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.

A Spy Among Friends: A Book Review

The e-book was provided by the publisher.

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

Much has been written about Kim Philby, the notorious British turncoat who operated freely for thirty years. Author Ben Macintyre takes a different approach in his presentation, giving us a view from those who thought that they knew Philby because they were close personal friends.

The book is a page-turner, with the very spy craft that inspired Ian Fleming (himself a member of the club), but it is the old boys network that really stands out. To read about a man being recruited and then admitted into the highest echelons of British intelligence because he was a Cambridge man and public school boy is to realize that the class system was not totally wiped out by the social changes brought on by the First World War.

The case of Kim Philby is as much a cautionary tale of class privilege as it is a story about the privileged being used in ways that broke their social rules, and the shock that kept them blind to the betrayal of one of their own.

Using the words of those who thought they were Philby's great friends, the author explains how the false narrative woven by Philby protected him from being outed. The closeness, the camaraderie, all served to insulate him from exposure and furthered his career. What comes across in the narrative is the frustration and total befuddlement of the men of MI6 who watched every attempt to undermine the Soviet Union upended, aware that someone had tipped the enemy off but utterly unaware that it was the very man they discussed their plans with.

As the story concludes, Mr. Macintyre maintains the focus on the friends, those who were betrayed so thoroughly. How they reacted to that betrayal, and what changed in the espionage game, bring the story full circle.

A fascinating glimpse into the everyday lives of spies makes for an intriguing read that is difficult to put down once you've begun.

When Free Amazon Prime Is Not Enough Of An Incentive

The buzz continues to ripple through financial circles where said circles intersect with literary interests. Amazon missed the mark this quarter, and Wall Street is punishing the monolithic marketplace.

Amazon has not shown signs of great profitability in its short existence. It's all about growing the marketplace, rising sales, but there comes a time when shareholders take stock and decide if their long term goals will be met, or if it's just a slow grind to insolvency. Those with a stake in the company tend to become alarmed when a new avenue turns into a dead end with a great deal of unsold stock piled up at the end of it. They often flinch when the firm they have invested in gets bad publicity, especially when that bad publicity is splashed in the pages of the New York Times and is written by a respected economist.

Why did Amazon miss Wall Street expectations?

In part, it's a trend that has been hurting book sales in general. Expensive college textbooks are available for rent instead of purchase, and with the cost of third level education skyrocketing, anything that saves on expenses is going to become the most popular option.

The book selling market has been in decline for a while, on a downward trend that coincides with the downturn in the economy. People had lots of money when Amazon appeared, and they were mad for the books. Now there is not enough cash on hand to cover the cost of tonight's dinner, and the last thing the average reader will splurge on is a book. They'll borrow from a public library or a friend. Or they'll download an e-book, maybe, but even that is not a fast-growing segment of the market.

It's apparent, after getting the numbers from Amazon, why it has been so fierce in its negotiations with Hachette Book Group. Amazon desperately needs every penny of discount they can wring out of a publisher, and the news from the investment world only serves to boost Hachette's position. You need us more than we need you, in other words. Amazon can't hide the wound and the hemorrhaging of cash is evident.

But what makes things particularly difficult for Amazon?

It just might be a misstep, a slight attack of hubris that is costing more money than the company can afford to lose.

Free Amazon Prime! Such a deal!

Competing with everyone, in every way, brought up the Kindle to take on Apple's iPad. But there is no exclusivity because anyone can buy an iPad and download the free Kindle app. Then they can use that Kindle app to download free e-books from the public library via Overdrive, and just because a reader has a Kindle account does not mean they are using it in a way that benefits Amazon.

Where else do people download books? More and more, they are downloading to a smartphone. So Jeff Bezos decided that Amazon would make smartphones as well.

Just because he wanted to compete does not mean he had a product that was equal to an iPhone.

The Amazon warehouses are stuffed to the rafters with Fire phones, unwanted by the general public because a free subscription to Amazon Prime just isn't enough of an incentive to make the purchase.

The phones cost money to develop. They cost money to manufacture. They cost money to store. And none of those costs are recouped by a phone that is not being sold.

Which leaves shareholders to wonder if Amazon has lost its way. And when they think a company is headed in the wrong direction, they dump the stock and when the stock gets dumped the price drops and when it drops precipitously, potential investors take notice.

All of which is likely to be pointed out by negotiators representing Hachette Publishing Group when next the parties meet to discuss the level of discounts offered on Hachette titles and who will determine the price of the e-books. Perhaps something along the lines of the deal struck between Amazon and Simon & Schuster, the one that resurrects a pricing model that Amazon said was a violation of anti-trust laws when Apple did it.

