A Poor Choice Of Words

How would you describe a filthy,stinking hovel? Would you just use those very words and be done, or should you find a better way to show that your hotel room was not suited for human occupation? A contest? Not quite. A couple who stayed one night in a hotel in Blackpool, England, were charged £100 in addition to the fee for the room after they left a negative review on TripAdvisor.

A picture is worth 1000 words but a poor choice of words will cost you 100

The Broadway Hotel in Blackpool has not been burning up the Internet with positive reviews, judging by the ratings at the website. The table is heavily skewed towards "Terrible", in fact, which makes the fine for a negative rating sound like a way to extort money from the unwary tourist who doesn't bother checking the available information. With 147 bad marks, that's a lot of money coming the hotel's way.

"This place is filthy,it really needs closing down,bedroom full of mould no heater,no hot water,beds need throwing away,couldn't bear to eat breakfast staff drinking cans of strongbow while serving breakfast,could not wait to get out of this place and get home to bath. environmental need to get in there quick..." So said Jeannette M of Derby rather recently. Did she get nicked for the hundred, and did she pay, or did she even notice that her credit card was charged after she'd paid her bill?

Maybe the hotel is still trying to figure out which guest she was so they can go after her for being so mean. It hurts business, reviews like that. Too many people have smartphones and they use them to read things like this. A place could be put out of business if this keeps up.

If The Broadway Hotel figure out who posted this snap they'll be made to pay

Dolores C of York was at a loss for words, according to the headline of her review. Perhaps that loss saved her the expense that words might have cost, although she did say " I would rather stay in Bates Motel than this joint. terrible, terrible, terrible" and "Think it is worthy of a visit from the Hotel Inspector." Did that get her fined for half the amount for having but few words of complaint?

Tony and Jan Jenkinson noticed the fine on their credit card statement after they posted a bad review, but they did not pay quietly. Instead, they complained, only to be told that hotel policy dictates the fine for every bad review. So no refund. The idea was so preposterous that they took their case to the Cumbria County Council, citing an apparent violation of fair trade standards.

The hotel manager is not making any comment on the outrage that has reached some higher office within the UK. He is at a loss for words as well, it seems.

And now that the story has hit the newspapers, he may be at a loss for a job. And don't be surprised if a hotel inspector shows up at the door, making for a loss of a hotel that needs a bit of work. Or a lot of work. Depending on how much they might try to fine me for bringing it up.

After The Ball Is Over

Simon and Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Amazon are now friends. Or frenemies. The dance of dominance is over and the parties have found accord, although no details have been released.

So it is good for authors, or bad for authors, or is the status quo maintained with Amazon still holding all the cards?

For the publishers, it's a return to the agency pricing model that was in place until Amazon complained to the US authorities and Apple was sued for anti-trust violations. Not so anti-trusty if it's Amazon doing the deal, apparently.

Publishers set the price of e-books, and Amazon as retailer gets a fixed piece of the money pie. And the authors get....?

The Authors Guild wants authors to get more than 25% of net, especially because those authors were highly supportive of Hachette, and therefore in support of all publishers. Where's the love, publishers? Show me the money!

The publishers are unlikely to give more. Amazon wanted more and that was the start of the whole thing. There isn't more to give, in the publisher's opinion, but then again, the publishers are paying huge advances for shite because it's a celebrity's book, and then make it up by short-changing talented authors. It's the business model they've known and loved, and they can't change the steps of their dance after decades of practice.

Amazon does not seem too much the worse for wear. It will continue to sell books as it has been, and you have to wonder if there is some wording in the agreement that works to Amazon's benefit so that it gets something to improve the sagging bottom line. It could be any kind of incentive, even a promo to push some book that a publisher particularly wants to sell, and Amazon gets a deeper discount on something else as a reward. Any mention of steeper discounts has authors looking at their sagging bottoms. They're at the bottom of the payment pyramid, and the ones most likely to take a hit if there's costs to be cut.

Smaller royalties might be in the offing, but it's anyone's guess. There are no details in the devil of a deal.

What's A Little Anti-Semitism Among Friends?

If you share your prejudiced views with a few close friends and the entire Twitterverse, where's the harm? It shouldn't cost you a job, should it?

What if you were in line for a prestigious position at, let's say, a prominent state university. You saw what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, and you tweeted about it. Except you said something about "Only #African-Americans can attempt to murder a policeman and insist that they are the victims. #WhiteFolks #WhiteFolksUnderAttack" because you're racist but it's your personal opinion. Would you then be surprised that the prestigious position evaporated before you could claim it?


Steven Salaita is unquestionably a supporter of Gaza, based on his tweets. He's also quite the anti-Semite, but that's his private affair as far as he is concerned. The University of Illinois had no right to pull the teaching post he thought was his until his tweeting exposed his less-than-acceptable prejudice.

The university fumbled around, searching for an excuse that would get them out from a problem of their own making. No one thought to fully vet Mr. Salaita before the job was offered to him, and when the tweets hit the fan, they were caught up in a controversy they had to get out of. A lot of their donors are of the Jewish persuasion, and a lot of their donors let the school administrators know just how unhappy they were with the possible hiring of an anti-Semite who would end up teaching other Jewish children.

Imagine the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan teaching about past injustices done to the native American population. And teaching it to a classroom full of Ojibwa students. Would you really expect a thoroughly unbiased discussion, and would you really expect the students to say much in protest when their grade depends on pleasing the instructor?

But there are few jobs to be had in public academia these days, and especially in Illinois where the budget is so tight that the U of I gives preference to foreign students paying an inflated tuition. The school has the biggest population of Chinese students among all the public universities, who also aren't going to become major donors to the school after graduation. Keeping the donors happy is quite the priority.

Steven Salaita was told the job wasn't his after all, and the problem was his anti-Semitic tweeting. The administration made noise about civil discourse and the like, citing some of the tweets to better explain without having to be more explicit. It wouldn't be particularly civil to call Mr. Salaita a horse's ass or an arrogant prick, and those aren't causes to be cited publicly when denying a job. That's what gets said in private, while a candidate is being vetted. But they didn't do the vetting before offering.

