if he wanted anything else. Mr. Winslow shook his head and said, “You know, I used to come here all the time when I was a kid.”

She smiled and, just like a character in a crime thriller, said, “You’re still a kid, darling.”
Mr. Winslow laughed and pointed out that readers often assume from his books that he must be the brooding type. “I’m actually pretty positive,” he said. “But I guess it is a pretty dark vision sometimes. I don’t know that I’d want to visit my brain except with a gun and a flashlight.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/books/don-winslow-on-savages-and-the-kings-of-cool.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Richard Attenborough: He is an actor (Jurassic Park) and a director.  I cut out this article “A giant of British Cinema” because he passed away.  What stood out to me was this part:

Gandhi (1982), an epic but intimate biographical film, was his greatest triumph.

With the little-known Ben Kingsley in the title role, the film traces Mohandas K. Gandhi’s life as an Indian lawyer who forsakes his job and possessions and takes up a walking staff to lead his oppressed country’s fight for independence from Britain through a campaign of passive resistance, ending in his assassination.

Among the film’s critics were historians, who said it contributed to myth making, portraying Gandhi as a humble man who brought down an empire without acknowledging that the British, exhausted by the Second World War, were eager to unload their Indian possessions. Nevertheless, Gandhi was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won eight, including best picture, best director, best cinematography, best original screenplay and best actor.

Mr. Attenborough brought the film to fruition after a 20-year battle to raise money and interest from often-reluctant Hollywood producers, one of whom predicted that there would be no audience for “a little brown man in a sheet carrying a beanstalk.” (Mr. Attenborough ended up producing it himself.)

My opinion: Attenborough put 20 yrs of time to get this movie produced.  He must be really passionate about it if he stayed with this project for so long.

http://www.24news.ca/entertainment/23688-richard-attenborough-a-giant-of-british-cinema

self- publishing by Mark Medley

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca: 

Oct. 13 Self- publishing: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “The book on DIY” by Mark Medley on Jul. 4, 2010.  This is a long article, so I won’t be sending any more emails for the rest of the week.

It’s a really informative and interesting article about self-publishing.  It talks to a lot of people’s experiences about it.  What stood out the most was this part towards the end of the article:

“Steve Almond says. ‘Your job as a writer isn't to figure out how your book's going to get in the world, it's to figure out how to write well enough that your book deserves to get into the world.’"

Here’s the whole article:

With better technology and more risk-averse publishers, the idea of putting your own book out there looks less like vanity and more like common sense

When Terry Fallis sits down at his desk, he's reminded of how far he's come. Four of his book covers are tacked to a nearby bulletin board. In the top right is the mock-up cover for his novel The Best Laid Plans, which never saw the light of day. To its left is the cover of his self-published version, which Fallis released in September 2007. Below it is the paperback edition published by McClelland & Stewart after the book won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. And to its right is the cover of his forthcoming novel, The High Road, which will hit stores this fall.

"It's kind of like you're playing in the minor leagues," he says, "and you get called up to the Stanley Cup finals."

In 2006, Fallis began his search for a publisher the traditional way, sending sample chapters to agents and publishers across Canada. He was "greeted with a deafening silence."
"It was a pretty easy decision -- although a last resort -- to move down to self-publishing," he says.

After researching his options, he signed on with iUniverse, where a publishing package currently costs between $599 and $4,200. He spent $3,500, which paid for cover-design advice, an editorial review of the manuscript, a publishing assistant whom he worked with by phone and e-mail, copy editing, proofreading, 10 paperback copies and one hardcover -- as well as a listing with online book retailers. Because it was an iUniverse Publisher's Choice, hard copies were placed in one Indigo store for eight weeks.

"It was a positive experience for me," he says, though he later adds, "I still consider it to be a spasm of self-indulgence to publish your own novel."

For writers who can't find publishers, going it alone has long been a last resort. Hundreds of thousands of authors self-publish each year (the Association of Canadian Publishers doesn't keep track). But what was once called "vanity" publishing is seeing a pronounced uptick these days that is threatening publishing's long-standing business model. And why not: An author can now go from manuscript to book in a matter of minutes -- easily and more lucratively than has hitherto been possible.

Steve Almond describes himself as a cult writer. He's the author of six books, the most recent of which, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, was just published by Random House, the world's biggest publisher. This is all well and good, but for Almond there are drawbacks. He gives one example: In 2002, he wanted to call his first short-story collection The Body in Extremis, the title of the final story; his publisher, Grove Atlantic, insisted on My Life in Heavy Metal, the title of the first story. Grove won.

"Any time that you enter into an agreement that you're not in control of," he says on the phone from outside Boston, "you have to make certain compromises. And that can be kind of tough."
Not long ago, he had an idea for a new book: a collection of very short stories paired with brief essays about writing, published in a flip book with two covers, but he couldn't generate any interest among editors ( "I don't blame them for one second," he concedes).

Around the same time, he did a couple of readings with other authors who were on a rather unstructured book tour and found himself embracing the DIY mentality. He got a friend to design a book cover, then availed himself of the Espresso Book Machine at the bookstore at Harvard University.

"I'm used to waiting 18 months," he says, but after feeding a PDF into Espresso he watched his book "pop" out of the machine -- "literally fall like a gumball down the chute. And I picked it up: It's wet, its warm. I wanted to swaddle it; it was like a newborn."

Almond struck an agreement with the bookstore to print copies of This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey for about $5 apiece, which he sells at readings for $10. It isn't in bookstores: "I don't want this book everywhere. I want it at readings that I do where it becomes an artifact that I hand to the person who I know is going to read it, not some commodity that's renting shelf space in a Barnes & Noble."

Since then, he's gone back and added new covers, updated some stories, experimented with size, added lists of recommended books and music. Thus, each edition is unlike the one before. He's so pleased with the result that he self-published a second book, Letters From People Who Hate Me. And he's placed his next short-story collection with a small press with whom he'll split production costs and revenue 50/50.