Actions Most Positive for Positive Action

I'd call a spa treatment and a massage some positive action. An Garda Siochana, however, doesn't see the positivity in such things. They're under the impression that the charity organization Positive Action was strictly about raising money for women infected with Hepatitis C.

There's more to Positive Action than helping the sick. What about helping the stressed individuals working so hard to generate the funds and then distribute them? One for you, two for me, one for you, three for me...and so on until several hundred thousand euro go missing.

One employee of Positive Action must have become exhausted with all the support group development and the lobbying for the best care available, to say nothing of the advocating. A massage would loosen up the tension in the shoulders, and someone whose liver is gone due to Hepatitis C couldn't begrudge an hour of such therapy. So busy was she with her work that she had to send a courier to pick up the dry-cleaning, and Positive Action came through once again. Or she charged the cost to the office. Either way, she earned the perk, right?

Have you ever tried to drive in Dublin? It's madness. So it's understandable that Positive Action would have spent €34,000 on taxi fares over a four year period. They must have had to do a great deal of traveling, what with all that advocating and ensuring the best care and such.

The organization also managed to spend €100,000 on such essentials as angel card readings and spiritual healing. Well, if the drugs aren't working, what's a patient to do? A little spiritual healing might be the only option.

Then there were the hundreds of thousands spent on overseas travel, and the astronomical sum that went towards legal fees.

Investigators are uncovering some phony invoices and inflated invoices and just about any scheme you could imagine to separate the cash from Positive Action. To help with disguising transactions, there was a secret bank account, to go along with a secret investment account.

The Health Service paid for all that lavish spending over a four year period, beauty treatments and groceries and whatever was wanted, because no one was minding the till. The employee entrusted with distributing the money to the women who were supposed to be reaping the benefits managed to reap the benefits largely for herself. Over a million of your hard-earned euro were thrown down the drain due to a lack of oversight.

The oversight is coming too late. The money is gone, and it isn't coming back.

Gardai aren't even sure where it all went.

The woman at the center of the fraud is cooperating with authorities, who have yet to charge her. They'll most likely wait to see how much cooperating she does before settling on a suitable charge.

For Positive Action, it was four years of living large on someone else's back, not unlike a pimp. That would make the Irish taxpayers the whores, apparently.

Democratic Strategist Integrity

The husband of political consultant Ann Liston quit his job yesterday, citing political interference and implications of pillow talk between spouses.

At the same time, Sun-Times reporter Dave McKinney resigned from the paper, citing political interference and implications of pillow talk between spouses.

These two sentences are essentially the same, but the description of the protagonist has been slightly altered to show, rather than tell. Dave McKinney is a political reporter for a Chicago newspaper, and his wife is a political consultant. Your head is now drawing lines from Point A to Point B and you're arriving at Point 'Journalistic Integrity'.

Are they talking politics?

Mr. McKinney penned an in-depth article about Republican candidate Bruce Rauner and Mr. Rauner's involvement in a lawsuit that touched on operations of one of the many companies his hedge fund operated. The article painted him in a bad light, which is what you'd expect from an investigative journalist.

But does it make a difference to your sense of integrity to know that his wife is a Democratic consultant whose firm works with Illinois Democratic candidates to get them elected?

The journalist blames the new owners of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of whom was Bruce Rauner before he gave up the investment when he decided to run for governor. Mr. McKinney says that the publisher was put under pressure by the paper's owners to kill the piece by the Rauner campaign, but the article ran anyway. The conflict of interest angle was then floated, but still the article was published.

But right after it ran, Mr. McKinney was relieved of his politcal beat and given other options at the newspaper, none of which he cared to accept.

The reporter defended his editor, in the belief that Jim Kirk would never do that to him. Jim Kirk has been defending his integrity by insisting that no one above him was pulling his strings and it was his decision to pull the plug on a good reporter who, it turned out, married into an enormous conflict of interest.

Ms. Liston herself is not working on the Quinn re-election campaign, but her company is, and the average reader would not believe that she is so isolated in her office that a word is never passed between her and her colleagues.

That becomes a problem for a newspaper that is concerned with journalistic integrity. The owners of the Sun-Times don't want to get a reputation as the spokes-paper for the Democrats, especially in Chicago where the Democrats are famous for corruption and one-party rule. They are competing with the conservative Chicago Tribune, and while a liberal slant is fine, a lack of independence from the politicians being covered is deadly.