Little wonder, then, that Steven Salaita is suing the university for exposing him. The lawsuit, however, is one of those legal actions that is meant to be settled out of court for a substantial sum of cash, which is all Mr. Salaita needs to tide him over until his tweets are forgotten and he can try to find another job somewhere else. There must be another prestigious institution in the US that doesn't have such powerful Jewish support.

Or he might try landing a job at a university in Gaza. He could do some good there, and he's a strong supporter. Well, maybe not so strong as all that.

A Source For Regency Writers

The curricle

When writing historical fiction, you want to make your readers feel as if they are there. You need touches of reality, but you aren't living in London in 1804, so how are you to go about painting an accurate picture?

You could read everything Jane Austen has ever written, but she was writing about everyday matters and you may not find the detail you need to paint a picture in your own head. You can't show a partial image to your reader. They won't get wrapped up in a story that they can't quite play out in their imagination.

There was a war going on through much of the Regency period, and you can help set your story in a particular era by referencing some important battle or the celebration that would have taken place to commemorate a victory. That sort of detail is more interesting than a simple sentence that gives the cold, hard fact of a certain day without the little snips of info that the people of your novel would normally be discussing. Grand, so, it's Tuesday in November of 1798, but it was also a period of a mini-ice age and shouldn't your characters be making mention of the unusual cold? People who kept diaries made note. Aren't your characters just like those real people?

Roy and Leslie Adkins have written a book that you would want at hand while you spin your Regency yarn.

The post chaise

Jane Austen's England is a history book that provides the backdrop you want to create. Each chapter covers a different topic, from the popular entertainments to the acceptable standards of hygeine. The authors touch on the lives of ordinary people, the farmers and those who were thrown into a newly industrialized world with the invention of steam power. Study up, and you can more easily put yourself into the world you are creating.

You would want a copy of Daniel Pool's treatise on Regency through Victorian times as well, to prepare yourself for writing before you put pen to paper. What Jane Austen Ate And Charles Dickens Knew is a trove of detail that you can insert into your manuscript to make your characters seem more real, and far less 21st Century.

Write what you know, the sages have decreed. If you want to write historical fiction, you have to learn what you don't know. Then you'll know it.

Go write.

November is half over and you have a NaNoWriMo deadline to reach.

Sure you should have started your research months ago. How will you ever get the rough draft finished by Sunday the 30th?

The Easter Rising of 2016

Ireland is gearing up to celebrate its centennial and the State wants to make a big, tourist-appealing splash that also honours those who gave their lives on those few days after Easter in 1916.

Those who gave their lives left living relations behind, and the descendants of those living relations would like a say in how the grand event will unfold. Would you want some politician making a speech about how your ancestor was a blood-thirsty eejit and Ireland would have been given Home Rule after the First World War so the Rising was a pointless loss of life?

Of course not. You would want your people honoured for their sacrifice. The centennial is no time for revisionist history or an insistence that Ireland is a peaceful country. That's forgetting all that went on before 1916. The Land Wars were not peaceful protests and there were more than a few men killed in 1798 and 1803.

A few of those whose family members signed the declaration of independence in 1916 are feeling ignored by the government, and so they have gone and started up their own group to make their own plans. The 1916 Relatives have given up on having their voices heard, so they will shout unofficially while politicians make their speeches to a crowd wondering why the descendants of the nation's founders are off at some other gathering.


Ireland 2016 from Ireland 2016 on Vimeo.

Speaking on behalf of the 1916 Relatives, Patrick Cooney has described the Government's plans as a bit of a shambles, a festival that manages to ignore the people who put their lives on the line by signing a document that declared Ireland to be free. There is more consideration being given to an official visit from Queen Elizabeth than to the presence of James Connolly's great-grandson.

It's grand to show the Brits that we're all friends now, but can't it be done while including the dirty business of an armed insurrection? Remember where we came from? That's not easy to do when the Government's video skips over that bit like it's too shameful to be shown.

The video put together by the Arts Minister is all Bono and Yeats, Mr. Cooney has said, without any references to men like Pearse or Ceannt or Plunkett. Seven men signed a proclamation and seven men were executed for it by the British authorites. Yeats wrote a poem about it, which is about as close to risking his life as he came, but there he is. Don't blink. You'll miss his picture.

In fact, you'd be hard pressed to learn a thing about the Rising from the video, which sprints past a few old photos before flying into the modern era with happy children and pretty scenery. There isn't much of anything in the video to even suggest that there was an actual battle in which men, women and children were killed.

Remember where we came from? A song in Irish isn't exactly remembering. It's more paddywhackery than tribute to the rebels.

So clean. So sanitized.

Is it any wonder that the descendants of the Seven Signatories are off doing their own remembrance? One that has actual memories.

Who Blinked First?

When Amazon and Hachette Book Group reached an accord, the news rippled through social media. The fight had been long and the dispute was followed with great interest by the publishing community. That the resolution would generate buzz was to be expected.

The treaty is signed and peace is declared

The question remains, however. Who blinked first?

After months of wrangling, who felt the pain of the dueling boycotts?

For much of the third quarter, Hachette's titles were difficult to come by if you limited your shopping to Amazon. The idea on Amazon's part was to inflict as much financial pain on Hachette as possible, to force the publisher to yield to Amazon's might. Yet when Amazon reported its earnings for the third quarter, the news was so bad that the stock took a big hit. It was starting to look like the actions of the publishing community against Amazon were having some effect, with well-known authors calling for boycotts on the pages of the New York Times.

Beyond the pages of a newspaper, however, was the airing of the dispute on television to an audience that might not otherwise know a thing about the stand-off. And when a popular television programme calls on its viewers to boycott Amazon, that's more negative publicity than the average online behemoth can shake off.

