A Season of Rememberance

Lent is the season of rememberance, a time of somber reflection. A time to seek forgiveness for sins of omission and those commited.

147 pairs of children's shoes were hung on the fence surrounding the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin yesterday.

147 children died while incarcerated in St. Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack, one of the more notorious of the industrial schools that were run by religious organizations. Thousands of other individuals passed their entire childhood, up to the age of sixteen, behind tall stone walls. They were guilty of being poor. guilty of being illegitimate, and for such crimes as those they paid dearly.

This is the season of rememberance, of penance.

Those who made it through came out broken, their heads filled with nightmares that never go away.

The Pope sent a letter to the Catholics in Ireland. Those who have been made to suffer until the day they die were not impressed with his well chosen words. Where was he, where were his bishops, when complaints were lodged about the treatment of the children in the industrial schools?

What was done cannot be undone, but those who paid the price of so many blind eyes turned away would like the laws to be changed so that pedophiles face greater penalties in the future. They would like to see a sex offender registry and enforcement. They are asking to have some input into the disbursement of funds, rather than trusting to the State or the Church to do the right thing.

They tied 147 pairs of children's shoes to the ornamental iron railings. A little reminder, those shoes. Former industrial school inmates haven't gone away just because the Redress Board distributed a bit of cash around and the clergy said they were sorry.

Running Fast To Stay In Place

Amazon changed the way books were sold and every other book seller has had to adjust or die.

Eason's, a venerable establishment in Ireland, has gone live with their very own online shop, to offer to the world what was once available in a limited area.

It may not be quite the same as shopping on O'Connell Street, but the internet location can give you a sense of what you might find if you were to make the trip.

Should you wish to impress your friends and act as though you've traveled, you can stock up on pens and paper with the Eason brand name on the wrapper. The paper sizes are different, too, so scribbling notes to co-workers on A4 rather than 8 x 10 will be sure to get you noticed.

Not to be outdone by Amazon's Kindle, Eason's is offering the Sony e-reader and the digital books to go with it. Their prices are in line with their competitor, with some books available for E8.99.

They've devoted an entire section to Irish literature and books of Irish interest, which gives them a leg up on Amazon. Like all the smaller vendors, Eason's has to carve out a niche that makes it unique in some way. Business will be good if they can appeal to the millions of descendents of the Irish diaspora who are curious about the land of their ancestors.

Who wouldn't want a signed copy of Rachel Allen's Home Cooking on display when friends arrive for some traditional St. Paddy's day fare? You'll find such a treasure at Eason's online, perfect to mount in the kitchen cookbook rack to impress the guests.

There's fiction to be found as well, novels written by Irish authors whose works won't necessarily be found on the far side of the Atlantic. Take a chance and buy something. You may find that the quality of the writing beats out any piece of commercial fiction available in your neighborhood, and you'll be able to travel to Ireland in your imagination. The cost of the novel is far cheaper than the airfare.

Nothing Is Sacred

After giving birth, an Irish woman could look forward to a prescribed Guinness every day during recovery.

Guinness, went their slogan, is good for you.

Donate a pint of blood? Good on you, and here's a pint to help build you back up.

Guinness is good for you. Or was good, at any rate. It's not to be proclaimed so anymore.

Diageo, the conglomerate that owns the black stuff, has decided that it's just not in keeping with modern thinking to promote an alcoholic beverage in a way that suggests it's a medicine. Even if the claim is nothing more than a charming old marketing gimmick that no one takes at face value these days.

Blood donors will no longer get their free pint, which will save Diageo some money and that's what big corporations are all about. Not that they're admitting to it, of course. They'll hide behind political correctness and trumpet their ideals of health and wellness and responsible drinking, all while promoting the consumption of alcohol to one and all.

Some swear by Guinness when they travel to high altitudes, taken as an iron supplement with a better taste than the pills your health-nut friend thinks are so brilliant. It's kept Irishmen alive for almost three hundred years, so there's got to be some good in it.

Corporate strategy trumps all, and it's that strategy that is bringing a long-standing promotion to a close.

No longer will Guinness be marketed as "good for you". On the other hand, it isn't bad, either.

Disclaimer: Please drink responsibly.

Blame On The Secular

If Irish society was more like it used to be, there'd be no clerical sex abuse scandal. Or that's what His Holiness in Rome has said.

He's sent a letter of apology to Ireland, to "propose a path of healing, renewal and reparation."

No magic bullet promised in the letter, of course. All can agree that healing will take a good long time. Getting the behemoth bureaucracy to move won't be a swift undertaking either. Consider how long it took the Holy See to admit that Galileo had it right after all.

But that isn't what really matters to Pope Benedict. It's this rapid secularization that's caused all the trouble.

"Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values" he says. Translation? When it was "pay, pray and obey", everyone was happy. There wasn't all this fuss about bishops resigning in disgrace and people refusing to allow their children to serve at the altar out of fear of what might happen in the sacristy.

Going to confession and daily mass and annual retreats kept the priests on their toes and kept them from straying from the Gospel. Once the parishioners slacked off, so too did the priests. When you get right down to it, the Second Vatican Council is at the core of the entire scandal.

Nice in theory, but anyone who's read about the goings-on Ireland's Magdalen laundries and industrial schools before anyone even thought about a Second Vatican Council would realize how bizarre and disconnected the Pope is from reality.

If not for secularization, the victims of the abuse that went on for decades would never have found the support and courage to come forward. The changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council had nothing whatsoever to do with bishops being mistaken in their interpretations of Canon Law. The fact that the clergy stonewalled the authorities and shifted pedophiles from parish to parish has nothing to do with Masses being said in languages other than Latin.

While the Pope comes down on the perps, he fails to slap down the higher-ups. The bishops who hid the pedophiles don't have to worry about facing God, to read the Papal letter to the Catholics of Ireland. It's as if they didn't do a thing wrong.

St. Peter didn't live in a fine house, with lovely red shoes to cover his feet. Perhaps the Church needs to emulate Christ and His Disciples a bit more closely, and keep in mind that while they are the Princes of the Church, they are royalty in a kingdom that's not of this earth.

Blame It On March Madness

We're all hit with the gloom and doom clouds from time to time.

I'm feeling as if I'll never make any forward progress. Treading water here, staying afloat but not getting anywhere near shore.

Rejections pile up, literary agents say it's not the writing but the material that isn't marketable, and to top it all off, Irish-style health care is taking a step closer to infecting the American system. I'll end my life on a trolley in the hallway of a packed, dirty hospital where the only physicians available are those who aren't quite skilled enough to enjoy a bountiful private practice.

Why so depressed? Is it what's happening in the world, in my life, in my business? No, it's the losses that have left my NCAA tournament bracket a mass of cross-outs.

No one can judge which team will have a stellar afternoon and triumph over adversity to beat a team they weren't supposed to beat. The best you, the punter, can do is try to guess which group of young men is riding a wave of momentum and which might lose their cool in the heat of battle.

Every day I check the post, to see if the small publisher I submitted to last November has made a decision on my manuscript. I monitor my e-mail to see if the agent who's reading the full will call me to offer representation...or reject the thing.

The one bright spot would be a circle on my chart, a sign that I'm not a complete failure and I could at least pick a winning team. After yesterday's round of upsets, I don't even have that for comfort.

This writing life is a misery sometimes, but like a drug addict, I can't seem to stop.

Not Resonating On The Same Wavelength

In order to target agents, I choose my reading material based on the acknowledgement page.

Not enough hours in the day to do all that needs doing, so I pick up novels that tell me who thought the words were of such quality that the manuscript was one worth representing.

With my latest venture, I think I may have figured out why Elizabeth Weed never responds to my queries. It also has me wondering if my problem lies in the way that I write and what I think is worth reading.

Clearly, we're not resonating.

The flap copy of Therese Walsh's The Last Will of Moira Leahy promises a debut novel about sisterhood. That's classic fodder for women's fiction, upmarket no doubt as that's what Ms. Weed is after.

Authors know that they have to hook the reader's interest straight off, and Ms. Walsh opens with her narrator telling us all that she lost her twin. How in the world did she lose the girl, you the reader asks. I've got to turn the page to find out.

Turn that page and you'll find lots of dialogue. Line after line of dialogue. I'm not particularly chatty, but I understand that conversations can be used to move things along. In fact, dialogue moves the narrative quite a bit faster than internal dialogue and descriptions, so the second and third pages fly by.

Another tease presented itself. The narrator seemed to be hallucinating, imagining that the child she was talking to bore a marked resemblance to her sister as a child.

Keep turning the pages, and there's more.....more dialogue. Do people really talk so much and say so little?