"Traditional publishers will continue to exist," he says, "but increasingly they are going for books that have a pre-made audience. Celebrity memoirs, celebrity dog memoirs, political books, books that pretty much have a built-in platform. And the world of traditional literary work is going to have to find new and innovative ways to make its way into the world.

"And that's something that can be a cause for despair, but it's also a cause for celebration. We're at the beginning of a new era."

Bob Young is a busy man. He is the owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. He is vice-chairman of the Canadian Football League.

And he is the founder and CEO of Lulu. com, whose raison d'etre is to "turn authors into publishers."
In 1999, Young wrote Under the Radar and published it the traditional way. It sold more than 20,000 copies at $25 each, for sales of around $500,000.

He got the princely sum of $2,311 -- what was left over after the costs of production, marketing, returns and all the costs his contract deducted before calculating his royalties. His take-away: "What I understood as a business guy is that publishing is a really hard business."

When he set up Lulu 2002, his focus was on the 19 out of 20 writers who can't get their books published, rather than competing for the one out of 20 authors whose books will go on to be successful. When he began, he recalls, "The general reaction back then was one of indifference." But today, Lulu. com, based in Raleigh, N.C., is just one in a crowded electronic-publishing marketplace that includes iUniverse, Smashwords, Amazon's Digital Text Platform and Scribd. Last year, Lulu. com published more than 400,000 books. Until now, Canadian orders have been filled in the United States, but Young lets it slip that, in August, Lulu will partner with a Mississauga printing company to establish a Canadian footprint.

"That's hot-off-the-press news," he says. "We literally signed the contracts yesterday."

At the 2008 Book Expo Canada, Key Porter publisher Jordan Fenn was approached by a middle-aged woman who gave him a copy of her self-published childhood memoir, which she claimed had sold 15,000 copies. He found it "a charming book," but didn't bite.

"I think they didn't believe my numbers," Mary-Ann Kirkby says today.

But she wasn't surprised. During the seven years she spent writing I Am Hutterite, she submitted it to and was rejected by "every major publisher, sometimes twice." Most of those who responded said it was a fascinating read, but there was no market for such a book (though Canada has the highest concentration of Hutterites on Earth, with 35,000 people).

Kirkby persisted. And after bookseller Paul McNally, of Winnipeg-based McNally Robinson, said he'd launch the book, she borrowed $30,000 from the bank and self-published it on her own Polka Dot Press in June 2007, with an initial print run of 3,000 copies. It became a chain-wide bestseller, and, within weeks, Chapters was calling to see if they could stock the book, too.

The book has now sold more than 75,000 copies, and Kirkby recently signed a distribution deal with Key Porter, which is handling the book's marketing, publicity, warehousing, selling and shipping. She's also snagged an American publisher, Thomas Nelson.

Key Porter's Fenn acknowledges Kirkby could make more doing it herself, but points out the upside: "She no longer has to worry about selling the book. She doesn't have to worry about warehousing the book and arranging shipments of her book. She can just focus solely on promoting her book and writing new books."

And that's the rub. Self-publishing isn't just about paying someone to print your book. If you want to find a readership, you have to hustle: market the book, get it into bookstores, sell the book, get it reviewed. You end up spending as much energy getting people to read it as you did writing it.

"It takes a certain kind of person to self-publish well," says Nancy Wise, president of Kelowna, B.C.'s Sandhill Book Marketing, and co-author of How to Self Publish and Make Money. Founded in 1984, Sandhill is now one of the largest distributors of independently published books in Canada, with 450 titles. "It's not for the faint of heart or the light of wallet. It takes time and it takes money."

Perhaps the biggest strike against self-publishing isn't the cost or the time or the effort, but the sense that if a book is self-published, it can't be very good.

"It was never far from my mind that I had self-published the novel, that it was not what I had wanted," Fallis admits. "Had I known then what a stigma surrounds self-publishing, I may never have done it."
The stigma spreads across the entire industry: The Writers Union of Canada's website warns against vanity publishers: "The Union does not advise or encourage a writer to pay any fee to a publisher to produce his or her book." With the exception of the Leacock Medal and the Trillium Book Awards, self-published books are usually ineligible for major prizes. ( "I'm not sure what a literary award can catch that a publisher's slush pile misses," says James Davies, the Writers' Trust of Canada's senior program manager). And magazines and newspapers -- including this one -- rarely if ever review them.

"Even here in Saskatchewan, I had to sell a phenomenal amount of books before somebody like the (Saskatoon) StarPhoenix would pay me attention," Kirkby says.

"It's not that I have a philosophical objection to self-published books, but the reality is that most of them don't cleave to the same editorial or production standards as books that come from reputable publishing houses," says Steven Beattie, Quill & Quire's review editor. "If I get a self-published book that looks interesting to me, I'll definitely have it reviewed. I've been in this job for two years now, however, and that has yet to happen."

"Self-publishing has allowed people to put lots of books into the world, but it doesn't mean that it's good art," Steve Almond says. "Your job as a writer isn't to figure out how your book's going to get in the world, it's to figure out how to write well enough that your book deserves to get into the world."

Let's give the last word to Terry Fallis, who sold about 1,500 copies of The Best Laid Plans before M&S took him on as one of its authors. Two days after the book was republished, Fallis found himself onstage at an Authors at Harbourfront event in Toronto with Fred Stenson ( The Great Karoo) and Andrew Davidson ( The Gargoyle), and soon went from reading by himself to reading with Joseph Boyden ( Through Black Spruce) and Paul Quarrington ( The Ravine). His book was recently chosen by Waterloo for their One Book, One Community initiative, following in the footsteps of Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. His new novel, The High Road, is prominently featured in M&S's fall 2010 catalogue, with promises of a multi-city author tour, national media and national print advertising, among other perks.