Now Hachette's parent, Lagardere Publishing, has released its third quarter earnings, and it is clear that the loss of Amazon as a sales outlet took its toll.

Sales were down while Amazon was making it hard to buy Hachette titles, and you might wonder if the publisher was considering how long it could hold out, if indeed it could afford to continue the fight. Book sales in the US were down markedly, the result of Amazon's tactics, and with other negatives weighed in, Hachette would have had plenty of incentive to end the dispute.

In the end, however, Hachette got what it wanted in the ability to set its own price on its e-book titles. Being able to control pricing was of the greatest importance, to avoid being run out of business by a vendor offering discounts while maintaining its own piece of the digital pie. If Hachette gives Amazon a more desirable deal on price, Hachette gets a nice prezzie from Amazon, but whether or not the incentives work for Amazon remains to be seen.

Hachette would like to sell more books, and if it can offer a steeper discount while making up the difference on volume, Amazon could stand to benefit. But not all books are best-sellers, as Hachette well knows. They blame part of the decline in third quarter sales on the fact that 2013 brought them some very popular titles that 2014 did not, and when you compare year to year, it shows.

The publisher and the vendor are returning to the old agency model of pricing, the very pricing structure that Apple introduced when the iPad was released and the iTunes bookstore needed stability. Amazon cried long and loud to the US trade authorities, citing violations of anti-trust laws. Now it is embracing the same model

Who blinked first? It's looking like Amazon backed down.

Wouldn't want consumers to be thinking "boycott Amazon" with the holiday shopping season about to begin in earnest. After all, timing is everything.

Ghosts Make For Good Television

Mike Arians is not a detective. He is just an ordinary man who owns a restaurant and can't get the ghosts to leave him alone.

The ghosts are behind his obsession with identifying the person who killed Mary Jane Reed and her boyfriend Stanley Skridla in 1948. That's a lot of years of haunting. Who wouldn't want to put a stop to the harassment?

The couple were shot to death at the local lover's lane, a secluded spot in Ogle County, Illinois. Mr. Skridla's body was found there, while the body of Ms. Reed turned up a few days later, in a ditch on the side of the road. There were some suspects at the time, but nothing could ever be proved, and so the case remains unsolved.

According to Mike Arians, the ghost of Mary Jane Reed haunts his roadhouse restaurant, and she's a persistent one.


In 2005, Mr. Arians thought he could placate her by getting her body exhumed for some forensic analysis using modern methods. Maybe some bullet fragments would turn up that could yield a clue as to the murder weapon. Mr. Arians has long felt that the killer was a former law enforcement officer whose advances were spurned by Ms. Reed, and if a bullet pointed to a service revolver, he'd have a stronger case to make.

Forensic anthropologists informed him that the skull in the coffin wasn't hers.

He tried suing local authorities, claiming there had been a cover-up at the highest levels. The judge did not see things that way, and tossed out the case. The sheriff's deputy who was implicated in the cover-up believed that the suit was just a publicity stunt because Mr. Arians was trying to make a movie about the murder.

So where is Ms. Reed's head? Could it be in Mr. Skridla's coffin, the result of a simple mix-up after the autopsies were performed?

Or was it something more devious?

Mr. Arians has just been granted permission to exhume Mr. Skridla's body to find out that very thing.

The Travel Channel was in Oregon, Illinois, in September to film the story that Mr. Arians has to tell. They'd be likely to send the film crew back if the exhumation reveals anything. Even if it doesn't, the sense of anticipation and potential discovery would be enough to get the cameras rolling. Ghosts make for good television, and the analysis following the exhumation would be compelling theater. It's a mystery to be solved, but a real mystery that may or may not be solved by the end of that particular installment of The Dead Files.

And if Ms. Reed is listening, this is the last attempt Mr. Arians will make to solve the crime. He can't think of anything else to do besides explore this rumor that circulated through the town all those years ago, that there was another man who committed murder out of jealousy. Whoever did it is most likely dead by now. The person Mr. Arians suspects did the crime has been dead for almost thirty years.

Like Capone's vault, this show might not discover anything. But if the viewers are riveted, it doesn't really matter. Except to Ms. Reed, whose restless spirit hangs out in a roadhouse restaurant, waiting for someone to bring her killer to justice.

Late To The Party But Better Late Than Never

To introduce readers to Newcastlewest Books, we lowered the price on one of our digital titles. Lowered it to free, in fact, to make it an irresistible offer. Lowered to free where we could, that is. Amazon wouldn't let us drop the price below 99 cent.

Readers who download e-books via Smashwords were able to take advantage of the offer and have been enjoying THE KING OF THE IRISH for several weeks.

Those who limit their downloading to Amazon's Kindle or Kindle app have not been able to get that price. We wanted to make THE KING OF THE IRISH free for everyone, but Amazon does what it wants when it comes to pricing books by small independent publishers.

Free at last, free at last

Non-Amazon users have been introduced to the sordid beginnings of Chicago's political machine through the story of Daniel Coughlin, a police detective who was charged with murder in 1889. He was a pawn in a larger game, a loyal second-generation Irish-American who took up the cause that his father championed. The connection between Chicago and Ireland's nationalist movement was strong, and Dan Coughlin was one small part of the vast and complex machinery. That he got caught up in it was a consequence not anticipated. How he was crushed by it is the heart of the tale. How the leaders of the movement manipulated government to achieve their goals forms the backdrop of the novel.

Suddenly, Amazon has noticed that a novel is available for a lower price than what they are offering. Readers could get THE KING OF THE IRISH for free if they went through iTunes or Barnes and Noble. They could not let the competition get the better of them.

Without warning, Amazon dropped the price on THE KING OF THE IRISH so that it is now free for downloading from Amazon.

We wanted to do it ourselves, back when we first thought of promoting our list by giving away a title.

It was not our choice to make. It was Amazon's decision, out of our hands.