From a first person narrative, the second chapter switches to third person and goes back in time. I find that I have to turn back, since I can't seem to remember the name of the surviving twin, and with that, my interest in the book begins to wane.

I plow on, through all the "As you know, Bob" moments that I skim over to save time. Authors know that they should research facts, even in a novel, but they shouldn't dump all that info. Yet Elizabeth Weed was untroubled by this violation of story-telling etiquette.

Often, agents ask for the first fifty pages as a sample of the writing, so I struggled through fifty pages before I gave up.

Just in case, I thumbed through the remainder, looking for a page that wasn't heavily peppered with quotation marks. Talk, talk, and more talk. I lost track of who the characters were, what role they played, and which one was supposed to provide the romantic element. I lost the thread of the story, but I don't think I ever really had a grasp of it to begin with.

Whatever Ms. Weed found in the manuscript, I don't see the attraction. Was she swayed by the author's website? The author's degree in psychology and residence in New York? As a reader, I look for a good story, an engaging tale that I can get lost in and escape from the pressing concerns of the day. Is this not what literary agents think will sell?

What matters is that Elizabeth Weed thought this sort of thing would sell, hence she would take a pass on my manuscripts. Colm Toibin's The Master wouldn't have stood a chance with her.

It's About The Story

Sorry, said Melissa Jeglinski of the Knight Agency. While she's looking for historical fiction, my particular story didn't resonate.

Not the writing, but the subject matter. The story didn't meet up with her requirements.

It could have been the setting that didn't appeal to her. No English castles or Regency drawing rooms in Hampshire could be found in my manuscript.

Just as likely at fault is the era in which the story takes place. The Regency period is huge, and you might have noticed an avalanche of books set in Elizabethan times. That leaves a lot of years unwanted by Ms. Jeglinski.

Not that all the agents who reject via WEbook give a clear and decisive response. Can't say what Miriam Altshuler didn't like, since she opened up the submission on WEbook and then didn't respond. Neither did Lorin Rees. Marcy Posner took one look at the log line on the submission and didn't go any further.

Busy agents, searching for the next blockbuster that will put Phillipa Gregory to shame. That's the subject matter that resonates with agents who are in business to make money, not art.

All I can hope is that some day, some well-established author will introduce the time period that interests me, and there's my manuscript, all ready to go.

But it's St. Patrick's Day. I'd be better off spending the day with a steady stream of well-poured Guinness and a few curry chips to ward off potential hunger.

To The Letter Of The Law

It's all right there, in black and white.

The clergy weren't obliged to tell the gardai about the pedophiles in their midst. So for those of you calling on Cardinal Brady to resign, keep in mind that he followed the letter of the law back in 1975 when he helped to cover up the heinous crimes of Father Brendan Smyth.

It wasn't his job to dial the phone after he interviewed two victims and found their reports highly credible. Someone else above him could have made the call, but there was no law per se that required such action.

Father Smyth was nabbed eventually. And convicted on 74 counts of abusing children. Over the course of 35 years. Who could fault the eminent Cardinal for not acting in his capacity as a decent human being to bring the priest's reign of terror to a halt? Granted, the abuse went on for another 18 years after the Cardinal learned of the situation, but by law he wasn't required to do a thing. So he didn't.

No, he wasn't trying to protect the Church. He was merely following the law. To the letter.

As for Christ's teachings in regard to the importance of the spirit of a law, of the sins of omission....Cardinal Brady would much prefer that you ignore all that catechism business until you're sitting in the church, being asked to donate money to help pay for the lawsuits that resulted from the decades of child abuse that went on without anyone lifting a finger to stop it. Then it's pray, pay and obey.

Cardinal Brady won't step down unless the Pope himself tells him it's time to go.

Catholics aren't waiting for the word. They're fleeing in droves, voting with their feet since they have no say in Church business.

The Minnow Recruits

From a tweet via @irishpublishing comes this most intriguing posting on Monster.com.

HMH is hiring!

All those synergies realized have now proven to be too much synergy for the Dublin office. Perhaps Mr. John Paulson has noticed that there are too many empty desks, or too much work not getting done.

You might think that Riverdeep had plenty of techies on hand to manage all that digital interfacing, but it looks like Mr. Paulson is ready for more.

If you currently reside in a city where Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt once employed you, or have lost your home due to a synergy realization, you might want to consider a move. Dublin is lovely, really. Of course you would be competing with thousands of Irish tech types who were all laid off when the Celtic Tiger expired, so it would be wise to have the job in hand before setting sail.

You're Very Welcome From Dublin

As he wakes in his hotel suite in Chicago, Brian Cowen will find that the weather is similar to what he left behind in Ireland when he departed for his St. Paddy's tour of the States. It's raining. It's cold. Not a soft day today by any means.

He'll walk in the parade, along the wide expanse of Columbus Drive that parallels the lakefront. From underneath the protection of a black umbrella, he may notice the tall boxes distributed at precise intervals along the curb, standing guard over every single square inch of available car-parking space.

Ireland is flat broke. There's not enough money coming in to meet the high cost of a government that wants to meet the citizen's every need. The non-descript payment centers may provide a much needed spark for Mr. Cowen's ponderings on the red ink spilling out of the Exchequer.

Not a penny of revenue drops into Chicago's coffers from those parking meters. Instead, Mayor Richard Daley leased the rights to collect the fees to a private company, which in turn paid the city many millions of dollars for the seventy-five year contract.

Chicago is flat broke. There's not enough money around to meet the high cost of corruption and sweetheart deals in the City That Works. Taxes are astronomical and people are moving out, to other states. An Taoiseach Brian Cowen can well relate to that scenario.

As he dodges the rain drops, he'll consider the possibility that the private parking meter firm would be interested in the concession for all of Ireland. Pay to park on every road in the island; in front of every shop and pub from Donegal to Youghal. What might that be worth? A billion euros perhaps? Enough to put the slightest dent in the deficit?

Mayor Daley could take Mr. Cowen for a tour of the Chicago Skyway, a toll road that has been leased for ninety-nine years. A much needed billion dollars arrived in the city's treasury with that clever scheme. Why not install electronic tolling along every major road in Ireland and lease the streets?

This junket may be all about boosting tourism and perhaps enticing a business or two to set up a tax shelter in Ireland. Mr. Cowen may very well come away with some fresh ideas to ease the burden on his ministers, all under fire as one budget cut after another is announced.

What do the people of Chicago think of the lease arrangement?

Parking fees skyrocketed, and so did the tolls on the Skyway. But it wasn't their taxes being raised, was it?

Welcome But Not Going Unnoticed

The Irish tourism industry is promoting the whole cead mile failte business during this most Irish of seasons. Plenty of good deals, you're all very welcome from America and Europe and Asia.

Welcome, yes, but don't think the neighbors aren't aware of the strangers in their midst.

Ireland's population is, by and large, pale of complexion. Excepting the black Irish, of course, but they're only on the swarthy side. And they tend to be rather hairy. But they look Irish. They blend in with the crowds.

The seven jihadists who were arrested might have felt welcome in Ireland. The purported ringleader was said to have arrived from Algeria about ten years ago and had quietly resided without drawing attention. Don't imagine for a minute that the native born locals weren't aware of the presence of a foreigner in their neighborhood.

So many black faces on the streets. I've heard that muttered many a time, the tone not filled with cead mile failte at all. So many Polish, so many strangers, there's no room for us Irish. The newly arrived from Croatia, Libya and Palestine could never blend in with the crowd.

Neither could a blond-haired Yank lacking the less-than-chiseled features of a potato-eating populace. The gardai have reason to believe that Jihad Jane spent some time on Irish soil during a recruitment drive. Just the fact that Americans are presumed to have plenty of money to throw around, she didn't stand a chance of not being noticed.

Maybe in Dublin there is more diversity, but the would-be assassins set up shop in Waterford and Cork, where the local mindset is a bit more insular. Grannies up and down the streets where they lived would have been aware of their comings and goings, of how many cars parked in the road near their flats or how many other strangers came to their doors.

Welcome to Ireland, but the gardai in the station probably know you're there from the minute you arrived. Gossip travels fast.

Exit The Tough Market

These days, you're likely to get a rejection from a literary agent that mentions the tough market for fiction. Not much demand, that sort of thing, and you move along knowing that you're not about to write some scholarly tome. Which you'd never be able to sell either because you don't have a platform.

What's a literary agent to do when the publishers aren't interested so much in fiction?

Quit accepting fiction submissions, as agent Kathi J. Paton has done.

Her agency specializes in non-fiction, according to her revised Publishers Marketplace page.

Fiction's gone. There's no market for it. Why take on an author, spend valuable time promoting and pushing, only to be told by the acquisitions editors that there's no market for today's fiction?