"In all humility, I think I'm probably the exception to the rule in self-publishing," he says. "I consider it to be a lightning strike."

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=844c163e-52e1-4de1-8cea-fd6b15cbefbd

The Twilight Zone/ always try and work hard

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Oct. 12 The Twilight Zone: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article called “Cross over into the Twilight Zone- and find today’s movie plots” by Maureen Dowd on Jul. 10, 2011.  I wrote about this article before way back in 2011:  

http://badcb.blogspot.ca/2011/07/job-interview-taste-of-edmonton-artists.html

Dowd writes for the New York Times.  Now I found the full-length article and it’s really good.  Here's the whole article:

I knew I should have been out eating charred meat or watching a bad Michael Bay movie.

But I couldn’t help myself. Every July Fourth weekend, I get sucked into the spooky little dimension of “The Twilight Zone.” As the annual Syfy marathon proves, Rod Serling’s hypnotic show is as relevant as ever. 

If Anthony Weiner had watched it, he might have been more aware of how swiftly, and chillingly, our technology can turn on us. Prosecutors and reporters, dumbfounded by dramatic reversals in the cases of tabloid villains D.S.K. and Casey Anthony, might do well to keep in mind Serling’s postmodern mantra: Nothing is what it seems. 

Agnes Moorehead may seem to be a lonely farmwoman under attack by scary little robots, but after she kills them and takes an ax to their spaceship, it turns out that she’s the scary Amazon alien and the little men were U.S. astronauts from Earth. 

(Tracy’s opinion: I saw that episode.)

Ensorcelled once more by that inimitable, smoke-filled Serling voice, which is reassuring and unnerving at once, I wondered how the ingenious TV writer would have used social media and search engines in his plots. Given the way Serling treated time travel, space odysseys, robots and aliens, the 21st-century technology giants would probably have been ominous in one narrative and benign in another. (Just like in life.)
No doubt some characters would have been saved and others destroyed by Twitter, Facebook and Google. 

“When you look at ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes, everything is ambivalent,” said Serling’s friend Doug Brode, who, along with Serling’s widow, Carol, wrote “Rod Serling and ‘The Twilight Zone:’ The 50th Anniversary Tribute,” published in 2009. “Rod had an open mind to the good, the bad and the in-between of technology. He was a guarded optimist until the Kennedy assassination. After that, his work reflected his sense of hopelessness.” 

He said that Serling’s father, a middle-class grocer, lost his business in the Depression, so Rod had an early lesson in reversals. Serling also had a devastating experience while serving in World War II. During a lull at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific, he was standing with his arm around a good friend and they were having their picture taken. At that moment, an Air Force plane dropped a box of extra ammunition that landed on Serling’s friend and flattened him so fatally that he couldn’t even be seen under the box. 

“Many ‘Zone’ episodes are about that split-second of fate where somebody arbitrarily gets spared or, absurdly, does not,” Brode said. 

Serling himself lived a reversal, going from a trailer park after the war and 40 rejection slips in a row to having a big Hollywood house and a pool. But he grew disdainful of Babylon’s corrupting materialism and moved back to a cottage on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York. Serling fought furiously against censorship and ads, asking how you could write meaningful drama when it was interrupted every 15 minutes by “12 dancing rabbits with toilet paper?”

In one “Twilight Zone,” an inept screenwriter conjures up Shakespeare to help him. The Bard produces a dazzling screenplay but then storms out when the sponsor demands a lot of revisions.
Did Serling, who had a searing sense of social and racial justice, believe in God?

“Not Charlton Heston sitting on a cloud with the Ten Commandments, but absolutely, as a force in the universe, he did,” Brode said. “Nearly 35 years ago, George Lucas told me that the whole concept of the Force comes from Rod Serling.”

It’s impossible not to watch a stretch of the endlessly inventive Serling and not notice how many of his plots have been ripped off for movies, and how ahead of his time he was. In a popular new Samsung ad, a young woman jumps up from the lunch table and begins screaming because the tarantula screensaver on her colleague’s 4G phone is so lifelike; another guy at the table takes off his shoe and smashes it.

There’s a “Twilight Zone” episode where a Western gunfighter time travels forward and goes into a bar, where he sees a TV with a cowboy coming toward him. Thinking it’s real, he pulls out his pistol and shoots the screen.

Looking at this summer’s lame crop of movies and previews you can appreciate Serling’s upbraiding of the entertainment industry for “our mediocrity, our imitativeness, our commercialism and, all too frequently, our deadening and deadly lack of creativity and courage.” 

“The Twilight Zone” was never gangbusters in the ratings, and Serling — who smoked on screen — died at 50 from the ravages of six packs a day. He felt like a sellout and failure. He had sold syndication rights for his show to CBS for a few million, thinking he had not written anything of lasting value.

Sadly, he gave himself a trick ending. He died never realizing how influential he would be.

“Everything today is Rod Serling,” said Brode. “Everything.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/opinion/06dowd.html?_r=1&smid=fb-nytimes&WT.mc_id=OP-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-TTZ-070611-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

My opinion: Reading this article about a TV writer really inspired me.  I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure a lot of you experience reversal of situations at one time or another.

Always try and work hard: I will give you one of my own examples: When I was in gr.9, school was hard.  Then I got to gr. 10 and it was really easy.  That was because I was in mostly low classes like English 13, Social Studies 13, Science 10 and Applied Math 10.  I hardly ever had to study, work hard, or pay attention in class.  

Then in gr. 11, school was hard.  English and Social were fine.  What I learned in Applied Math 10, was gr. 8 and 9 math.  Applied Math 20 was really hard.  My skills and work ethic really atrophy in gr.10.  I didn’t have a work ethic anymore because I was so used to not working much.  

I had to study, work hard, pay attention in class so I can barely pass.  I had to endure my sister tutoring me in math nearly everyday so I can pass.