Mr. McKinney believes his demotion was ordered by the paper's owner, Michael "Charles Foster Kane" Ferro, and he has retained some high-powered legal bulldogs to make a case that shows Mr. McKinney was the victim of political machinations at the highest level.

Is his wife the political strategist advising him?

What do they talk about when their heads hit the pillow? Should the readers know?

Take Back The (Halloween) Night

The good old days

The ancient Celts knew how to celebrate the dead. It's an art that, sadly, has been lost to our modern culture. Sure we still carve up the occasional vegetable and scare small children with grisly tales of the dead, but the true meaning of Halloween is lost.

Sinn Fein's Sandra McLennan wants to restore Ireland's former Celtic glory. She wants the government to do it, but she's Sinn Fein and they expect the government to do everything anyway. It won't happen, however, unless the Celts get behind her and stand up for their right to the night.

The old ones called it Samhain, the night of the dead, and they celebrated the holiday like it was a genuine holiday. It was also a date that marked winter's approach, an event of some importance to the ancients who had no government to offer subsidies or welfare payments if the crops were poor or a farmer didn't get his livestock secured before bad weather hit.

What was Samhain became Halloween as the ancient practices were absorbed into Christianity. Who doesn't enjoy Christmas, right, and it's just the old Roman festival in fancy dress. So here we are, us modern types, still celebrating all things that go bump in the night on the same day as the old Celts. Except us modern types have distorted Halloween into a time for terrorizing the elderly neighbors or engaging in acts of vandalism after some heavy drinking and drug use.

You might think it's all in fun until it's your dustbin that gets blown up by fireworks and you have to clean up the mess. And if your neighbor decides to build a bonfire that runs out of control, you won't be pleased to learn that the fire brigade is busy up the road and sorry about your shed burning down.

Sandra McLennan wants Halloween to become Samhain again, with a national festival that would run along the lines of Culture Night.

Her suggestion has hit a barricade in the form of Heather Humphreys, the Arts Minister.

As the Minister has pointed out, Ireland already has Culture Night so why try to clone it and then confuse people about which night is the big night. In addition, the State is already paying the costs of one Culture Night to draw in the tourists, and there isn't a lot of spare cash around to pay for another.

Then there are the many local festivals that would be lost in this nationalization of Halloween. That's a lot of toes to be stepping on, especially the toes belonging to those who work so hard to create the local celebration and organize the many activities. Someone from Dublin is going to waltz in and take over? The reception won't be warm, and the grumbling will be loud.

Unless everyone were on board with Ms. McLennan's idea, that is. The local groups would have to be brought in under the national umbrella, and what better selling point could Ms. McLennan have than the need to eliminate anti-social behavior on Halloween? The ancient Celts weren't blowing up dustbins or throwing firecrackers at the gardai attempting to keep order. Wouldn't everyone in Ireland like to be more Celtic for one night of the year?

The Irish essentially invented Halloween. Why not make it a cultural event and then promote it as a tourist attraction? The Druids are always up for a good party.

Extortion At The Pharmacy

Pay up or the cigar gets it

You fill your prescriptions where it is most convenient for you. A pharmacy near your job, or where you wait for the bus to take you to your dull cubicle or the dish-washing station at the greasy spoon. Maybe it's next to the dry cleaners so you can consolidate the pick-ups to save a few minutes.

CVS doesn't care if you're inconvenienced. If you have Caremark running your benefits show and your preferred store is still selling cigarettes, you are going to pay more for your prescription.

It's extortion, in essence, at the corporate level. CVS wants all shops in its Caremark network to stop carrying tobacco products because it's not a product designed to promote health. It is an addiction, not unlike those addicted to prescription meds, but pills are so clean and they don't smell when being used according to the doc's orders.

The idea behind the extortion plot is to force the pharmacy in question to remove the cigs because their clients are going to go elsewhere to buy their meds and the pharmacy will be forced out of business.

If you're doing business with CVS directly, at one of its 7700 pharmacies, you've already adapted. You get your ciggies elsewhere because the pharmacy doesn't carry them any more. If your health insurance plan contains a prescription drug benefit plan operated by CVS-owned Caremark, you will either pay up for your pharmacist's stubborn refusal to be told what to do by some big faceless corporation, or you'll go elsewhere to avoid paying the extortion.

The Mafia makes millions from shop owners who pay the goons to not burn down the store. Now CVS is going thug and making everyone pay if the pharmacy doesn't follow orders.