Ms. Paton is looking for writers who are specialists in the field in which they write. No amateurs need apply. Only those with a strong and sturdy platform are welcome to submit.

One less agent to query. One less rejection to field.

Less opportunity for writers who can tell a good story to get their product to market.

Unemployment Insurance

The argument began in the usual form.

He gets in the way because he has nothing else to do. He putters around, looking for things to dismantle and reassemble so that he can say he's 'working around the house'.

So he gets in the way, lumbering to and fro, moving directly into my path.

With time on his hands, he surfs the web on our one computer, unaware that my home-based business requires the use of the computer. He is out of work. He keeps me from working.

The petulance, the self-pity were there in his voice but I'd heard it so often already that I cracked. There was silence for the rest of the afternoon, extending past dinner.

I didn't care. There was nothing to say. He's out of work. He gets in the way.

Let's get out of the house, he said in the morning. He's cooped up, with nothing to do. Let's get out of the house. I can't drop what I'm doing to walk around the hardware store, listening to his grand plans of home remodeling when I know we can't possibly afford to invest in a new kitchen.

He's out of work. He's looking for something to do but he's driving me out of my mind.

I smoke more these days. I run errands in the middle of the day to get a break from the constant togetherness that is forced on us by his unemployment.

If we can get through this, I think, but I know that our relationship has been strained beyond repair. We will carry on as a family, while the space between us will grow as I drift away in search of a quiet place where I can think and imagine and craft stories.

The unemployment insurance will see us through, until his boss calls him back when the weather improves. We'll get by while I deny every request to buy one thing and another, leading to more arguments that strain my patience beyond endurance.

There is no government subsidy that insures against the stress of so much time together. There are no unemployment benefits that can patch up what's broken.

Timely Edits

James Joyce was all artsy and cutting edge and experimental when he penned Finnegan's Wake.

Written during the Great Depression, it's no wonder that he was trying to find a new form. At the time, many were questioning the old forms of government and economic policy, with socialism and communism glittering brightly on the far distant horizon. Surely there had to be a better way, the downtrodden cried, and Mr. Joyce went off to find a better way to write the novel.

It's pure gibberish, of course. No one can make their way through it, yet the book remains in the great pantheon of great books. I suppose if you've made your mark in the literary world and then produce a pile of shite, no one would dare call you on it lest they risk looking the eejit.

Not many would dare to call out the Emperor on his lack of clothes.

In an effort to repair some of the experiments gone wrong, scholars Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon have made some much needed corrections to the original.

By poring over manuscripts and notes by the author, they crafted 9,000 edits that should make the prose a bit less dense. Although any author making up his own words and rules of punctuation can't be helped by minor edits. Some experiments simply don't work and need to be scrapped.

The new edition, available for E300 at a book shop near you soon, is said to make the syntax more clear, in the way that Mr. Joyce intended and which the original printer failed to replicate from the original manuscript.

So the Joycean scholars can merrily doublin their mumper all the time, with fresh fonts and trusses on the ruptured syntax.

Finnegan's Wake will be more readable, which isn't saying much. You'll still want your crib notes and reader's guides at hand to make sense of it.

Celebrating World Book Day

Shane Hegarty left that book there on purpose. If you're passing by in St. Stephen's Green, please pick it up and read it.

People have been asked to put a book out in a public place so that others can share in the pleasure of the written word.

You might have access to a rack of paperbacks at your local commuter train station. Help yourself. Leave another book behind, in place of the one that caught your eye.

Read.

Running out to the shopping mall? Take along a book and put it down on a bench, with a note that invites anyone passing by to turn the pages. Sharing the pleasures of reading may go a long way to reminding those who don't think they have the time that it's worth while to slow down sometimes and get lost in the fantasy of fiction.

Concerned about the weather? Pop the book into a clear plastic bag and zip it up. Books can go anywhere and never need to be re-charged.

In Ireland, the free-form book exchange program is to run the month of March. Why not join in? If you like, you can register your book at www.bookcrossing.com and track its progress, to follow it along on its journey from hand to hand.

What aspiring author wouldn't want to promote reading?

Another Grand Slam For Denny's

Most businesses would be satisfied with celebrating St. Paddy's Day, but not restaurant chain Denny's.

No indeed.

They're celebrating.....The Great Famine.

Brilliant.

Two million people either starved to death or had to risk their lives on an ocean voyage to a strange land, to start again in America where they had nothing. Now that's a cause for celebration.

The Hibs (that's the Ancient Order of Hibernians for those of you keeping score at home) threatened a boycott (another Irish invention) and Denny's retreated as quickly as a landlord facing a gang of irate tenant farmers armed with scythes.

The advert has been pulled, but not before Denny's left a bad taste in many an Irish mouth.

I don't think an offering of all-you-can-eat green eggs for St. Patrick's Day would do a thing to make amends with the Irish community and the descendants of the diaspora. The best hope for Denny's at this point is to trust that few saw the commercials in the first place, having avoided viewing with a touch of the remote control.

They had problems a few years back with racial discrimination. Perhaps they could show how much they really care and celebrate something like, oh, say, slavery?

Someone Else's Responsibility

Is that the flame of indignation that burns so brightly, Bishop Brennan? Is it the fire that should burn in every Irish Catholic when they think of the child abuse scandal that has severely damaged the Church?

No, it might be the warm glow of a brass neck.

Having railed against the guilty clerics in his own fold, the Bishop of Ferns has now asked his faithful to dig deeper into their pockets and come up with the money needed to pay the victims of clerical abuse.

It's their responsiblity, you see. Given by God Himself.

The insurance company finds that their God-given responsibility reached its conclusion after they'd paid out about one-seventh of the costs incurred thus far. So, parishioners of the Ferns Diocese, it's up to you to pay the remainder. God said so.

Not asking much, this bishop. It breaks down to E60,000 per year for twenty years from the 100,000 members of the diocese. Just drop a few extra euros in the collection basket and we're good to go.

Considering the current state of Ireland's economy, it isn't likely that many have extra cash lying about, let alone enough cash to meet the mortgage payment and buy food for the week.

Then there's the change in attitude that faces the Catholic Church. The days of "pray, pay and obey" are long gone, and the congregations are asking questions of the religious board of directors. The shareholders were never allowed to look at the books before, and they're less likely to throw good money after bad now that they've had a glimpse into the inner workings that saw pedophiles shunted from parish to parish in a shell game.

So, no, Bishop Brennan. The diocese can go into receivership, as happens to all other mismanaged companies. Sell property at a loss, lay off employees, and act under the direction of the likes of Deloitte and Touche until the bill can be paid. The parishioners didn't incur one penny of that debt, the Church leaders did, and it's their responsibility entirely.

Growing To Death

Anyone who's passed through Dublin Airport and gone looking for a book to read on the long trans-Atlantic flight has been inside Hughes & Hughes.

For over twenty years, the airport shops in Dublin and Cork provided reading material and snacks for the countless visitors who were just passing through. The book seller turned a nice profit during the boom years, when everyone was traveling and Ireland was a prime destination for the descendants of the Irish Diaspora.

Not content with their niche, the bookseller saw greater profits beyond the boundaries of the airport and they expanded.

What else is a firm to do but grow and expand? To sit back would be foolish, leaving money on the table.

The posh new shopping malls in Swords and Dundrum hosted Hughes & Hughes shops. No captive audience there, however. No travelers with little better to do and time weighing heavy. Those who might purchase a book at the Pavilions Shopping Centre could just as easily buy from Amazon at a lower price. They weren't there to pick up reading material for a flight that was about to leave, and having the time needed to wait on an on-line order made a difference.

Posh shopping mall owners charge posh rents, and that was fine when money was no object. With the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the money's not coming into the till and meeting high rents has become impossible for several Irish merchants. Hughes & Hughes is not the only business enterprise to seek a new rental agreement with the landlord. In their case, however, the landlord didn't see any need to lower the rent.

Now the bookseller is in receivership and there won't be any rent money coming in at all. The store will be empty, unless someone else comes along to rent the space. You can bet that they will be renting at a level in line with current demand, so the landlord will end up with less anyway. It just won't be coming from Hughes & Hughes.

Fewer people pass through Ireland's airports these days, but they may represent enough foot traffic to keep Hughes & Hughes alive in their original location, selling books and such to tourists. A few clerks will manage to keep their jobs, while those who arrived late to the party will be on the dole.

All that growth killed Hughes & Hughes. The good times didn't last very long at all.

A Song To Suit The Mood

From a live performance by Pierce Turner comes a classic Irish song, a lament straight out of the Famine era that fits a gloomy frame of mind.