After that, I never let my skills or work ethic atrophy.  When I passed math and science, I learned that hard work does pay off.  I can work hard and pass.  I rather work hard and try and fail, then not try at all.  If I didn’t try, then I will always wonder “What if?”  

That’s why I always try and work hard.

Oct. 13 The Lovers: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “Away she goes again” by Lauren Groff.  She reviews the book The Lovers by Vendela Vida on Jul. 4, 2010.  Here’s an expert:

Ambitious works usually proclaim their ambition stylistically, panoramically or on the level of the line, and it is easy for a reader to feel frustration when it appears that a writer isn't pushing herself to do something new.

It was only in light of Duras' lifelong project - to refine her story by retelling it - that I understood that Vida's project over her three novels is quite ambitious, even if her methods are quiet. In the end, by pushing deeper into her refrains of grief and travel, Vida's work becomes clearer and more sophisticated with every book she writes; and "The Lovers" is her best and most disturbing novel yet.

http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Lovers-by-Vendela-Vida-3184554.php

My opinion: The part of “pushing yourself to do something new” stood out to me.  It’s not just about writing, but it could apply to life.

Adam Lewis Schroeder: Also in the Edmonton Journal on Jul. 4, 2010 was “Exotic land blossoms in winning tale.”  Robert J. Wiersema reviews In the Fabled East by Adam Lewis Schroeder.  Here’s an excerpt:

I assumed he was fast on his way to becoming a household name. Empress of Asia had everything -- great writing, a great story -- and Schroeder, who now lives in Penticton, was the sort of author who made good copy: photogenic, with a backstory of travels in Asia.

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=e47bc3e1-dced-4d63-913a-922a1115c103

My opinion: I looked at his picture and studied it.  He looked like he could be an actor.  Here is the picture that was in the newspaper:

http://www.straight.com/life/travel-opens-adam-lewis-schroeders-path-fabled-east

He kind of reminded me of the actor Desmond Harrington.  They’re both handsome with dark hair.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004993/

Espresso Book Machines/ Alex Leslie

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Oct. 13 Espresso Book Machines: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “Got a book in you? Go ahead, Espresso yourself!” by Richard Helm on Jul. 4, 2010.  It was right underneath the article “The book on DIY” by Mark Medley.  Here’s the whole article:

You hear it before you see it, faithfully churning out the pages in the middle of the floor, downstairs at the University of Alberta bookstore.

This is the granddaddy of Espresso Book Machines, the first of its kind in Canada, purchased in November 2007 for $144,000. There are six of them now scattered across the country. The high-tech wonder can print, bind and trim on-demand paperback books with a four-colour cover in a matter of minutes. And it does it at a fraction of the cost offered by publishers, which is why the university acquired the gizmo in the first place.

The original idea was to generate big savings for students on their course textbooks, while also sheltering library expenditures.

Three years later, the Espresso's true value has become clear. It is nothing less than the long-sought El Dorado of the vanity press.

Todd Anderson, director of the University of Alberta bookstore, says about 60 per cent of the Espresso business these days is devoted to self-published books brought in by the general public. The demand from would-be authors is such that Anderson is now lobbying U of A bursars to buy a second machine.

"Good lord, the amount of things we put through here now," Anderson marvelled this week. "Novels all the time, and poetry all the time, haiku, graphic novels, family history -- lots of family histories -- memorial books, lots of non-fiction stories by people who were in the First World War or the Second World War ...

"People want 20 of this and 30 of that and 40 of this. It's especially busy around Christmas. People have written a Christmas story and they want to hand it out as a gift."

The situation isn't unique to Edmonton. The McMaster University Bookstore purchased its Espresso in 2008, mainly to compete with online retailer Amazon. At the time, customers could order a book from the store and wait two weeks or order it online and have it mailed out the same day. Now the books have been balanced. The Espresso machines have a database of more than a million books that can be printed on the spot.

"We're really just a bookstore who happen to be able to make the book in our store for you," Mark Lefebvre, operations manager at the McMaster store and also president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, told the National Post.

But once again, what's really surprised Lefebvre is that most of the money generated from Espresso has been from self-publishing. "The demand for people who want to tell their own stories is absolutely phenomenal. Overwhelming, even."

The U of A's Espresso machine paid for itself within the first 11 months and now prints some 22,000 books annually, Anderson said.

"It's been running day in and day out. Since we put this thing in, it's been sitting in the basement here, pumping out books."

And for some of those self-published authors, a book in the hand has proved especially satisfying.
"For people who want something printed, and the validation of a name on a cover, this is a great thing," Anderson said.

"But we had one fellow who did a novel, and printed five or 10 and was quite happy with it, and decided to print some more, and went to New York and got signed by an actual publisher because he had something to show them."

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=c74c5d87-6d79-4790-a53c-4cc77dff1990

My opinion: I didn’t know the U of A had a book machine that prints books.  Interesting.

Oct. 19 Alex Leslie: I cut out this National Post article “Her Justifiable Swagger” by Michael Hingston (an Edmonton Journal writer) on Apr. 14, 2012.  He reviews the book People who Disappear by Alex Leslie.

The debut story collection from Vancouver’s Alex Leslie has an intentional vagueness built into its title — one that becomes more and more apparent the deeper you delve into the work itself. There’s no question that there are people here, and no doubt that some of said people are disappearing.
The question is: Do they want to disappear?

Yet we’re not talking about high-stakes thrillers here, full of midnight abductions and ticking bombs in car trunks. In fact, the majority of the characters in People Who Disappear are regular folks who live average lives in unassuming towns. But they all have breaking points. And when things get too heavy, they don’t think twice about leaving it all behind.

