“I really feel quite hypocritical about hairy-legged males who will never be pregnant and never have that life-altering decision to make being the ones writing the rules for the opposite gender as though we had nothing to do with their condition.”
– Texas state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, not shying away from his pro-choice stance in a heated primary.
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When is 99¢ the most appropriate price for a writer’s work? When it’s just a short story? An essay? An entire novel? I’ve noticed a number of books offered on Amazon for 99¢, usually from first-time writers trying to get their name into circulation. If you invested $1,000 to publish a novel yourself, you’d have to sell more than a 1,000 novels just to break even. This issue reminds me of a question that came up years ago, when I worked for a major bank in Dallas – how does human resources decide salaries and bonuses? What criteria do they use to determine how much someone should be paid? If you’ve kept up with the recent financial implosions on Wall Street and around the country, you’ve surely wondered how someone could justify a 7- or 8-figure salary.
So, what price do we place on a writer’s work? Should the writer set that standard? Or, should the market? And, there again, what criteria does “the market” utilize? As publishing companies struggle to survive in a rapidly changing market, so do the writers who essentially keep them in business. We all want to be paid what we think we’re worth, but that’s always subjective.
How often have you read a book or watched a movie and regretted paying for it? It went on too long; it had too much filler. People often make it through a fiction novel and think it would have been better off as just a short story. Other times they feel a non-fiction book could have fit into a magazine article. Agents and editors often will try to construct a book around a single good magazine piece. Anyone submitting a nonfiction proposal probably should have published several excerpts well in advance, as a form of vetting the work.
Writers always come up with good ideas – I have a notebook filled with great synopses – but it’s a different matter to flesh it out into a coherent story that will hold the reader’s interest. Still, you really can’t make a decent living selling your stuff for 99¢. People may buy it, but unless you’re already independently wealthy, gainfully employed, or more than willing to suffer for the sake of your art, I don’t think you’ll be too happy with how things turned out.
“I have to get the Secret Service home in time for their new curfew.”
– Obama again.
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“Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals.”
– President Obama, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, before a picture of Donald Trump appeared on a nearby screen.
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A couple of weeks ago the Pulitzer Board stunned the literary world by not selecting a winner in its fiction category. For book lovers it’s like breathing – how could you not do it? This is the first time since 1977 that Pulitzer hasn’t chosen anyone to receive its literary fiction award; usually a guarantee of free publicity and increased sales for the winner and their publisher. A 3-member panel selects the fiction category, after reviewing hundreds of books and sends 3 finalists to Pulitzer’s board for a decision.
The authors who missed out this year are Denis Johnson for Train Dreams; Karen Russell for Swamplandia; and David Foster Wallace for The Pale King, which was compiled from notes he left when he died in 2008 and published last year.
“Every publisher in America would agree that it is a missed opportunity,” said Paul Bogaards, director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf that published Swamplandia! He cited the tenfold sales boost for previous winner Jennifer Egan and her book A Visit From the Goon Squad. “It has a demonstrable effect on sales, especially in the fiction category,” he added.
But, Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler called the lack of a fiction winner “unusual,” but noted that none of this year’s finalists received a majority of board votes. “I can say that multiple factors were involved. Beyond that, we do not discuss the deliberations, which are confidential,” he said in an email. “We realize that the lack of an award in Fiction is a disappointment to many. We regret that. But I can assure you that the Board made a considered decision.”
Chairwoman of the Pulitzer fiction panel Susan Larson told National Public Radio that the jurors had read some 300 books and were “shocked … angry … and very disappointed” that the Pulitzer board couldn’t pick a winner. “I think we all would have been happy if any of books had been selected,” she said.
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Fellow blogger “Free Spirit” truly lives up to her name. In her “Fabulous 50’s” blog, she emphasizes that, once you turn 40, you don’t have to be sedate and sedentary and do everything society expects of a proper citizen. I’m just now discovering that. Today, she embarks on her next great traveling adventure: a foray into Africa. After centuries of exploration and colonization, Africa still seems to hold a great deal of mystery to the uneducated and unenlightened. Africa, for example, is one of the largest land masses on Earth. All of the United States, china and India, as well as most of Europe could fit into it. Madagascar alone is about as large as the United Kingdom, which is slightly larger than the state of Alabama. Africa also is home to some of the most advanced societies the ancient world has ever produced. Egypt is the first that probably comes to most people’s minds, but there was also Nubia, Nok and Timbuktu; even Ghana and Sudan were home to highly-organized and well-structured kingdoms. Considering Free Spirit’s eponymous journeys, here are just a few photographs of Africa, courtesy of National Geographic.