The deed is done, although it would have been easier to promote from our end if we could have set our own price. That is not how publishing works in Amazon's world, where the small presses must sign on to Amazon's exclusivity deal to be allowed to give a book away, and even at that it's all up to Amazon.

Thanks for noticing the price change, Amazon. Readers can now discover Newcastlewest Books through THE KING OF THE IRISH, finally available for free downloading at Amazon. Just like it's been available via iTunes for free. A bit late to the party, but at least Amazon is finally on board. Without that exclusivity deal that makes no sense for publishers or authors.

Was She Or Wasn't She

The big shock of an announcement came in December of 2009. Right there on Van Morrison's website was a news flash about the birth of a son, except the reclusive singer's wife was never pregnant.

The mother was someone else, and the PR spin was begun.

Van and Gigi in happier times

The woman claiming to be the mother of the newest Morrison was a total stranger, Mr. Morrison's PR man said. John Saunders gave a radio interview to get the message out. The birth notice was a hoax. Mr. Saunders was hired to deny the claim, and he went about his job as instructed.

Well, right, the mother wasn't a total stranger. She might have been a bit strange, but she was the tour manager for Van Morrison's American performances so they did have some contact. Purely professional, however.

The rumour mill started churning out stories, so many stories that Mr. Morrison sought a court injunction to keep the whole thing quiet.

At some point, after issuing a string of denials about the paternity issue, Mr. Saunders turned around and sued his client for such unpleasant issues as breach of contract and misrepresentation.

That misrepresentation would be Van Morrison's insistence that he didn't know Ms. Lee but then a photograph turned up that showed them together and they worked together so, there you have it. You can't hold things back from your PR man is he's to do his job properly, with the facts in hand and a well-crafted spin in place to cover all the potential pitfalls.

To this day, Van Morrison denies that he was the father. Tragically, both mother and baby died shortly after the birth, and it would seem that the point of arguing is lost. Both are gone. Does it really matter? There won't be any future issues in regard to inheritance or estates, which is the main reason why paternity would have to be established.

And it could have been established with a simple DNA test, but matters never progressed that far.

We will never know if Van Morrison had an affair with his tour manager. The lawsuit has been quietly settled out of court, with the participants keeping silent on what if any damages were agreed. The earlier dispute, that Mr. Saunders had not acted on Mr. Morrison's direction when he told the world that the singer wasn't the father, has been officially concluded with a note that Mr. Morrison had indeed instructed Mr. Saunders to go forth and spin away.

The child dead after falling into a diabetic coma. The mother dead of throat cancer. The unhappy incident is dead as well, except perhaps for a little spark of life in the Morrison household, where Van Morrison had some explaining to do to his wife. But that is an entirely private matter between husband and wife.

The Novel As Prophecy

George Orwell saw through the rhetoric of the Soviet era and the post-World War II Cold War. His world was an uncertain place, with freedom trying to make a glittering return after years of secrecy and espionage that were necessary to keep loose lips from sinking ships. What if a population could be fooled into thinking that the war footing was ongoing, and the government had to curtail certain liberties for the good of the people? What if people let it happen?

From that background came 1984, a novel that imagined a world in which government exerts absolute control over its citizens, all behind a barrage of rhetoric that is doublespeak and thinly veiled nonsense.

That the citizens would see through the verbiage and put an end to it is a notion that is highly dangerous to a government that would like to exert control and maintain power for the powerful. There are some who see parallels between the world envisioned by George Orwell and modern day Egypt, where the military took over to preserve democracy, only to trample democracy under its heel. Maybe it's better than the Muslim Brotherhood running things, especially if you are female or Christian, but that's a different argument for another day.

The book is still a dangerous collection of prose, even after all these decades since its publication.

That could be why a report surfaced over the weekend that described a student at Cairo University being arrested for the crime of openly carrying a  copy of 1984 in full view of the police.

When asked, the police could only look puzzled. They say they don't know a thing about some British novel that was written 65 years ago. They don't have time to engage in light reading, and would be more likely to get lost in a good thriller than some English dystopian concoction. To the students who say their fellow was arrested, the book has great symbolism, and it is possible that the insertion of 1984 is a little embellishment to better express their outrage over the direction their country is heading.


Authorities have said they arrested the young man for filming the security forces without permission. Sure the man had a book on him when he was arrested, but what would you expect when you arrest a student at Cairo University? The whole world isn't studying off of iPads and some schools are still using physical books.

Did you hear the part that sounds like something out of 1984?

Maybe the book should be required reading for those who would prop up a regime, to get their minds into thinking about what they are being told and what they are doing to protect that regime.

Education, in other words. It's a dangerous thing, that learning, and it comes out of books.

Only At The End Do You Realize The Power Of The Dark Side

The business model? Eliminate the middle man and keep the profits.

The means to reach that end? Become a publisher and control the product, and the pricing, from start to finish.

The current level of success? For Amazon lately, not much to brag about at corporate headquarters.

For some time, Amazon has been trying to get itself established as a real publisher, to create its own product and then sell it through its own channel online but also in brick and mortar stores. Just like the big boys, like Hachette Book Group that has not been very cooperative of late.

A few years back, Amazon launched a publishing company that could be viewed as the first step towards world publishing domination. They brought in Larry Kirshbaum, a highly regarded player in the publishing industry, and it was clear that Amazon meant to succeed. To get its titles into the bookstores where people do most of their book selecting, the online retailer inked a deal with Houghton Mifflin (still coming off its earlier debacle in the Barry O'Callaghan era) to utilize HMH's existing sales force.

The bookshop owners were not easily fooled. They had said they would not carry Amazon books on their shelves because Amazon was a leech sucking out their life's blood, and so they did not. Amazon tried to disguise the fact, but the book vendors hadn't just fallen off the turnip wagon.

Larry Kirshbaum left Amazon, about a year after he came. Some might have seen it as a bad sign, that the master plan had some major flaws and the publishing start-up was not going all that well.