The company you work for wants all the employees to give up smoking because health care costs are higher for long-time smokers. They have an unpleasant tendency to develop cancers after prolonged use, and if you get sick while still employed, the health insurance provider has to pay up and they really, really hate that. You can still sneak the smokes, of course, but it's going to be made more inconvenient because you can't just pick up a pack when you get your blood pressure meds. You have to go to the nearest gas station or the convenience store on the corner.

What can you do, to keep doing things the way you've been doing?

Walgreens doesn't care if you smoke or not. They're competing with CVS to get prescriptions. So it's up to you and your fellow smokers to put pressure on whoever at your place of employment picks the insurance policies. Down with Caremark! Up with liberty! Down with extortion! Don't tread on me!

A Question Of Celibacy

Father "Do As I Say Not As I Do" Rosbotham

Two men dispute ownership of a holiday cottage. They both claim ownership rights.

Not a particularly earth-shattering revelation. People can be found in courts everywhere, arguing over who owns how much of what if they own a piece of it at all.

Such disagreements between two people in a relationship that does not have the legal framework provided by marriage are often contentious. What a wife might get in a divorce settlement is not what a lover can expect to automatically receive when the relationship ends. Then the courts have to wade in and calculate how much each party invested in the asset in question, and the feuding couple has to testify in court about various aspects of their personal life that would otherwise never become public knowledge.

For instance, there could be two men arguing, and the next thing you know, everyone is made aware that the lads are not just old friends or work colleagues but homosexual lovers.

And where did our subjects here work? They worked for the Roman Catholic Church. One used to be a Franciscan. The other is still a priest.

What of the vow of celibacy, gentlemen?

Parishioners in Kilmoremoy, in County Mayo, were a bit stunned, at least those who attended Mass on Sunday. Their bishop read a letter to them, which itself was a shock. You don't often see the bishop at a Mass at a small local parish. But there he was in all his majesty, letting the faithful know that their curate was being given a time-out to reflect on the things he preached about. Things like sin and fornication and the like. The things Father Gabriel Rosbotham was doing for years with his Franciscan lover.

Father Rosbotham makes no apologies for being gay, and in keeping with the Pope's call to not judge homosexuals, the Church hierarchy isn't saying anything about his sexual orientation. What has the Church upset is this latest example of hypocrisy, which is doing more to drive people away from the Church than the most boring series of sermons ever could.

Priests must be celibate, and let someone suggest that the celibacy issue is part of the madness of the institution and you'll be told it's tradition, a gift, a sacrifice, or whatever excuse will do to stop any mention of ordaining married men. Don't even get them started on the suggestion that women be allowed entry.

The sexual relationship between Father Rosbotham and Hugo Crawford was exposed in court when the two argued over a cottage in Donegal. Father Rosbotham ended up with a legally decreed 27% share, and the Catholic Church ended up with another fire to extinguish. A pair of clerics were getting up to all sorts of fun in a scenic section of Donegal for ten years, and their superiors knew nothing, or at any rate, Bishop Fleming says he knew nothing. Women can't preach from the pulpit but a hypocrite can because he's male?

A gay priest? Not shocking at all. But a priest who lives a lie? That's not shocking either.

Star Spotting

What does Ireland have that can be used to generate jobs and tax income?

Not much in the way of precious gems, major manufacturing, lumber, gold, and the list goes on and on. What Ireland does have is beautiful scenery. And what does Hollywood want and need? Beautiful scenery that hasn't been used as backdrops so often that film-goers instantly recognize the actual location of the shooting.

Filming Star Wars 7 On Skellig Michael

Hollywood is also looking for discounts. The industry is facing a decline back home in California because it is too expensive to work there. Watch the credits of your average movie and you'll notice a lot of thanks going out to varioius foreign countries who provide some hefty tax incentives, along with a cheaper supply of labor.

The Double Irish is going away, but there's nothing to stop the State from modifying its tax credit scheme to draw in more Hollywood productions, which means more Hollywood A-listers arriving and more tourists following on their heels to get a glimpse of Brangelina and their menagerie or maybe George Clooney and is he escorting the missus or do they seem to be having a little spat there?

Scenery has its place, but to Hollywood's beancounters, it's all about the money.

Ireland will now make it about the money as well, if Arts Minister Heather Humphreys has her way.

Film crews can make use of a tax credit for the first 50 million they spend, but the major Hollywood blockbusters spend far more than that, and if you're competing with Prague for the business, you'll lose out to Prague. Ms. Humphreys would like Ireland to recognize the fact that the more desirable business is the more costly business, and the tax incentive should be upped to cover the first 100 million.