Somehow it makes you feel better in comparison to the poor lad who finds no other solution to an impossible love than to leave all behind and hope for something better in America.

Is It A Rejection Or A Long Pause

So much detail, so much to ponder.

I haven't been submitting much through WEbook.com because I am running out of agents there to query. The letter or the hook aren't doing the job and I have to keep revising, which takes time, which I don't seem to have much of these days.

Not having a supportive family, the writing has to be done when no one is around to ask me what I'm doing and since I'm not busy can I run to the hardware store or find the drill bit or any other task that disrupts the flow of words.

I do sometimes check the status of the unopened submissions, though. If you want to find out how long it takes a literary agent to get to the cold calls, WEbook.com is the place to follow along at home.

Following all the rules and regulations, I put together a package for a few agents who are seeking historical fiction but only want a query letter. No manuscript samples, no five pages or three chapters.

What does it mean, then, if a literary agent opens the WEbook submission and reads the hook and then goes to the manuscript sample page that only lists the word count as per the WEbook submission rules?

To be more specific, what does it mean if this agent reads the hook and then does nothing? For two weeks and counting?

Is it a rejection? Is it a variation on the "no reply means no" theme?

Do I tally the submission as yet another rejection and move on, to maybe query the agent again next year if I have another manuscript finished?

Is it a case of the agent putting something aside because it's a maybe if time opens up or some editor at a publishing house happens to mention a need for some historical fiction that doesn't deal directly with the famous folks but with those who might have been around them?

No answers to be found in the tea leaves.

Better to pack up a pen and some paper and wander over to the public library where I can write in peace, without interruptions.

Swim With The Sharks And Get Eaten

After making a fortune in the grocery business, Feargal Quinn cast his financial net in search of bountiful investments.

He hauled in a piece of Barry O'Callaghan's mighty minnow's dream of swallowing a publishing house whale.

Mr. Quinn swam with the sharks, only to get swallowed down himself.

With 400 million euros in profit from the sale of the SuperQuinn chain, he sank approximately 16 million into the deal that saw Riverdeep merge with Houghton Mifflin. Now comes word of a planned restructuring of the mountain of debt, and Mr. Quinn has seen his stake in Riverdeep-Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt-EMPG sink like a stone.

He's not the only Irish millionaire to fall victim to a dream of grandeur. Even a savvy banker like Sean Fitzpatrick tossed a bit of his cash into the pot. Now he's lost his investment in EMPG, and that coming on the heels of the failure of Anglo Irish Bank. No one knows for certain how much Anglo Irish cash was invested in Mr. O'Callaghan's projects, or how much he might owe the bank. The Irish people now own Anglo Irish, and the bank is insolvent.

Clients of Davy Stockbrokers were eaten by the debt shark as well, and they're in good company with the likes of financier Domhnail Slattery, who has also lost big.

Like a private club, the Irish millionaires invested in each other's schemes, only to find themselves all together at the bottom of the financial sea.

As for HMH, the whale of a publishing firm, it looks to be smoother sailing in the future. Thanks to a massive debt restructuring scheme that has seen so many Irish investors wiped out, the end product of the merger frenzy is in a stronger position going forward, and may very well survive the storm-tossed seas.

Barry O'Callaghan will be hoping to set up a nice little deal for himself, to recoup some of his spectacular losses. Surely the CEO of such a large firm as HMH is deserving of stock options and a hefty salary?

Boost Your Credentials

If your dream literary agent is Lisa Grubka of Foundry Literary, you can't just send her a cold query and expect results.

No, it takes credentials. You have to have a platform from which to launch your debut novel.

Samuel Park is represented by Ms. Grubka, and she's sold his manuscript to Simon & Schuster. Not a bad start to a writing career.

But it isn't Mr. Park's start, exactly. You see, he teaches literature at Columbia College in Chicago. That's where noted author Audrey Niffenegger was teaching when she found fame and fortune as a novelist.

Mr. Park is a bit of an expert on Asian American literature, so when he writes a story about a Korean woman, literary agents figure that he knows what he's talking about. Like most college professors, he's published so that he wouldn't perish, although such scholarly works aren't the stuff that short story collections are made of, but his writings do add to his luster as an expert in ethnic literature.

So there you have it. You want Lisa Grubka to seriously consider your query? Get your Master's degree in Fine Arts and land a teaching position at a major university with an outstanding writing program.Write a good book that dovetails with your area of expertise.

It's one of the best ways to stand out in a crowded field.

The Unused Passport

Five Irish nationals did not travel to Dubai to kill a senior leader of Hamas.

The passports used by the secret agents who went to Dubai to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh were very good forgeries that used real identification numbers.

Of course, if anyone at Dubai's airport had done anything to verify the name and number on the passports, the game would have been up. The names and photographs on the forgeries didn't match up to the people who held the real passports.

There are five Irish people who never once traveled to the Middle East who had their identities stolen, to a limited extent. Their passport numbers were lifted and used on fake passports, with different names and pictures, but the fact that those passport numbers are now in Interpol's line of sight means those five people can't travel anywhere.

Bad news for the two who had plans to travel this weekend. If the Department of Foreign Affairs hadn't notified them in a timely manner, they most likely would have been promptly arrested at the airport and tossed into a truly Kafka-esque situation.

On the other hand, the forged British passports that were also used in the caper were identified as having been stolen from British nationals living in Israel.

That part of the story has a far more interesting twist, with its hint of Mossad intrigue at the local level. But why did they mix in five Irish passports as well?

Income Wasted On Stocks

Davy Stockbrokers has come out firing at the Irish public for wasting their money. Those who followed Davy's advice and invested in Barry O'Callaghan's high seas adventure must surely be shaking their heads in amazement.

That's why Ireland was never a wealthy nation, says the report. Money flowed in to workers and they turned around and cast it to the four winds. What greater waste of money was there than buying into an excessively leveraged corporate buy-out of publishing giant Houghton Mifflin? All that cash is gone in the restructuring and it's unlikely that Davy's clients will see a penny back from their investment.

What of those who didn't care to become a part of Riverdeep's school of publishing fishes?

Davy believes that they paid over-the-top prices for housing, which of course isn't the most productive use of anyone's assets. Better by far to keep living in your Gran's box room, paying minimum rent and stashing your cash in a bank account where it's safe to grow at a slow but steady pace.

What of the ladies and their shopping trips to New York City? Now there's a true waste of money, what with women's fashions changing every few months and an expensive pair of shoes no longer in style after one wearing.

Did Ireland get anything right? As far as Davy is concerned, the investment in the nation's roads was money well spent, since better travel conditions allowed for economic expansion, to say nothing of the explosion of home construction in what was once the quiet countryside. Building was once a booming industry and tradesmen were rolling in dough.

Education was the other bright spot in an otherwise gloomy report, but now that all the money has gone away, even education will have to take a hit and university fees will have to be raised.

The trick will be to learn from the past and its flurry of excess while finding the safest places to make deep cuts in the budget.

Does that mean that anyone flying to New York City for a long weekend should stock up on textbooks rather than Manolos?

Prime Time For Kindle

As rumours go, it's an intriguing one. Amazon is said to be considering a give-away that could see more Kindles out there in the world.

It's being reported that those who sign up for Amazon Prime might find a Kindle in their mail box.

If you buy a lot of books, you may already be a member, taking advantage of the free shipping while convinced that $79 per year is a bargain to get your books a few days faster than the rest of the non-Prime readers.

Yet the Kindle sells for far more than $79, so how could Amazon afford to give them away?

The price of any new device usually goes down, in no small part because the manufacturer knows there's an eager audience lusting for new toys. Some people will pay just about anything to have the latest device, and cost is no great barrier. Once that market is saturated, it's time to appeal to the rest of the book-reading public, and that may be where Amazon is coming in.

Kindles may not cost as much to produce as their current price would suggest. Find a price point that would allow Amazon to break even and why charge someone for the Kindle?

Go buy razor blades and you'll see the marketing angle. Wasn't Gillette quick to send out free samples of their latest razor, all for free? Once you used it, however, you had to buy sharp new blades for the thing, and there you were.

Even cell phones fall into that particular scheme. Give someone a device that they find they must have, and charge for the privilege of using the thing. Calling plans, minutes, monthly fees---the carriers make more down the line from a free phone than they could in selling the things without the two-year contract and monthly bills.

Amazon could assume that someone who was paying $79 per year to get their books faster would love to get their books instantly through a download. Give that person a Kindle and they'd buy more books. After a certain number of titles are purchased, Amazon would hit the break even point on their give-away, and further purchases would be pure profit.

That sort of thinking only works, of course, if the people who get the free Kindles find that they like them and can't get along without them. There's the danger for Amazon that the free Kindles won't have the desired impact, and without titles being purchased for the Kindle, it's a losing proposition.