Has realized the power of the Dark Side

You never know what people like to read, and publishers have to meet a lot of different interests. Amazon created a series of imprints to cover all those various interest categories. Romance is always popular, right? So Amazon invented an imprint to publish romance titles. And there is another for mysteries, another for reprinted work, one for science fiction, and so on through all the genres. They wanted to flood the market, and force book shops to carry their titles through the back-door strategy of having customers ask for the books. In time, the vendors would bend to meet customer demand and then Amazon would get its big foot in the door and never leave.

Still the public was not clamoring for an Amazon title. What was needed was a unit that would make the literati sit up and take notice. Little a was added to the roster, and novelist Ed Park was put in charge. The man who edited The Village Voice literary supplement had the reputation and the connections that Amazon needed.

Now Ed Park is leaving Amazon.

He has hinted at the ongoing feud between Amazon and Hachette Book Group as part of the reason. He sits on the wrong side of the cultural divide, trying to bring literary fiction to the world through Amazon's portal, while his friends in the industry despise Amazon for turning books into commodities like batteries or light bulbs.

At first, he might have been tempted by the power of the position. With so little good literary fiction getting to the public, who would not want to be in a position to expand the list? The big publishing houses are all looking for the blockbuster title, the fluff that entertains but is forgotten the moment it is finished. Ed Park was granted the ability to publish what he felt was needed to make the world of reading a better place.

But at what cost?

Can you imagine going to a drinks party and telling people you work for Amazon after they've finished lambasting the Internet demon for what it is doing to the independent book seller? Would you want to go to work every day, knowing that your boss is the Dark Side of retailing, hell bent on bringing the publishers under its control, treating books like things for sale instead of works of art created by someone deserving of a decent royalty? Was he being used by Amazon because he had the right credentials and connections in the literary scene?

Ed Park realized the power of the Dark Side and decided to end his association with Amazon.

So Amazon will find someone else to step up, just like they replaced Larry Kirshbaum. It's a minor setback for Jeff Bezos. He may be a little stunned, but he's far from defeated.

Are You My Mother?

Are You My Mother?

A would-be mother froze her egg.

The egg was defrosted and fertilized in a lab and implanted in another woman who had a womb available.

"Uh, oh," said the would-be mother. "My baby will be here and who is going to be listed on the birth certificate as the mother?"

"I must consult with legal authorities," she said. "I will be back!"

So away she went.

The baby grew. It grew, and grew, and grew for nine months.

Out came the baby.

"Which one of you is the mother?" the bureaucrat asked. He looked at the would-be mother. He looked at the woman who had given birth. He looked up. He could not tell which one should be listed on the official form. He looked down. He could not leave the space blank.

"I will go to a higher authority to determine who is the mother," he said. So away he went.

Down, out of the hospital he went. Down, down, down to the court. It was a long way down!

The court said that the mother was the woman who shared a genetic link with the baby. The woman who provided the egg was the mother.

"Now I will go tell the mother," he said.

"You are not the mother," the Irish State said. "Our Constitution is very clear. The mother is the woman who gave birth."

"It's my feckin' egg," the would-be mother said. "The other woman is a surrogate who let me use her womb since mine is out of order."

"What about women who receive donated eggs?" the State asked. "That's quite a disaster you're after making here with all this trouble you're causing. We can't have egg donors being listed as mothers when they never intended to be mothers. Let's ask the Supreme Court because they are the experts on the Constitution."

"The Constitution is indeed quite clear," the Irish Supreme Court said. "A mother is a woman who gives birth. Therefore, the surrogate is to be listed on the birth certificate as the mother."

And then Mrs. Justice Susan Denham stated the obvious. The Constitution is out of date when it comes to modern medicine. When it was written, there was no artificial insemination or egg freezing or surrogate mothers except what might have been done behind closed doors.

When the Irish Constitution was written, women were being locked up in slave labor facilities if they had sex outside of marriage. Any sort of sexually-tainted funny business was not going to be allowed. The definition of motherhood was intended to erase any and all immorality, as determined by the local parish priest. But times have changed and Ireland is trying to fit into the modern world.

The law is the law until new legislation is written. The would-be mother is not the mother on the birth certificate. The definition of motherhood is going to have to be redefined but the Court cannot do that.

The would-be mother will just have to wait for the wheels of State government to grind out a new law so she can be the mother.

So when the mother asks, "Do you know who I am?", her baby can say, "You are my mother."

Even if the courts say it's some other woman who was generous enough to help out another in need and never thought she'd be dragged into a legal tangle because legislation can't keep pace with the society it's supposed to be legislating.

The Ravages of Time

Doris S. Michaels with you-know-who

Doris Michaels has been on the literary scene for a long time, opening a literary agency in 1994 to bring her kind of books to the reading public. For twenty years she's been slogging away in the trenches, but after twenty years, she has decided it is time to retire.

Life is too short to work yourself to death. There are books to be read for pleasure, and when you read for a living, what could be better than finally having the time to enjoy prose instead of searching through the words for a marketable property?

The ravages of time have claimed Ms. Michaels. In November of last year, she stopped taking on new clients. One year later, she has merged, or turned over, her agency to a fellow agent and friend who shares her taste in books.

There is no more Doris S. Michaels Literary Agency.

Clients of Ms. Michaels are now represented by Sheree Bykofsky, another literary agent of long standing in the industry.

And best of all, Ms. Bykofsky is looking to represent more authors. She's keen to grow, even after more than two decades in publishing.

So if you have a manuscript in need of representation and it's non-fiction or commercial fiction with the potential to be a blockbuster, drop her a query letter.

One agent hangs up her reading glasses but another picks up the baton (manuscript?) and runs the next leg of the race. It's the natural order of things, when the ravages of time take their toll and open the way for the younger generation to step into their place, to carry on until the ravages of time strike them in turn.

The Divorce Papers: A Book Review

Page 38. That is as far as I could go. And that after starting over twice from the beginning.