Limestone formation in Egypt’s White Desert. Photograph by Clemens Emmler.
South Africa’s Table Mountain. Photograph by Santjie Viljoen.
A Bururi long-fingered frog, last seen in Africa in 1949, and re-discovered in Burundi in December 2011. Photograph by David Blackburn.
Koranic Sankore University in Timbuktu, Mali. Timbuktu was a thriving center of scholarship instrumental to the spread of Islam in Africa. It retains three notable mosques and one of the world’s great collections of ancient manuscripts. Photograph by Naftali Hilger.
Avenue of the Baobabs, an area near Morondava, Madagascar, is all that remains of a once thick forest cleared for farmland. Growing 80 feet or more, baobabs are valued for fruit and bark. Photograph by Pascal Maitre.
A pink-hued, or strawberry-colored, male leopard wanders South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve. Tourists had seen the animal before, but only recently was it captured on film. Officials suspect the leopard has erythrism, a little-understood genetic condition that’s thought to cause either an overproduction of red pigments or an underproduction of dark pigments. Photograph by Deon De Villiers.
“After Barack Hussein Obama suddenly cast-off his Muslim roots, rejected his mother’s disbelief in God, turned tail on the Islam of his early life and converted to Christianity – BLAM – he’s elected President.”
– Republican congressional candidate Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe the Plumber,” in a letter he plans to distribute to churches during his campaign.
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Every time I hear of a hate crime committed in the U.S. I’m as angered as I am frustrated. Even after 2 centuries of civil rights activism and legislation, occasionally an incident occurs that just smacks of blatant racism and disrespect. The Trayvon Martin case in Florida has captured the nation’s attention recently, but not because the alleged perpetrator is a self-proclaimed White supremacist. The lackluster reaction from the local police is what aggravated the victim’s family. But, there are other more glaring cases of racist activity, often at the hands of people we’re supposed to trust. One such recent event comes out of Rapid City, South Dakota.
In August 2011, Vernon Traversie, a 68-year-old member and resident of South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, suffered a heart attack while at the Heart Doctors office in Rapid City. They immediately sent him a few blocks away to Rapid City Regional Hospital for emergency surgery. Traversie, who is blind, said, “I was supposed to have emergency surgery on my heart, but they (the hospital) had scheduling problems. Every night they would prep me for surgery which went on for four or five days. Every night they would shave my chest and stomach and wouldn’t feed me.”
Traversie said he didn’t even know what was done to him until a RCRH employee came into his room and advised him to have pictures taken of his torso as soon as he got home. He says she told him that she could not testify for him, but that her conscience got the better of her and she didn’t agree with what they did to him.
Last Real Indians, a site dedicated to raising awareness of Native American issues, asked Joyce Anderson, a retired surgical nurse from Baptist Hospital in Little Rock, AR, to view a photograph of Traversie’s injuries. “It appears the area under the incision was done with a scalpel for drainage of the incision,” Anderson says. “The other wounds seem to be necrotic, meaning the tissue is dead. This could indicate the wounds were burned into his skin.”
Traversie has no resources for an attorney but did say council member, Ryman Lebeau, and Tribal Chairman Kevin Keckler are trying to get an attorney for him. “Those Ks are causing me pain still,” he adds, noting that “not all White people are like this.” Still, he emphasizes, “And, I have to live with that on my stomach the rest of my life.”
Here is a video Traversie made detailing his experiences at the hospital.
This Facebook page also has been established to help push for a legal resolution to the matter.
Since this appears to be a hate crime, a federal inquiry may be warranted, which means the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder could be drawn into the matter – just as with the Trayvon Martin case. Since Traversie also is blind and 68, charges for abuse of a disabled and elderly individual also could apply. All the legislation and affirmative action programs won’t eliminate bigotry and racial prejudice. But, in the current environment, no one has to tolerate it anymore. Native Americans and Hispanics, especially, have been too conciliatory over the years. Whenever incidents like this occur, we can’t just get upset – we need to get mad!
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Chief Writing Wolf 