Which makes you wonder, if Amazon is hearing the patter of little Apple feet and feeling the heat of iPad competition. Better to get a Kindle into everyone's hands and crowd out iPad's potential sales, or it's all over for the Kindle monopoly on e-books.

The last thing that Jeff Bezos wants is for his Kindle device to end up in the back of the box room, stored away with the Betavision VCR or the Sega Genesis game system.

Don't Come Around Here No More

The rejection was short and to the point.

According to Evan Goldfried at Jill Grinberg's literary management firm, they're not looking for whatever genre I'm selling.

No mention of the genre in the rejection, however. A rather generic rejection at that, one size fits many in case there's more than one genre that's been cast off. In my case, the genre in which I write falls into that particular category.

If you write historical fiction, you've been advised. Don't waste agency time and don't query Ms. Grinberg. She's not interested.

What other genres has she abandoned?

Hard to say. You can hope that someone at the agency has updated their preferences at Webook.com, which will save a few headaches.

I won't be coming around Ms. Grinberg's inbox any time soon. I know where I'm not wanted.

Blame It On Tax Season

There's always a season for literary agents to explain away their slow response time to your query.

Summers are slow in publishing, with Friday afternoons cut out of the work week so that publishing tycoons can get to their weekend retreat in the Hamptons. The end of August is impossible, with all the vacations shutting up the entire industry for a couple of weeks. As for the Christmas and New Year's holiday weeks, forget it. No one's in the office.

I've noticed a definite increase in the time that passes between query and response, and I've come to find out that it's tax season for the agents and their clients.

Financial statements have to be prepared and mailed in January so that the clients can file their tax returns in time to beat the deadlines for financial aid applications for their college-age children. Actually, by law the forms have to be mailed early in the year, and agents are under the gun to get the things done. On top of that is their usual work of contacting editors, preparing submissions to publishers, etc. and there's no time for reading query letters.

Waiting on a publisher to get back to me about a submission is bad enough, and I already know that it could be many more months before I find out if my novel is worth their while.

It's miserable waiting to hear from literary agents who, in the past, have responded within days. Maybe it's the hectic pace of tax season. Maybe it's because my query letter and manuscript sample were so intriguing that they had to be set aside, saved for a time when IRS forms are cleared away and the agent can devote some quality time to some quality writing.

Quite the vivid imagination I have.

Got A Feeling

Something's going to happen.

I have a feeling tickling the back of my brain, next to the place where the stories are stored up for later use. What exactly will happen I can't define, but it has something to do with writing and acceptance.

Utter nonsense, to be sure. I get this sensation from time to time, usually when I'm about ready to chuck the whole business and stop wasting my time at writing.

This feeling vanishes when literary agents mention in the rejection letter that the writing just didn't grab them. It flashes red hot when another agent lets me know that the story isn't right for him, but the writing's strong and the narrator has something. Another rejection, yes, but phrased in such a way that I can't help but feel that something is going to happen.

This morning I woke up with the thought in my head, that I was close to getting a novel published. Was it due to the fact that the pressure switch on the furnace had gone during the night and the house was freezing cold? Or am I tuned in on a psychic level with the small press that's reviewing the manuscript?

More likely it's a figment of an overactive imagination, the result of some residual alcohol fumes lingering well past the previous night's cocktail hour.

Whatever the cause, I have this feeling that something is happening, somewhere out there in the publishing world, and it will be good news for me one day.

And that is why I can't seem to stop writing and submitting and hoping.

What Part Of Na Caitear Tobac Don't You Understand

The no smoking indoors business has gone too far.

As far as guns drawn and shots fired, and that's going to extremes over a nasty habit.

A couple of Irishmen were in a Queens bowling alley and by all accounts, they were committing the egregious crime of smoking cigarettes. Indoors. God help us all. The world is surely coming to an end.

The bowling alley is situated in Jackson Heights, not what anyone would call a posh neighborhood. No fancy wines by the glass at the 34th Avenue Lanes. Odds are good that Gerard Hourigan and Justin Donaghy were drinking beer. Possibly too much beer. Mr. Hourigan is from Limerick. A bad combination, all in all.

A security guard at the bowling alley, a former cop, told the pair to leave because there's no smoking indoors. The guard once worked in the prison ward of Kings County Hospital. He's most likely not one to take any guff, and certainly not from a pair of drunken Irishmen.

The lads wouldn't leave peacefully and Michael Iavecchio, ex-cop, drew his weapon and fired. Either he's not a good shot or he was only trying to scare the men off. Their wounds aren't life-threatening.

After they get out of hospital, they'll be properly arrested for smoking indoors and have their day in court. A judge will decide if a bullet in the stomach is sufficient punishment for the misdemeanor, or if the gentlemen will face further penalities.

So it looks like smoking doesn't actually kill you.

I'm going out for a smoke.

Oh Canada

Things have gotten bad when the oh so polite Canadians laugh at the Irish ambassador.

You can't talk about the financial crisis in Europe without bringing up Ireland, a nation that experienced actual prosperity for the first time in centuries and now struggles to deal with a downturn. They've had to nationalize a bank or two, cut back on spending, and find a way to get spending in line with reduced revenues.

No surprise, then, that even the Canadians find it laughable that the ambassador's residence in Ottawa is being renovated, at a cost approaching seven million Canadian dollars. Even converted to euros, it's a lot of money.

Other residents of the area are upset that some mature trees were cut down to make way for additions and perhaps a swimming pool. Their outrage resulted in a slight alteration to the over-all plan, saving a few trees that were chopped up to accomodate construction. What kind of shape will those trees be in come spring?

Micheal Martin, Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs, realizes that it's a lot of money, but Ireland needs to maintain its embassies, after all. Yes, people do need hospitals and schools and libraries, but the citizens need fine accomodations to house their ambassadors just as much. How would it look, if some Canadian firm considering investment in Ireland had to be entertained in shabby surroundings? Makes the whole country look bad, and aren't first impressions of critical importance?

Wine cellars, billiard rooms, and panelled libraries are the trappings of wealth and success, and that's the image Ireland wants to present to Canada.

So many famine immigrants landed in Canada with literally nothing, not even clothes on their backs. Who wouldn't want to show off a bit when they've gone from abject poverty to wealth, even if that wealth is fleeting?

The Age Of Miracles

After much prodding from Dublin and London, an agreement has at last been reached between the warring parties in Northern Ireland.

Home Rule has finally come to pass. Take that, Sir Edward Carson. Stand in front of Stormont while you can, with your clenched fist in the air.

Granted, the man is very, very dead, but he may be spinning in his grave at this moment.

He dedicated his political career to preventing Irish Catholic participation in government, taking a side against Home Rule. After the Easter Rising in 1916 and the subsequent Civil War, he sided with partition of the island, keeping a gerrymandered collection of counties under British rule.

Catholics and Protestants sit side by side in Stormont these days, governing those same six counties. They've now reached an agreement that will see justice and policing powers fall into their hands, given up by the government in London.

Sinn Fein will have a hand in running the courts that were used against Irish nationalists. Sinn Fein will be involved in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Catholics will be telling Protestants what to do.

Yet the Irish aren't fully satisfied with the changes, nor have they given up on their dream of a united Ireland, free of British rule. They may be one step closer to realizing their ambitions. They may be one step closer to putting chains around the statue in front of Stormont and pulling it down.

For A Literary Valentine

Roses and chocolates have been done to death. To really impress, you have to come up with something unique, something fresh and unusual for that special someone in your life.

The ladies are said to enjoy soaking in the tub. They like a glass of wine from time to time when they need to unwind. Put all that together with a good book and you'll want one of these:

Available from the Victorian Trading Company, purveyors of romantic accessories, the tub caddy is complete with book rack, wine glass and candle holders, and there's a spot there for a bar of scented soap. Or a small box of chocolates if you're sticking with tradition.

What lady wouldn't fall in love with you when you show such consideration for all her relaxing needs?

Offer to watch the kiddies while she enjoys a few pages of erotica and she'll return your gift many times over.

Cheaper than a Kindle or an iPad, both of which would fry if they slipped out of m'lady's hand if she tried to read in the bath. Less fattening than dinner in a fine restaurant. What's not to like.

Time is running out. Valentine's Day is right around the corner.

John Paulson Tests His Fins

Where will HMH Riverdeep EMPG WhatHaveYou go, now that Barry O'Callaghan is no longer the biggest fish in the sea?

John Paulson, the man who saw a bargain in EMPG debt and sucked it up on the cheap, does not need to know a great deal about publishing educational materials. There are plenty of people already in place at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who can handle the business.