I received a copy of THE DIVORCE PAPERS through a Blogging For Books arrangement with the publisher and I felt a certain level of responsibility to get through the novel. It is so bad that I just couldn't do it.

The novel is marketed as a modernized version of the good old epistolary novel, so what make it modern? Oh look, there are no letters but there are e-mails and notes and see the cute graphics to make it look like real letterhead or someone's handwriting. Is it an epistolary novel that ran through a graphic novel and came out the worse for the encounter?

The so-called plot, if it can be found in this mash-up, is supposed to concern a criminal defense attorney thrown into a divorce case. Other than that, I neither know nor care about the rest of the cast. It is not worth the amount of work needed to find the narrative arc when the author throws in duplicates of genuine legal documents because, well, she's a lawyer and not just playing one on television.

Sometimes you wonder how something got published. I suspect that author Susan Rieger either has a good friend in high places at Broadway Books, or she has some serious dirt on an influential editor.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone. 

 

Writing Fiction On Tinder

Are you looking for the most prolific writers of modern fiction to be found in one place? Then it's Tinder you're looking for.

Sure they call it an online dating app, but the prose is pure fiction. Some may be non-fiction, of course. There's no librarian on site to sort through the offerings and put things on the proper shelf.

Are you sure this is Amy, 20?

Let's say you see a picture of an attractive blond female and you think that she is the sort of person you'd like to date. You follow the instructions and swipe left to arrange a date. You expect the person in the photo to show up, but if you swiped left on Amy, 20, she wouldn't be the one answering your response.

That's because this one is a work of fiction by some unknown catfisher.

The woman in the picture above is not Amy but Emma Nolan, and she didn't set up an account on Tinder. She didn't even know her pictures were out there, lifted from her Facebook page that she thought was set to 'private'. Someone made up this Amy character, just like any author would invent a character. There isn't much in the biography section, so clearly this author does not have a lot of words at his or her command. Maybe they were sidetracked by the NaNoWriMo business and went off to work on a full length novel instead of a short paragraph.

Ms. Nolan has no idea who set this thing up. How is she to have it taken down? Someone is going to fall for the trap, whatever it might be, and we all hope that some besotted male of the species doesn't get mugged when he thinks he's going to meet the girl of his dreams. Because it is just a fabrication that Ms. Nolan would like to see gone.

She can't expect much help from Tinder's CEO. Sean Rad is in a bit of trouble himself over a sexual harassment lawsuit involving two Tinder marketing executives. He's stepping down from his post as soon as a new CEO can be found. Maybe one with more maturity than the 27-year-old whose industry is filled with page after page of fiction.

In the meantime, a friend of Ms. Nolan's has swiped left in the hope of outing the miscreant who posted the faux Tinder offer.

It's caveat emptor in the Tinder world, and caveat anyone who has any pictures posted anywhere. Which would be just about everyone in the digitally connected universe.

Product Placement Leaves The Big Screen For The Small Screen

Here's a drinking game to liven up that next Saturday night get-together with a few friends. You put on a film, any film but something set in modern times will work best, and then pour the beverage of choice.

Ready? Any time someone spots a commercially available product being featured prominently in the scene calls out "Product Placement" and everyone takes a drink. You'll all be pissed before the credits roll.

Sure we all put the containers on the table so the labels face in the same direction

Hollywood understands that a film's return on investment requires more than just box office sales or DVD sales. There are other ways to gather in the cash, and product placement is an old standard. How many times does an actor walk past a Starbucks coffee shop and there's that iconic logo hovering over their shoulder just long enough for you to see it and think how you'd like a tall caramel mocha latte. Even the makers of Kellogg's Corn Flakes got a product placement in the 2002 film Evelyn. Sitting right there in the final happy scene was that big box of breakfast cereal that no one, absolutely no one who lived in Fatima Mansions in 1956 could have afforded to buy.

But Kellogg's paid to have their cereal as part of the set dressing, and every little bit helps the Hollywood producer.

Product placement is all over the movie industry. Now it's coming to an e-book near you. From the big screen to the small screen of your e-reader, advertisers have found a way to insert their product into your thoughts so that when you mindlessly cruise the aisles of the grocery store, you mindlessly pick up what they want you to buy.

Storyverse Studios has developed a new business model that merges e-books with advertising in the subtle way we're accustomed to from watching movies. According to the report in the New York Times, the founders are launching their venture with a piece of chick-lit that is awash in references to Sweet n Low, the once ubiquitous artificial sweetener that has lost much market share to aspartame and stevia.

Imagine reading a silly novel and getting an info dump about the chemical that isn't bad for you, like, whatevs, the protagonist has done extensive research online and discovered....wait, only the actual verbiage can demonstrate the quality of the writing:

“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” the friend asks. Mags replies that she has researched the claims online and found studies showing that the product is safe: “They fed lab rats twenty-five hundred packets of Sweet’N Low a day ... And still the F.D.A. or E.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’t connect the dots from any kind of cancer in humans to my party in a packet.”

Will readers breeze through sections like that, or will that become the part of the novel that readers skip over? Could a paragraph be any more clunky, clumsy, and ridiculous? Who talks like that? Is the target audience considered that stupid as to not see this for what it is?

And what does all this mean to independent authors? It's hard enough to build an audience without the marketing power of a major publisher behind you. Now your potential audience is going to think twice before taking a chance on your novel because it might be one of these new and dreadful advertising things disguised as a novel and who wants to pay money for that?

FIND ME I'M YOURS is coming soon, to be offered just like any other e-book. But it isn't another novel to entertain you with empty-headed prose. No, this is an advert that will set you back $6.99, so not only are you getting a book that doesn't sound promising as far as quality of writing goes, but you're going to be manipulated with product placement that you can spot readily on the big screen, but might not notice on the small one.

What you might notice is that the book isn't particularly well written, and if that makes you hesitate to take a chance on an independent author, the independent authors and the reading public are both going to lose.