“Preservation” features a teenage girl fed up with everything about her stuck-in-quicksand hometown: her “living fossil” father, her girlfriend who’s afraid to take their relationship public, as well as the nearby pit of actual turtle fossils that seem to silently taunt her dreams of escape. “What you are, we once were.”
The uncle-niece team in “Ghost Stories” travels through the wilderness of Vancouver Island in search of entire towns that were left to rot following the end of the mining boom.

And “Like Mind” picks up just as a woman’s loyal but mentally unstable friend quietly returns to Vancouver after a three-year retreat to his mother’s basement in Edmonton. Before, when she’d asked some mutual friends where he took off to, one vaguely told her, “I think somewhere it snows a lot. He mentioned it snowing in an email.”

This latter story gets at the idea of disappearance more explicitly than most. The duo spend all day driving around the Lower Mainland, picking up furniture posted for free on the Internet so the man can rebuild his old life. At one place, they get a Buddha-shaped lamp from another woman, who argues that it’s all but impossible for anyone to actually leave the city for good.

Privately, the narrator agrees. “I still saw my classmates from kindergarten at concerts,” she thinks. “Several people I’d been to high school with had become managers of Starbucks in different neighbourhoods.” Plenty had left for school, or to travel — and then they returned. “Back in Van, they shrugged, as if it had happened by accident.”

That’s the urban version, anyway. The other half of the stories take place on the isolated forests of Vancouver Island, where fallen trees and vicious rainstorms can make you disappear whether you want to or not.

Leslie is a skilled writer, too, though there are many places where she struggles to find her footing. This struggle tends to manifest itself as a leveraging of mood over story, which dims the lights on several of the collection’s weaker stories in an attempt to disguise their flaws. Sometimes her stabs at plot run completely off the rails; see the ending of “Face,” when a group of suburban neighbours decide to dispose of a recently unearthed skeleton in just about the most ridiculous way possible.

What the author does very well, however, is relationships. People Who Disappear is full of tense families and lovers alike, whose futures are always just one argument away from dissolving. In “Long Way From Nowhere,” one of the collection’s best and boldest stories, Leslie never fully spells out the relationship between the vagabond trucker and his alleged daughter — though we can figure out the disgusting truth without much trouble. Then, just as we’ve gotten our footing, the story takes a wonderful leap into the unknown as the girl runs off into the forest with a group of protesting hippies (with names such as Yggdrasil and Happy) and moves into their treehouse community, which is suspended more than 200 feet off the ground.

The other standout piece takes a similar kind of risk, and yields just as much reward. “People Who Are Michael” tells the story of a teenaged pop star’s rise to fame, but only through the prism of videos uploaded to his YouTube channel. He starts out high-voiced and anonymous, standing nervously in front of a Bart Simpson poster; before long he’s fending off legions of fans and marvelling at his own success. Then a dark twist in the middle turns the story into an electric cautionary tale.
Obviously this is inspired by Justin Bieber, with a dash or two of Michael Jackson thrown in. The clinching moment, though, comes when the fictional Michael references his “swagger coach,” who, he tells an interviewer, “shows me how to be smooth and stuff.”

When Bieber told the Toronto Star about his own swagger coach in 2009, I remember marvelling at what a great detail that was. Obviously Leslie was paying even closer attention.

My opinion: This sounds like an interesting book.  I’m not really a fan of short stories, but there seems to be a good bunch of stories here to read.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/04/13/book-review-people-who-disappear-by-alex-leslie/

Through the Glass/ Loving a Murderer

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca: 

Sept. 21 Through the Glass: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “Punished for a lover’s crimes” by Debby Waldman on Nov. 20, 2011.  It’s about the book called Through the Glass by Shannon Moroney.  Here are some excerpts:

On their first date, Jason Staples told Shannon Moroney that he was on life parole for murder. That kind of news would send most women fleeing. But Moroney, a smart, attractive, college-educated high school guidance counsellor, saw something special in Staples.

She wasn't the only one. Staples, who was 18 when he committed his crime - murdering his 38-year-old housemate because she refused his sexual advances - was widely considered a model ex-con by the time he met Moroney. He was 33 and had been out of prison for five years. He had to spend four nights a week at a halfway house, but he was encouraged to live independently the rest of the time and hold down a job, which he did.

A month after the wedding, when Moroney was out of town at a conference, Staples kidnapped and raped two women at knifepoint. Then, after the women appealed to him, he left them tied up in his basement, called the police, and turned himself in.

The principal at her school refused to let her return, telling her, "It's too upsetting for people to see you. You represent something terrible."

Through the Glass could easily have been the story of how Moroney's life fell apart - and indeed, it did. But this is no "poor-me" tale. It's equal parts how-to manual for anyone touched by crime, indictment of the criminal justice system, endorsement for the practice of restorative justice, thank-you note to the friends and family who supported Moroney and, ultimately, answer to those who wanted her to explain what she was thinking marrying a man who had committed murder and standing by him after he violently attacked two women he didn't know.

"I hated what he had done and I would never condone his actions, but I knew I didn't hate the person he was," Moroney writes as she recalls her feelings before she visited her husband in jail for the first time after the rapes.

She knew he was too dangerous to live in public.

For the justice system to recognize that if it wants criminals to be rehabilitated, perpetrators' families need support, not censure, blame, and ostracism.

It's hard to read Moroney's book without thinking about Elizabeth Williams, the unfortunate spouse of convicted rapist and murderer Col. Russell Williams.

In truth, though, there are many readers who will benefit immensely from Moroney's level-headed but passionate look at the journey on which she was thrust after her husband's crime.

There are those who will undoubtedly accuse her of having written it to make herself look good. But her argument that she, too, was a victim, is a solid one. If trained professionals in the Ontario criminal justice community couldn't figure out that Jason Staples was a ticking time bomb, how could Moroney have been expected to come to that conclusion?

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=b6d97117-1eae-4c56-9fe4-12243f8692db&p=1

My opinion: That was a very intense article.  If you like to read true-crime, you may like this.