And handle it they are.

The iPad is but newly born, and already HMH is on board with ScrollMotion Inc. to develop software applications for the tablet device. They are banking on the iPad doing far more than the Kindle ever could. Seeing a possibility for the iPad in the classroom, perhaps replacing bulky textbooks, HMH will do what it takes to make their materials iPad ready.

No one can predict what the future of textbook publishing will be. Perhaps the iPad will be rejected by students who prefer hardbound books that can hold bookmarks to note key pages, and bright yellow highlighter that springs off the page when it's time to cram for a test.

Yet students are welded to their iPods, and it isn't much of a stretch to imagine that they are loyal to Apple devices because Apple meets their needs in very cool ways. If any company is going to have a shot at attracting the school-going public, it would be Apple.

A business has to take risks if it is to grow and survive into the future. HMH is only doing what a well-run firm would do in the same situation, and it's no surprise that their competitors are swimming in the same lane.

There's Always Time To Read A Story

Not all mothers with children under the age of ten are reading to their children before bed.

What a terrible loss for those children.

Only 71% of mothers take the time to tuck in the little ones with a story. Only 71% of the children are developing a love of books at an impressionable age.

The study was commissioned by Kellogg's as part of a promotion that ties in with Rice Krispies cereal and The O'Brien Press which is looking to foster reading. Children who are read to before bed are the ones who become readers as they get older, and it's readers who buy books. And cold cereal, we are to assume, given that Kellogg's is involved.

Of those who don't read at bedtime, it was a hectic schedule that was to blame. Mammy is just too busy or too tired after a long day at work. They're busy providing for the child's physical needs, and missing out on the first step towards excellence in the classroom.

Those same 71% of mothers who read bring their children to the public library to borrow books. Shelf after shelf of colorful picture books, yards of chapter books with fewer illustrations because pictures are for babies, and on to the young adult section for the big kids who don't need pictures at all.

Good thing that mothers are taking the time, because the librarians in Lucan have gone on strike and they won't be reading to the children. Forget about story-time, that much loved event. You see, Ireland's going broke and everyone's been asked to take a pay cut, and the librarians represented by Impact aren't about to accept it without expressing their grievances.

For 71% of Ireland's children, it won't make much difference. They have their mothers to weave literary magic at the end of the day. It's the rest of the children who are getting short-changed.

Amazon Can't Take Back My Books

Hasn't everyone, at one time or another, bought a book from Amazon? You figured on owning it for life, yours to keep forever and forever, to sit on a shelf or make the rounds of your friends, at your choosing.

Due to the current disagreement between Amazon and Macmillan, some chapters of Macmillan books that were downloaded from Amazon have disappeared. As in, Amazon is feuding with Macmillan so you, who wanted to read those chapters, are out of luck.

What you download to your fancy, expensive Kindle isn't yours at all. That $9.99 you paid for a novel? It's not to buy the book. That's the price Amazon charged you for the privilege of reading the words on a device that you spent a small fortune to obtain.

The books on your shelf that you bought from Amazon? They can't take those back.

Jeff Bezos can't waltz into your home and lift hard copies. No matter what war may wage between Amazon and Macmillan over fair pricing for e-books, Mr. Bezos can't push a button and make your real books disappear.

Good news here for Apple's new iPad. The suits at Apple worked out deals with five of the six major publishing houses, avoiding the "my way or the highway" scenario that's come to a nasty impasse. Go out and buy your iPad. You can get all the Macmillan books available, and Amazon can either give in or face mounting competition.

Better yet, go to your local independent book seller and browse the shelves. Touch a real hard-bound book, smell the pages of a freshly printed copy. Read the opening paragraphs. Study the author's portrait and biography. Peruse the acknowledgements. Check out any page you like. Any one at all.

Buy that book and it's yours. Download it and know that your possession is temporary, until someone at Amazon decides you can't have it anymore.

Tablet Versus Kindle, No Holds Barred

By making the iPod bigger, Apple created competition for Amazon's Kindle.

Publishers are rejoicing. They're so happy that several of the major houses have already signed agreements with Apple to provide content (i.e. books) at prices they can live with.

Take that, Amazon. $9.99 for a Kindle version that hurts the bottom line of the publisher? Just try to get content from the big publishers now.

Concern about a monopoly drove the likes of Macmillan into Apple's warm embrace. With the Kindle as the only game in town, and Amazon setting the pace, publishers were afraid that it would be a case of take it or leave it, and no one wanted to risk getting left behind as the great e-book revolution rolls along.

By offering a higher price, Apple's tablet gives hope. It's a matter of withholding rights from Amazon for e-books if the behemoth won't cooperate and lift that $9.99 mark a little higher. Certainly Amazon could claim collusion to fix prices, but a monopoly stands on shaky ground when it argues about price fixing. Without the giant iPhone reading device, it's Amazon doing the price fixing, to the detriment of its content suppliers.

Thus far, Random House is holding out, to see which way the e-book wind blows. Will people flock to buy the Apple tablet because it does more than a Kindle? Will its high price be off-putting, or seen as better value overall?

And considering the state of the economy and the general lack of disposal income, will book sales continue to slide, in both digital and analog formats?

Transportation As A Choice

All those trouble-making Irish, all those starving masses who stole food out of desperation, all of them clapped into shackles and put on board prison ships bound for Australia. Such was life during the Great Famine and beyond, until 1867 when the practice of exile was stopped.

With such a history, you'd think that the Irish wouldn't have a positive outlook about the place.

Turns out that plenty of people are leaving Ireland, willingly, bound for the land down under. They're heading to a country that was created by convicts, by the ancestors of those who have given up on Ireland now that the boom times have come to a crashing end.

Australia has been busy promoting itself to Ireland's professionals, hoping to attract engineers and skilled laborers. There are jobs Down Under, and while it's no longer legal to arrest someone and force them to go work in Australia, it's possible to appeal to the desperate.

Plenty of people are out of work in Ireland, with no real hope of finding a good job in the near future. They're tired of the government, fed up with the national health care system, and who wouldn't give serious consideration to a place that can boast of a sunny, warm climate?

The young and eager are taking flight once again, as they did in the Eighties, finding nothing to hold them in Ireland and nothing but opportunity elsewhere. It's not America anymore. No jobs are to be found there, not like the old days. It's Australia that holds the promise of a good future, financial security and a culture that's familiar.

Another generation will be lost. Another generation will grow up with strangers for grandparents. Another generation will grow old, alone, and end up in nursing homes, alone, because the children are far away.

Sweet, Sweet Synergies

On the heels of Barry O'Callaghan's ill-fated spending spree comes word that Kraft has agreed a deal with Cadbury. Financial gurus are all quick to note that Kraft did not appear to pay too much for Cadbury. The deal is sound, unlike the Riverdeep Houghton Mifflin Harcourt fiasco.

The last of the Cadbury Roses are but a sweet memory around here. Christmas is unquestionably over. Will it have been the last to feature the rich chocolate and voluptuous cream fillings that makes Cadbury's chocolates so decadent?

While it's been said that Kraft arrived at a reasonable price, it's also to be noted that the two firms have to be melded into one. It's Riverdeep merging with Houghton Mifflin, duplicate departments hunted down and brought to heel. For Kraft to make their merger work, they have to find a way to save $675 million per year for the next three years.

A candy company can cut costs by changing the recipe, reducing the amount of costly ingredients and adding cheaper substitutes. Kraft could add enough wax to Cadbury chocolates that they would serve as candles in an emergency. Imagine a box of Roses with wicks, to be inserted and lit in the event of a power failure.

High fructose corn syrup is cheaper than sugar, even though the flavor and texture isn't the same. A slight tweak, however, would not be expected to hurt sales significantly. After all, there's Mars to contend with, and Kraft wouldn't want to cheapen the Cadbury brand.

And then there are the employees.

Just like the unfortunates at Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt when Barry O'Callaghan whacked them with his synergy stick, the workers at Cadbury have become costs and potential savings.

One accounting department is all that is needed, so farewell Cadbury bean counters. There will be redundancies found in the sales and marketing departments.

In the end, Cadbury's can't possibly be the same. We can only hope that Kraft won't tamper, changing the Cadbury Rose into an artificial confection as unpalatable as their so-called "cheese" products.

Goodbye To The National University

Money is tight in Ireland and difficult decisions have to be made. Savings must be found and realized.

That being the case, the National University of Ireland will have to go.

The body was founded a century ago to oversee doctoral degree programs at Ireland's universities. It was, in essence, a bureaucracy that tended to its little niche in higher education, approving courses of study at University College Dublin or Maynooth or Galway, while lower education ran along its own track.