In My Previous Life I Lived What I Now Write

A waitress writes about a waitress

Stephanie Danler took the route that so many artists take. She waitressed to earn enough money to support herself and her writing habit---in New York City, where the publishers and literary agents live.

She earned her MFA to prove that she can write cogent prose, and then she wrote a novel about....you know already. Her protagonist is a "recent transplant to New York City" who finds employment in an upscale restaurant. Then she told one of her clients at this upscale New York City restaurant where she was working about her novel. The client, as you can well imagine, is the senior vice president of Random Penguins.

The rest is history. Her novel is going to be published and she is on her way, and all by writing what she knows so well, which would be her own life.

What if you're writing historical fiction? You can't very well push your manuscript to that editor slurping the soup you just served him as a story you know so well because you lived it. You can't say your protagonist is a waitress in some greasy spoon in the Bowery and you're just the one to write that story because it's your life story.

Unless you can somehow convince that hungry editor that you are utterly certain that you are the reincarnation of the Bowery denizen.

Chances are, the editor would either think you were insane and demand to be seated at a different table, or he would find you intensely creative and an author worthy of consideration.

Then again, it's highly unlikely that you are even in New York State, let alone New York City. You're plodding away in some small town in eastern Ohio, or scribbling your prose in a corner of the kitchen table in a nondescript suburb of a minor city, and you've never had to wait tables because you landed a part-time job at Banana Republic when you were putting yourself through graduate school.

On top of all those negatives against you, you don't have a Master's degree in Fine Arts and can't see how you would manage it anyway, what with the kids and the full time job and the mortgage payment.

You didn't contribute to McSweeney's like Mona Awad, also an MFA holder. You didn't edit Slate magazine like Jessica Winter, either, but she's got a debut novel coming out and you don't.

What it boils down to is simple. You don't have the credentials to make Melissa Flashman sit up and take notice. Julia Kenny is going to reject you, and Claudia Ballard won't even bother to respond. If she was interested, she'd be calling you and your phone isn't ringing, is it?

Your agent search should be centered on the newcomers to an established agency, to those just starting to develop a list. They won't snag the big movers and shakers, the highly credentialed writers, because their superiors will get the juiciest fruit. Instead of hoping to land Susan Golomb, you would be better off trying to catch the eye of Soumeya Bendimerad who doesn't have a deep list and wants to develop one so she can make some money in her chosen profession.

If you aren't starting at the top of the profession, with writing credits and an advanced degree, you aren't doing yourself any favors by starting at the top of the agent listings. You have to begin at the bottom of the bar and work your way up. It has nothing to do with raw talent these days, but it has a lot to do with the platform you've constructed.

Did I tell you that I underwent regression therapy and discovered that I was an Irish immigrant at the time of the Great Famine? It's all come back to me, every detail. It's written down here. Would you like to read it? And then publish it? Do you want fries with that?

Mad Dogs, Englishmen And Conville & Walsh Go Out In The Noonday Sun

Are they mad? What else would you think of a literary agency that openly invites slush? Begs for it, essentially. Don't they have enough coming in?

Conville & Walsh is a respected London literary agency that has opened up a contest that will attract enough slush to sink the British isle. What they are getting by way of submissions is not enough for them to find the talent that they are sure is out there, so they are inviting that talent to come calling.

Word of Mouth Prize, comes with its own logo

There's a hashtag for those of you on Twitter. There's pins on Pinterest if you're doing that sort of thing. To say that this contest is being promoted would be an understatement. They are just begging for an inundation of manuscripts. Pleading with writers to fill up the inbox until the internet is overloaded and collapses on itself, exhausted.

Authors can submit manuscripts electronically, and it makes no difference to Conville & Walsh if it's previously self-published or totally unpublished. Send it along. Maybe there is something there that could be turned into something real.

Why haven't they found it yet, if the agents already accept queries?

If you've done a fair amount of submitting you're familiar with the process. Attach the manuscript and two page synopsis to a cover letter, and be sure to include the genre and your publication credentials which you probably don't have because you're not published.

MFA holders with some literary ramblings to their credit can thus be plucked out of the general morass from the start, to simplify things.

Those capable of composing a respectable query letter might get a chance at having their synopsis read if the genre is something in demand, like romance or thriller or mystery.

But even with tripwires in place to blow away the excess, the culling is going to take considerable time and wouldn't that time be better spent reading regular queries?

How will a contest yield any better result for anyone than the current system?

All any writer wants when submitting a manuscript is to acquire representation so the manuscript can be placed under the nose of an editor at one of the Big Five publishing houses. All any literary agent wants is a manuscript than can sell.

Will a prize of one thousand British pounds make that much of a difference to anyone?

You're submitting anyway, so why not give it a go? The Word of Mouth prize could be yours, with just as much chance of getting representation as what you're doing already. Except this will be even tougher competition from writers around the world.

They must be mad, over at Conville & Walsh. Stark raving mad, or severely masochistic, to wish the world's largest slush pile on their heads.

Sharpen Your Pencil And NaNoWriMo

It was a dark and stormy night....No, that's no good. It was the best of times....

Tomorrow being the first of November means it is time to start writing that novel you've been talking about writing for the past eight years if only you could get started. This is the time.

National Novel Writing Month has become quite a grand production, with a website and signing up and making a genuine commitment. If you hesitated to take the plunge before out of fear that writing was too solitary an occupation, you can join NaNoWriMo and get yourself into a community of people like yourself. People who are giving the novel writing game a go, that is, not professional writers. They know that it's impossible to write a novel in a month, but this is more about the process of beginning than the real work of getting published.

Sharpen your pencils, would-be writers. Yes, pencils. Or pens if you prefer the look of ink. A dip pen or a quill if you're planning to do the Jane Austen immersion technique. And paper, reams of paper. Typing away on a computer doesn't engage your brain in the same way as the slower process of physically writing. But this is a race to the finish, not a work of art. Maybe you'd be better off with a computer keyboard under your itchy fingers. Putting together 50,000 words or more over the course of a month is going to take some effort, and time-saving modern conveniences could make some difference.