Loving a Murderer: I cut out this National Post article called “Loving a MURDERER” by Joe O’Connor on Oct. 8, 2011.  Here are some excerpts:

Ms. Moroney has moved on, recovered, remarried. But for Jason Staples there is no moving on. He is a convicted murderer, a double rapist — a man capable of incredible violence and a dangerous offender destined to die in prison.

“The hard thing, in my experience, is getting people to understand that you can love a human being and yet detest what they did — and that one does not negate the other,” Ms. Moroney says.

“We all love people that hurt us. This is just a very extreme case.”

It is a remarkable story, really, of love and betrayal, of a horribly broken man’s hidden brutality and his ex-wife’s boundless capacity to forgive.

She listened, intently, to everything he had to say. Soon after, she began asking questions — at Mr. Staples’ urging, meeting with his parole officer, his psychologist, his friends.

Their verdict was unanimous: Jason Staples was a reformed man, a prison success story. He had done something terrible, once upon a time, paid for it and was at no risk to re-offend.

Her parents loved him. Her friends loved him. He never hid from the past.

“For those of us that knew Jason and were a part of his life in 2005 which, by then, was almost 18 years since the first crime, it was like lightning striking twice,” Ms. Moroney says. “This was cancer coming back and it was Stage IV and it was terminal.”

He also told police that he had been spying on his wife and other houseguests using a hidden camera in their bathroom for several months. For Ms. Moroney, the earth cracked open. She was angry, furious, but more than anything she was sad, mourning for a life she might have had, for a Jason she thought she knew and for the pain he had caused his victims.

She could never forgive his actions. But his early admission of guilt and his palpable sense of remorse and a willingness — almost an eagerness — to be punished for the crimes so he could never hurt anyone again would help Ms. Moroney forgive.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/10/08/saturday-interview-we-all-love-people-that-hurt-us-this-is-just-a-very-extreme-case/

Sept. 22 Forensic Files: A few weeks ago, I was on the computer and my dad was watching TV show.  This TV show covers real cases.

Zane and Maria Isa- they killed their daughter for having a fast food job without approval and having a boyfriend.

FBI had put bugs in the house because they suspected they were terrorists.  They mostly spoke in Arabic.

I went on the internet and looked it up and here’s the full story.  It starts off with the transcript of the argument that led to the murder.

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20111801,00.html

My opinion: I’m putting this TV show here, because it is based on a true story like the above book.

Creepy dolly mystery: I found this Yahoo article on Jul. 25, 2014 called “ ‘Creepy’ doll mystery solved.”  Here are some excerpts: 

If you want to give your neighbour's daughter a doll to play with, there are better ways to do it than this.

In recent weeks, as many as 11 "creepy" porcelain dolls have been discovered on the doorsteps of eight homes in an upscale community in San Clemente, Orange County, prompting a police investigation.

Young girls, all about the age of 10, lived at each of the homes.
No notes were attached to the dolls.

"It's peculiar, strange and weird and all that stuff," Orange County Sheriff's Lieutenant Jeff Hallock told City News Service. "People are saying the dolls slightly resemble their daughters, which is creepy."
Officers tracked down the person who left the dolls on the front porches by Thursday night: a female adult who lives in the community and attends church with many of the families.

She had been clearing out an old doll collection and thought that some of the young girls in her neighbourhood might enjoy them, Hallock said.

"Investigators have concluded that her motivation was out of goodwill and that she intended it as a kind gesture," stated a news release from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

My opinion: When I was reading the article, I immediately thought: “This sounds like an episode of Criminal Minds.”  In fact, there was one episode where a serial killer was kidnapping women and dressing them up like dolls because she thought they were dolls.  There was another episode where a serial killer kidnaps a man and a woman so he could make them into puppets.

In this case, that woman really should have left a note with the doll.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/creepy-doll-mystery-orange-county-community-solved-204650921.html

Writing off Magazines/ bad writing

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Oct. 12 Writing off Magazines: This Globe and Mail article “Why so many good writers are writing off magazines” by Russell Smith on Aug. 9, 2007.  I read it, but I didn’t cut it out.  I was in Professional Writing in college and I got this article as a handout in Creative Non-Fiction class. 

He really puts actual work experience and numbers on how he gets paid for writing.  It’s informative, and kind of depressing.  Here’s the whole article: 

My article of a couple of weeks ago about the now-defunct Idler magazine, and the government support of such ventures, prompted a lot of e-mailed response. The publisher of The Walrus pointed out to me that that magazine does not receive support from the government arts councils, but is called a charitable foundation, so cannot make a profit. Several publishers of small magazines, in print and online, relayed their complaints to me that they had not benefited from government support, either.

And the former editor of The Idler claimed that his magazine suffered not from lack of government subsidy, but from unfair competition from subsidized magazines that would not have survived in an unfettered free market. He was the only one who even entertained the possibility that any kind of artistic or intellectual Canadian magazine could survive on its paid subscriptions and advertising alone.

My strongest evidence that serious Canadian magazines are simply no longer plausible, except as hobbies or charities, comes from conversations with writers. Writers are always bitter, of course, because a few of them do get the big break - the six-figure book advance, the story in Esquire - and it makes the rest of us feel underpaid and prone to complaint. But I am starting to sense more than the usual bitterness, even among highly successful writers. There is now a sense of exhaustion.

When my colleagues meet these days, it seems to be more and more in order to discuss some kind of business scheme. Maybe we should set up a speech-giving company, for corporate dinners or whatever they do? Maybe we should set up a creative-writing school for corporate executives who are frustrated artists? There has to be some way of extracting more money out of this thing.

The meetings devolve into bitchfests. How is it possible that we have each published a handful of books and won awards and have entries in encyclopedias and get asked to appear on radio shows and TV shows as experts twice a week and get asked to come and talk at universities once a month and no one wants to pay us anything for it?