At a potential savings of a couple of million euros, it's been determined that the individual universities can oversee their own Ph.D.s, using existing office space and staff. They can pay the bills from their own coffers, hire and fire, and all the rest.

The fifteen people who were employed by NUI will thus be made redundant.

Naturally, those fifteen people are lobbying to hang on to their jobs, with the Chancellor leading the call. In Dr. Maurice Manning's eyes, to dismantle his bureaucracy would be to dismantle a national brand. Higher education in Ireland would fall to pieces without NUI to manage things.

For the past hundred years, the universities haven't been involved, so they'll be starting from scratch, and won't that be a disaster in the making?

Not if you ask the presidents of University College Dublin or Trinity College. They see NUI as a drag on their own efforts to create a highly marketable brand, and they'd be happy to see the back of Dr. Manning as he walks out the door.

Dr. Manning is wishing that the final decision will be delayed until there is a change in government, in the hope that Fine Gael will win the next election and spare NUI. Unfortunately, it makes no difference who is in government. There is no money.

Two university presidents are in favor of a cost-cutting deal that will save some taxpayer cash when it is all about trimming anything resembling fat. They believe they can get to where Dr. Manning would like the nation`s universities to be, but without Dr. Manning and his fiefdom. Hard to argue with money when it speaks with a loud voice.

Lay-Off Lit With A Fresh Face

According to the New York Times, there`s a new genre hitting the shelves.

Sad tales of life after a lay-off are arriving in book stores near you. You might have read something similar a few years back. Jen Lancaster wrote it.

A victim of the dot-com bubble, Ms. Lancaster penned a memoir of her life before and after a lay-off. In Bitter Is The New Black, she took a humorous look at getting by financially when no one in the family has a job and the job search comes up blank, day after day after day.

The book was a best-seller and the author was saved from having to work another job as a mind-numbing temp.

It's a good bet that Alexandra Penney's memoirs, due out next month, won't have Jen's wit. The Bag Lady Papers, by the former editor of Self magazine (so yes, she has clout in the publishing world and a very, very large platform), will be full of tragedy and sorrow and there's no telling if people will want to read it. Especially those laid off from publishing houses who won't have a great deal of sympathy for someone with enough money to invest with Bernie Madoff, and not quite enough sense to recognize his scam.

Will anyone anguish over Ms. Penney's sad tale of woe? Can the average unemployed worker relate to a woman who sobbed over the sale of two of her three homes, and commiserated with working friends over lunch at the Four Seasons?

Editors at publishing houses tell themselves that anyone who lost a job could relate to the new memoirists, but booksellers have their doubts.

Most of us who struggle to earn a buck are not in the least bit interested in the hard times visited on the well-to-do. Jen Lancaster's popularity has as much to do with her funny take on life as it does to her background as an average American who attended a state university and was not born with anything resembling a silver spoon in her mouth.

We're waiting for a real memoir of a lay-off. We'd pay money to hear from one of the many synergies that Barry O'Callaghan realized when his little Riverdeep minnow swallowed Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt. What of those who lost jobs because of one man's dream, a dream that turned into a nightmare and is now slipping out of his grasp?

Lay-off lit? There are more interesting stories that might yet be written. But really, Jen Lancaster pretty much covered it already, and is the dot-com debacle all that much different from the real estate bubble-burst of 2009?

The Minnow Makes Good

Queue up. Barry O'Callaghan has promised to make good on his debts, including loans from Anglo-Irish Bank.

He says that he only "speculated what (he) could afford to lose", or rather, what he felt that you, the Irish taxpayer now in possession of Anglo-Irish Bank, could afford to wait in line for.

The man's not skint, not in the least. He still has great faith in EMPG, the enormous whale of a corporation that he created by leveraging debt until the lever proved too weak to lift all the weight.

If you're one of the job applicants hoping for a position in Dublin, take heart. All promised jobs, all 450 of them, will be realized. Riverdeep is going to grow as planned, in spite of the restructuring that must take place.

The question is, however, does EMPG's new majority stockholder plan on Riverdeep growing? Is John Paulson and his hedge fund as keen on Riverdeep as they seem to be on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt?

Tired of waiting for the debt to be repaid? Not sure that it ever will be paid? You might consider a trade with Mr. O'Callaghan, who owns both Bentley's Hotel in Dublin and Cliff House Hotel in Waterford. A couple of months stay, free of charge, might cover your losses and allow Mr. O'Callaghan to meet his obligation to you, while you enjoy posh surroundings and all the amenities.

While in Waterford, you could swim in the ocean and dream about a little minnow swallowing a big whale, risking only what it could afford to lose while losing sight of the other fish in the financial sea.

Looking Smart

For a time, Barry O'Callaghan fancied that he looked quite smart in his tailored suits, pockets bulging with debt.

In the wake of a financial crisis that some claim they saw coming, the Irishman doesn't look quite so brilliant. He's about to take an enormous loss on his scheme to create the biggest educational publishing materials corporation, and he's not so popular in the home country either. Anglo-Irish Bank is holding a sizeable portion of his debt and now those losses have devolved to the Irish taxpayers.

The plan is now to convert debt into equity to avoid a bankruptcy. Should first and second lien debt-holders not go along with the plan, there is an alternative in the works. A 60-day brush with bankruptcy and the little minnow will emerge strong like the mighty whale it swallowed. HMH-Riverdeep-EMPG will, it is hoped, survive.

All the synergies realized, all the restructuring, and still Mr. O'Callaghan couldn't keep up appearances. Looked smart enough to convince Davy Stockbrokers to recommend an investment, but those who took the facade for a sound structure will be left with nothing but a stake in the international segment of EMPG, along with a hope that they might recover some money should HMH-Riverdeep-et al. show some profit in the future.

John Paulson's hedge fund, which purchased a large part of the $7 billion debt, will end up as the majority shareholder. He's quite happy with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, seeing it as a strong and going concern. Whether or not Mr. O'Callaghan will continue to steer the good ship HMH will depend on Mr. Paulson and the new board that he will control. The same goes for the fate of HMH.

Nothing like a going concern in one's pocket when searching for items to pawn during financial difficulties.

The Minnow Cuts Bait In The Emerald Isle

Once again, the minnow that is Barry O'Callaghan's EMPG-Riverdeep-HMH-et al. will be restructured.

Like a person who cannot seem to find the right arrangement for the furniture, EMPG is trying yet another financial grouping in the hope that all that debt will finally fit into a tiny fishbowl.

For the Irish people, it's not good news. Much of Riverdeep's debt was funded via loans from Anglo-Irish Bank, which was on the way to Davy Jones' locker until the government took it over. In essence, there's no return on that particular investment and the Irish are left with the empty pockets.

The highly respected Davy Stockbrokers firm is making calls to the very same people they called a few years back, touting the brilliance of Barry O'Callaghan's scheme. Now they're following up, to inform the investors that their investment is wiped out in a tsunami of restructuring.

What of the nervous little fish manning the offices of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt? Not to worry, say the suits in the corner offices. The fact that EMPG is going to be owned by the banks who loaned all the money won't make a lick of difference in day-to-day operations.

Do worry about the Dail, where your new bosses sit in government. Fine Gael is spouting vitriol at Fianna Fail over their failed policies. It is to be hoped that the politicians don't try to actually run EMPG now that they've snagged it in their bank bail-out net.

From RTE's David Blake comes this analysis, available here.

When The Book Tour Goes Wrong

To begin with, how could James William Lewis not have gotten a literary agent to take an interest in his novel?

Aren't murder mysteries and thrillers in such demand that good writing is allowed to slide for the sake of a page-turning story? The premise is classic thriller fodder, with a suave Doctor Chuck Rivers tracking down the rogue government employee who has dumped poison into underground water supplies in a midwestern city, causing the demise of some of the doctor's own friends. The ones who don't drink bottled water, apparently, unlike the doc.

Unfortunately, Mr. Lewis had to resort to publishing Poison: The Doctor's Dilemma entirely on his own.

Was it a lack of platform that worked against the new author? Again, how could he miss? He was, and is, the only suspect in the infamous Tylenol Murders, in which seven unsuspecting Chicago-area residents went to their deaths after ingesting arsenic-laden capsules. The killer had tampered with the head-ache medication, putting tainted product back on drugstore shelves where innocent people bought it, and then died without ever knowing what hit them.

The scenario of his novel has a ring of truth to it, although Mr. Lewis would call it pure coincidence. Or perhaps he is only following good advice and writing what he knows.

Like any self-published author, Mr. Lewis has had to set up his own book tour, and without a publicist, he isn't protected from the sort of audience-stacking that went on at The Cambridge Rag, where he appeared to promote his novel. He assumed he'd be talking about his book, plugging away, but it turns out that the host of the program brought in journalists and friends to ask pointed questions about....the Tylenol murders.