What to write about? Write what you know, but be aware that what you know can be expanded by research. Do you think historical fiction authors are ancient folk who watched the British fire the shot heard round the world? You can write a great deal if you expand your knowledge, and as for your characters? People are people, largely unchanged over the centuries. Man is driven by greed and lust and all those other seven deadly sins, today and back then and on into the future.

Your topic is selected, your materials are at hand, and you must next undertake the most difficult part of NaNoWriMo. You have to sit down at your writing space and compose sentences that make paragraphs that make chapters. That means you can't do any of the usual things that distract you in everyday life. You can't let your family disturb you. And you can't go disrupting yourself.

At the end of the month, you can celebrate your accomplishment, whether it's a few paragraphs or something along the lines of a Russian novel complete at hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Just don't think you've got something brilliant that any literary agent would jump at. Chances are, it's not. The manuscript you flew through is far from polished. If you give in to the temptation to submit it, you're wasting a lot of time and creating some annoyance.

NaNoWriMo ends on the last day of November. The literary agents cringe, knowing that the first of December will see an uptick in submissions that have to be plowed through. Writers hoping to snag an agent would do well to avoid querying in December. The agents are all in foul moods with the slushiest slush and they're likely to reject you because they've had quite enough.

I Invented 'Operation' And All I Got Is This Lousy T-Shirt

What? No oral surgery option?

When John Spinello was a student of industrial design, he invented this game that involved some skill, a steady hand, and enough electronics to make some noise and light up a small bulb.

It was the early 1960s and games were a lot more simple, as were the abilities to amuse the younger set.

Mr. Spinello sold the rights to the game for $500 and went on with his life. He was a creative type and wasn't thinking in terms of marketing or potential sales. He got on with his life, while the man who bought the game for next to nothing sold it on to toymaker Milton Bradley Co., and earned a very tidy return on his investment.

Mr. Spinello kept the bragging rights, but he is not the bragging type. Few people knew that he had invented Operation, a game that is still popular, and still making money for the game's owner. As for the inventor, he took a severe hit in the recent economic downturn and ended up declaring bankruptcy, even as the Operation game kept right on amusing children, even in our more sophisticated times. Every now and then you need some silliness, like a plastic pencil representing writer's block or a little butterfly to be removed from a patient's stomach. And the desire to not sound the buzzer has not diminished, either. Fifty years on, and people are still a little competitive in that way.

Now it is Mr. Spinello who needs an operation but he's broke. Word got out, and the response has been overwhelming for the unassuming Bloomingdale, IL, resident.

A couple of game inventors who knew of Mr. Spinello's contribution to the industry got wind of his financial distress and set up a crowd funding site to raise money for some much needed oral surgery. In a little over a week, they nearly hit their goal of $25,000 so Mr. Spinelli can get the dental implants he needs. Hasbro, which now owns the game rights, has offered to buy the original prototype from Mr. Spinello. What could be more perfect for the company's archives than the mock-up that started it all? It's a museum piece. And considering how much profit they've earned on the game, they should be able to make a respectable offer.

If all goes well, the inventor of a classic game will get the medical care he needs, and have enough left over to help him through a rough patch.

A Place That Works, or, A Room Of One's Own

Elizabeth Berg is an acclaimed author who has penned several novels. When she writes an essay telling you what you need to be a writer, her words are worth heeding.

What advice does she have?

You should feel things, she suggests. Have you ever read an account of some incident and found yourself burning with anger? It was anger that started Katie Hanrahan on writing THE LEAVEN OF THE PHARISEES, and her anger comes through in the powerful emotion of the story. Children taken from their mothers for the crime of being poor? The government deciding which women were of suitable moral character to raise their children, and which were overstepping the bounds, as determined by a parish priest or a visiting nun? Young women enslaved for the crime of being pregnant out of wedlock, for the crime of being pretty? There is strong emotion running through the novel, and it came about from casual reading of newspaper reports that inspired a driving outrage.

That a writer has to notice things fits with the image of a writer as that person in the corner watching everything but saying little. John McGahern had a reputation in his hometown of mingling with the locals, watching them as they went about their normal activities, but always observing. His observations of small town Irish life fleshed out his novels. Readers can relate to characters that are familiar to them. As a writer, if you bring that element of reality, you have done well.

Wasn't it Virginia Woolf who said a writer needed a room of one's own? Elizabeth Berg reiterates that requirement, and if you are a man with a wife to do the housework and maintain you in comfort, you are a step ahead of everyone else.

To have a space to work is not asking much. You don't need an entire room. A corner somewhere. A desk where you can prop up your research documents, your pens, extra paper, maybe a laptop if you're doing writing the modern way. But what you need, as Ms. Berg points out in her essay, is uninterrupted time to think about words and then put them down before reading them and listening to them and starting over again.

What woman has that kind of luxury?

If you work full time, your day is filled. Then you come home and throw food on the table, monitor homework, entertain your spouse who has to tell you about something that happened during the day. Maybe you and your husband argue about finances and the need to squeeze another drop of blood out of the financial turnip that month.

After all that, are you going to sit down and work on a novel and not expect to be disturbed by a phone call, the husband looking for the packet of crisps he thought he saw in the back of the cupboard, or a whining child?

Is there a writer out there who does not write full time, or work in academia where they don't work much at all, and who can tell female writers how they manage to write with all the normal distractions that a woman faces because, let's face it, if a man is working on a novel it's something of earth shattering importance. If a woman is trying to write, well, it's charming, what is it, dear, a nice romance like one of Cecilia Ahern's stories?

That attitude is even worse than the constant rejection you face when you try to get that novel published after all those years of squeezing in a paragraph here or a chapter there. Any writers out there who have advice on how to overcome that sort of frustration?

A supportive family could be of far greater importance than a room of one's own.