Everyone has a story like this: "It feels great to be so in demand! I've been asked to drive to a college in a town two hours away and prepare an hour-long lecture. They're offering me $200. And once a month some film executive buys me lunch to ask me to write a script. It's exciting: If I spend the next year writing it, she will add it to her pile of scripts and consider paying me something for it if her boss likes it! Thanks!"

We are all asked frequently to pitch story ideas to magazines, and more and more, I am hearing writers saying they can't afford to do it any more. "Think about it," a very successful book and magazine writer said to me recently. "I have a house and a child. I am asked by a major city magazine to write a big feature story. For it I will have to do about 20 serious interviews, find some criminals, interview their lawyers, the judge, the families involved, maybe a psychologist and some other kind of expert.
"It will take about two months - not full-time, of course, but two months of constant stress. Then there will be a few weeks of rewrites and quibbles over fact-checking. And then when it's published, I am vulnerable to angry response and possible lawsuits if I offend anyone. For that I might get, if I'm lucky, $3,000. Why would I do that?"

And $3,000 would be, indeed, lucky. Most magazines are still paying the $1 a word that they have been paying, in this country, since the mid-1970s. New magazines, and many trade or specialty magazines, are paying much less. Most of us in this business have been paid exactly the same rates for as long as we've been doing it (in my case, about 17 years). I needn't explain how much the cost of living has risen in that time.

It is now impossible for all but a very few magazine writers to make a living as a freelancer. Even if you're at the very peak of popularity, and you get one of these big features a month, you're going to be working awfully hard and you're going to be making between $1,500 and $5,000 a month, which means at peak capacity you're still earning less than $60,000 a year - not poverty, certainly, but harder as you get older, and certainly not commensurate with the education required to do such a job. Which is why our most successful magazine writers get teaching jobs.

This isn't entirely the fault of stingy magazine editors, of course. They would love to pay more, but many of their magazines are on the verge of non-existence because not enough people are buying them, and not enough people are buying them because of the Internet. (Internet magazines are hardly more profitable, though, since the advertisers' money is divided among so many small outlets.) I have no solution to this. Sorry for the bad news, but when I am asked to come to speak to a journalism class on how to become a successful freelance writer, I am going to have to say, "Don't." (I'll still do it, though - for $200.)

My opinion: Wow, you really can’t make money off writing.  I read this in my second year of Professional Writing in college.  I was going to get the college diploma in it.  I thought it would be cool and fun to write for a teen magazine like Seventeen.  I’ve been reading those teen magazines since I was 9 yrs old when my sister started buying them and reading them.

I liked to read it for the true stories of how teen girls experience a big traumatic event and overcome it like battling drug and alcohol addiction, and homelessness.

Of course, I did like the fun stuff like celebrities and quizzes.  Lol.

In my first year of college, I was in Distilled Prose and we had to write an essay where we analyzed a word.  I analyzed the word “magazine” and did discuss how a lot of magazines were folding because of the internet. 

Oct. 13 Bad writing: To balance out the sad article above, I will put up a funny Edmonton Journal article “Awfully good at bad romance” on Jul. 4 2010:

A Seattle author is being recognized for demonstrating the worst possible way to open a novel.
Molly Ringle is this year's winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, organized by San Jose State University's English department to celebrate truly awful fiction. Since 1982, entrants have been asked to compose the opening sentence to the worst novel possible. The contest honours the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his novel Paul Clifford with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Ringle wins top prize for this contribution: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss -- a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Paul Chafe, a science fiction writer in Toronto and a reserve infantry officer in the Canadian Forces, was also cited in the romance category for this long-winded opener: 

"'Trent, I love you,' Fiona murmured, and her nostrils flared at the faint trace of her lover's masculine scent, sending her heart racing and her mind dreaming of the life they would live together, alternating sumptuous world cruises with long, romantic interludes in the mansion on his private island, alone together except for the maids, the cook, the butler, and Dirk and Rafael, the hard-bodied pool boys."

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=e5611176-b9ef-4847-994f-5a2ab5ea9b36

My opinion: I didn’t know that “It was a dark and stormy night” was from a book that Paul Clifford wrote.  That line is legendary.  I don’t really see it as bad, but a cliché.

“There will be no more professional writers in the future”

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Sept. 25 “There will be no more professional writers in the future”: I cut out this Globe and Mail article titled “There will be no more professional writers in the future” by John Barber on Jul. 26, 2012.  Of course I had to read it since I majored in Professional Writing.  Here’s the whole article: 

Ewan Morrison is an established British writer with a credit-choked resume and a new book out, Tales from the Mall, that the literary editor of the venerable Guardian newspaper hailed as “a really important step towards a literature of the 21st century.”

By his own account, Morrison is also being driven out of business by the ominously feudal economics of 21st-century literature, “pushed into the position where I have to join the digital masses,” he says, the cash advances he once received from publishers slashed so deep he is virtually working for free.

“I’ve been making culture professionally for 20 years, and going back to working on spec again seems to be a very retrograde step,” Morrison says. “But it’s something a lot of established writers are having to do.”

And not only them: From the heights of the literary pantheon to the lowest trenches of hackery, where contributors to digital “content farms” are paid as little as 10 cents for every 1,000 times readers click on their submissions, writers of every stature are experiencing the same pressure. Authors are losing income as sales shift to heavily discounted, royalty-poor and easily pirated ebooks. Journalists are suffering pay cuts and job losses as advertising revenue withers. Floods of amateurs willing to work for nothing are chasing freelance writers out of the trade. And all are scrambling to salvage their livelihoods as the revolutionary doctrine of “free culture” obliterates old definitions of copyright.