Forty-eight minutes of grilling, and all in the name of driving sales.

At the moment, the e-book stands at #37,805 in the Kindle store, respectable figures that came at the price of great discomfort for the author.

You'd have to suspect that Chicago-area prosecutors and the FBI have all bought their copies. The case remains open, and Mr. Lewis had recently donated a sample of his DNA to the Feds. No word yet on what the FBI's newly formed book group thinks of Mr. Lewis's literary chops.

Ask A Contractor

Question: Even though I followed the directions in Lowe's Complete Home Improvement and Repair and Lowe's Complete Home Wiring, followed by further review in Sunset Complete Home Wiring, the Fire Marshall tells me that the family room caught fire due to faulty wiring. Tell me, Contractor, what could I possibly have done wrong?

Answer: Well, first off, I could say that you should have gone to Home Depot, but I digress.

Your first mistake, Mr. Do-It-Yourself, was in believing that Oxmoor House would spend money on the kind of editing that needed to be done to be sure that little mistakes didn't slip through.

You see, even though you used three different books, they all came from Oxmoor House and they all had some minor errors that resulted in you, the homeowner, wiring up your outlets in a manner that would have any electrician laughing his head off.

What makes things really bad is the fact that these books have been in print, with the same mistakes, since 1975. Oxmoor House just kept putting them out, under different titles, and it's only recently that someone figured out that people were being dangerously misled.

Who knows how many DIY types adhered to the guidelines and diagrams in all that time? Makes you want to take a serious look at your wiring and pull every outlet and switch in the house, doesn't it, in case the people you bought your house from thought that they were "handy" and did all kinds of work themselves. Not even a junction box can be considered safe.

In conclusion, then, let us all avoid the false economy of doing your own electric work based on instructions you culled from a book you picked up at the check-out line in Lowe's. Just because you saw something in a book doesn't mean it's real. Haven't you heard? You can't believe everything you read.

Now let's talk about installing crown molding in the dining room.....

The Cougar Of Strangford

To read Iris Robinson's account of her descent into sexual impropriety, you'd diagnose a case of manic depression. Especially if you'd recently finished reading Terry Cheney's Manic.

Behaving impulsively, to the point of danger? Ms. Cheney lays out scenarios that would curl your hair. The fact that Iris Robinson, after being married for almost forty years, had an affair with a nineteen-year-old man, certainly falls into that category of madness.

They can call her the Cougar of Strangford, the older woman who snagged some young and virile prey, and the more 'holier-than-thou' Protestants can rail against her sins, but if Ms. Robinson is indeed suffering from bipolar disorder, she is only to be pitied.

Not only did she cheat on her husband, but she used her political connections as the Stormont representative from Strangford to assist her sweetheart financially. If not for her, it's unlikely that the gentleman would have had the money or the clout to acquire the rights to run a cafe at the Lock Keeper's Cottage, part of a historic area being developed by the Castlereagh Council.

Opposition parties are calling for Ms. Robinson to step down as MP, but there's also a great deal of political fur flying in her husband's direction. He should have known about the shady deals the woman was concocting, goes the line of reasoning, but the man didn't even know his wife was sleeping with Kirk McCambley. If she appeared to be stepping up for a constituent who was the son of a family friend, how would he suspect something untoward was going on?

It was only after the fact, after Peter Robinson was aware of the affair, after Iris tried to kill herself, that he stepped in to make sure the loans were repaid. Should he have alerted the council and Stormont and the press and members of the Ulster Unionist Party that his wife had gone astray, and very badly?

That's the problem with family businesses when that business is government. What a husband wouldn't want the world to know about his wife isn't a private affair at all, but the public's.

Lost In Translation

How does one say "Sorry" in Slovakian?

Ah sure and the unfortunate Slovak speaks English after four years in Ireland. Stand the man to a pint at the local and all will be forgiven.

An electrician from Slovakia was returning to Ireland after spending time with the folks back home, only to be picked by local officials as one of eight Grand Prize Winners.

The lucky man had 3 oz. of plastic explosives tucked into his personal luggage, all without his knowledge.

Don't the Slovaks just love to spring surprises on people? Great partiers, those Slovaks.

Seven stashes of dangerous contraband were found, to the joy of Slovakia's anti-terror squad. Airport security was working. To a large extent.

The electrician managed to land at Dublin Airport with his RDX undetected, however. The Slovakian government then had to ring up Dublin to let them know that, so sorry, our bad, but there's a man with enough explosives to turn a corner of Dublin into rubble and could the gardai maybe stop in and retrieve it?

Retrieve it? A nation that went through decades of IRA bombings did more than that. Irish authorities raided the man's flat, turned it upside down, evacuated the area, and tossed the unwitting bomb carrier in jail after charging him with terrorism. Up the 'RA indeed!

Minister Dermot Ahern is put out about the Slovaks failing to let him know about the stray explosives for three days, with Irish citizens put at risk by a gang of feckin' eejits in Eastern Europe. What kind of government puts bombs into people's luggage without letting them know? And what kind of moron would think it was a good way to test airport security, anyway?

The Slovakian national has since been released, and is re-considering ever returning to the land of his birth, even though the geniuses in Bratislava managed to convince Irish authorities that the man really and truly was innocent.

Doesn't exactly make us all feel safer about flying, does it?

Change Partners And Dance

I queried Nicole Steen of the Elyse Cheney Literary Agency, but she left.

Whereabouts or future prospects unknown.

On the West Coast, Elizabeth Evans departed from Kimberley Cameron's agency, to shift her allegiance to Jean V. Naggar. Such are the benefits of following agents on Twitter. I discovered this change of venue in a short entry, and I was quick to fire off a query.

Ms. Evans was equally quick to reject it.

I've done my share of querying Michelle Brower, sending my carefully crafted prose to her desk at Wendy Sherman's office and Joelle Delbourgo's place of business. She's done her share of rejecting me.

Like so many others before her, Ms. Brower has traded places. She's now working for Folio Literary Management, and it's safe to assume that she'd be interested in seeing some queries. After all, she'd want to impress her new colleagues and signing up some brilliant authors would fit that bill.

I've sent her a query and now I'll sit back and wait for a response. Or a no response rejection.

Either way, I'll make time in my busy day to work on another manuscript so that I always have a supply of fresh material for fresh queries. Let the agents switch agencies. I'll find them just the same.

Less Than Tasty Wares

The last of the independent book vendors in Aiken, South Carolina, has closed the doors. Ann Carlson gutted it out for three years, but in the end, the difference between expenses and income didn't add up.

The owner of the Book Stall had to deal with stiff competition from on-line book sellers and the massive economies of scale that Amazon can realize.

Then there was competition from the big box retailers, again enjoying economies of scale that an individual shop could never hope to realize. Residents of Aiken didn't think twice about driving to a bigger city to visit the Barnes & Noble, where the same books could be had for less money, although without the friendly help and suggestions from a knowledgeable staff.

What about the product that Ms. Carlson had available? After all, she could only stock what the publishers were producing, and then hope that the likes of Rizzoli or Random House had guessed right.

Word comes from Rizzoli that they will soon lay down a book of hip-hop star Rihanna's deep thoughts. There'll be photos as well, to fill up over one hundred pages. A person wants to get their money's worth when they shell out $38.00.

It will make a perfect bookend to Kanye West's prose, also available from Rizzoli.

There's two examples of publishers paying huge advances for big-name stars. Two examples of books that the literary world isn't dying to sample. A table loaded with celebrity shite won't bring in the reading public, those who look for well-crafted words and compelling storytelling.

How is an indie shop to stay afloat if they're given less than tasty wares to put out on the shelves?

New Year, New Rejection

Happy New Year from the editors of the college-based literary journal. It's a rejection, but it's a good story just the same and could you send something else?

New year, new decade...same old same old.

So comfortable, to settle into the known and familiar. And how do I respond to renewed rejection?

I send the same story to a bunch of other literary journals. This year, however, I'm selecting those that use a submission manager system so that I can download my clever bits of prose and send them off with the greatest of ease.

The hard work was done in the writing, in the editing and the re-writing. Why put much more effort into submitting than is absolutely necessary?

Another year, another rejection. Well, who'd want to be published in a journal where the editor isn't too hungover on New Year's Day to work? And one in which said editor is firing off rejections on a holiday?

At least the literary agents have the sense to take off for the holiday season. No reading, no rejecting, and not looking favorably on those who dare to submit at such a time. With the new year in full throttle, those same agents should be returning to their desks on Monday. It's time to start up again with a new round of submissions to ring in the New Year.