The economic trajectory of writing today is “a classic race to the bottom,” according to Morrison, who has become a leading voice of the growing counter-revolution – writers fighting fiercely to preserve the traditional ways. “It looks like a lot of fun for the consumer. You get all this stuff for very, very cheap,” he says. But the result will be the destruction of vital institutions that have supported “the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years.”

In short, he predicts, “There will be no more professional writers in the future.”
Many will cheer, Morrison admits, including the more than one million new authors who have outflanked traditional gatekeepers by “publishing” their work in Amazon’s online Kindle store. “All these people I’m sure are very happy to hear they’re demolishing the publishing business by creating a multiplicity of cheap choices for the reader,” Morrison says. “I beg to differ.”

So does bestselling novelist and lawyer Scott Turow, current president of the influential Author’s Guild. He has drawn heavy criticism from digital partisans for defending the diminishing rights of “legacy publishers” currently under U.S. Justice Department investigation for allegedly fixing ebook prices.

Predatory price wars initiated by market behemoth Amazon directly devalue the written word, according to Turow. So does the willingness of young writers to work for nothing in the hope of future rewards. “You can’t be a professional writer unless you get paid for it,” he says.

“The third peril,” Turow adds, “is the generalized assault on copyright from the book pirates on one hand and the [free content] people on the other.”
Digital self-publishing may work for already established authors, according to Turow, “but it’s one more instance of the winner-take-all economy. It doesn’t allow young writers to flourish and it is not in my judgment a good thing.”

Nor is self-publishing profitable for the majority of authors, according to a recent British survey. It found that half of the writers – many no doubt lured by well-publicized tales of spectacular success achieved by a handful of fellow novices – made less than $500 a year for their efforts.
To Authors Guild members who have embraced digital opportunities and resent the president’s defence of the status quo, Turow has a ready answer. “I say, ‘I’m really glad publishers are no longer barricading your way to a readership. But that doesn’t mean, if you were able to choose tomorrow, you wouldn’t rather get paid in advance.’ ”

The livelihoods of serious writers will continue to depend directly on the health of traditional publishers, “the venture capitalists of the intellectual world,” according to Turow.
As if to prove the point, self-publishing stars who have grown rich selling 99-cent novels online, including young-adult author Amanda Hocking and Fifty Shades creator E.L. James, all sign what Morrison calls “a proper publishing deal” as soon as they are able.

“It just goes to show you can’t have it both ways,” the British author adds. “You can’t on the one hand say, ‘This is a revolution that’s going to sweep away the hierarchies of the publishing houses,’ and at the same time say, ‘Hey, you big guys, give us a deal.’ ”

Writers’ Union of Canada chair Merilyn Simonds likewise challenges what she sees as the magical thinking of the free-content movement. “Younger generations are so steeped in consumerism I think sometimes they don’t understand where that’s taking them,” she says. “Who benefits from all this free content? Google. They’re making enormous profits from free content.”
So are entrepreneurs like Arianna Huffington, who built and sold a $315-million business by “aggregating” other writers’ work.

By contrast, the average annual income of a Writers’ Union member is $11,000, according to Simonds. And the union is currently facing “decades of litigation” over copyright law and collective licensing agreements in an effort to protect those paltry incomes from further erosion.

“Is this the Canada we want?” she asked after a recent Supreme Court decision that extended the rights of educators to photocopy books without compensating writers. “A Canada that has to import its literature because it forced its own creators to work for free until eventually they gave up?”
All the critics admit that the digital revolution has brought tremendous opportunities as well as challenges, and many are working assiduously to exploit those opportunities. Derek Finkle of the Canadian Writers Group, an agency that represents more than 100 non-fiction writers, touts the recent success his clients have achieved online. Paula Todd went straight to Kindle with her recent long article about Karla Homolka, while Russell Smith found online sales with Blindsided, an expanded version of a just-published magazine article.

But when it comes to negotiating typical deals to supply content to conventional media, Finkle adds, old rules apply. Top-tier writers can rarely command more than $1 a word – the same rate their predecessors enjoyed 30 years ago. The cost of housing in Toronto has increased 700 per cent over the same period, Finkle points out – and media executive salaries are hardly stagnating.

“If you’re good, how long do you want to go on being paid at rates that are really far beneath what people get paid to put their bum in an office at a media outlet?” he asks.
The answer is that you don’t, says Winnipeg writer Jake MacDonald, who has shifted much of his effort from the journalism that once supplied most of his income to writing corporate histories. “It’s quick money,” he says, and no more dispiriting than writing screenplays that never get produced due to network cutbacks. “But let’s face it,” he adds. “You’re not following in the footsteps of Isaac Bashevis Singer when you’re doing that kind of stuff.”

“My ecological model is the raccoon – a diversified survivor,” MacDonald adds. “I’m always writing, but the survival plan continues to evolve.”

“I’m surviving as well as I ever did,” MacDonald says, “but in completely different ways.”

My opinion: Here’s what I found underneath the article on the internet:

PENGUIN BUYS VANITY PUBLISHER

Yet another pillar of the old regime crumbled last week when one of the world’s largest and most recognized book publishers, The Penguin Group, spent $116-million to acquire upstart vanity publisher Author Solutions Inc. , an Indiana-based firm that earns most of its income not by selling books, but by charging amateur authors hefty fees to produce unsellable books.

As if to celebrate the transition, the stock price of Penguin’s parent company, Pearson plc, hit a 10-year high the morning of the announcement. Penguin CEO John Makinson said the company hopes to “explore opportunities that lie somewhere between self-publishing as presently defined and Penguin publishing as presently defined.”

Whatever else that might mean, one thing is certain: Writers will pay.

My opinion: That was a kind of sad article.  It talks about the reality of how a lot of writers are working.  What stood out to me was the part at the end with Jake MacDonald saying “It’s quick money,” he says, and no more dispiriting than writing screenplays that never get produced due to network cutbacks.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/there-will-be-no-more-professional-writers-in-the-future/article4441060/