She throws in the usual bit about job creation because every tax scheme needs a job creation number to support it. That film production could generate 2,000 new jobs is most likely the absolute best case scenario that's more wishful thinking than hard numbers, but it is not easy to calculate the knock-on effect of star spotting as a new tourism draw.

After all, we speak English in Ireland, we have beer that we think is better than what you'll find in Prague, and we have all that cead mile failte to throw around.

I'll See Your Double Irish And Double Down

The Double Irish tax scheme has been under fire from non-Irish countries, like the United States, that do not wish to lower their corporate tax rates and insist that Ireland raise its rate so corporations stop flocking to Ireland to save some money.

The grumbling has verged on extortion in America, where AbbVie has just decided to drop its acquisition of Shire Pharmaceuticals because new laws meant to punish Double Irish consumers would have made the deal less profitable. All to the good of Shire, which stands to gain a break-up fee of something around one billion dollars, which it will then use to buy another company so it can grow while AbbVie can go explain to its stockholders why things just didn't work out in the pending marriage.

Enticing foreign corporations to locate on Ireland's shores brought in so much money that the Celtic Tiger was born. There was no need to produce anything, and on an island without a lot of natural resources, that means a great deal. It was the tax inversion that brought prosperity to a poor country for the first time in its existence. Under pressure, Ireland has had to scrap the scheme.

At the same time, governmental types are well aware of the benefits of tax inversions, and just because they have caved in to the pressure on the Double Irish, they aren't going to not offer special deals and various bargains for foreign corporations willing to set up a small office in Dublin. And hire a couple of Irish nationals to shuffle the paperwork.

So the State will see your Double Irish rate of 12.5 percent and double down.

Have a patent, perhaps? Register it in Dublin and it's Irish intellectual property. Your tax rate? 6.25 percent.

It will be called "The Knowledge Box", as in computer technology knowledge that might be used by Amazon, Apple, Google, or Ebay. It's new drugs that might be developed by any of the big pharma companies that already have a presence in Ireland, and might therefore be enticed to stay.

Government is working with the very executives of these multinational firms affected by the death of the Double Irish, and together they will develop a policy that will save those multinationals some money. You don't see anyone in Government consulting with foreign heads of state on the new scheme, do you? It's being done to keep the tax inversion money flowing in, and what those foreign heads of state competing for the same pile of cash want is the opposite of what would be best for Ireland.

If the EU doesn't go for it, then there are other schemes in the works that can be modelled on similar tactics currently in force in other EU nations that were hoping to siphon off Ireland's tax exiles who would leave when the deal wasn't so good, and go looking for a more welcoming tax levy.

The Double Irish might be gone but the notion of attracting foreign investment via tax savings is still very much alive and well.

All that chatter out of Washington DC will not kill off what brought new life to a poor country. There is always a way around whatever barriers are erected, especially when money is involved and the Irish taxpayer is stretched to the limit and can't be asked for more.

Small Press Publishing Is Another Word For Non-Profit

On the heels of his success as an author, Dave Eggers wanted to share more of his sort of writing with the world. After all, the average publisher was looking for sales, not artistry, and he wanted to bring more artistry to readers whose brains were not being stimulated by the likes of THE DA VINCI CODE or other such drivel. It was a diet of cake when a reader needed more substantial verbal nutrition.

He started McSweeney's, a small house publisher that provided an outlet for the writerly writers who crafted beautiful prose or had something to say that wasn't being heard.

Mr. Eggers discovered something along the way.

There is no money in publishing.

McSweeney's has just gone from being a small publisher to a small non-profit.

We here at Newcastlewest Books can sympathize.

We started our small publishing company because we weren't finding the kinds of books that we liked to read coming out of the major houses. Knowing that we were not alone, we organized around the realization that we would not make money in providing books for a small niche market. We did not go into the publishng game to turn a profit because it is next to impossible.

Operating a firm with volunteers has its limits, and McSweeney's grew too big to be operated by dedicated individuals working for love alone. You need a few editors if you're cranking out more than three books per year, and fair play to you if you find quality editors who will work for free. There are not all that many indepedently wealthy individuals in the world, and not enough to create a full staff.

Mr. Eggers had the added burden of additional staff to put out a quarterly journal. If you are familiar with literary rags, you know that they are generally published by universities who are offering students some practical experience in publishing and creative writing as part of a degree-granting program. The costs are met by the school, which does not have to turn a profit. Its mission is to turn out competent professionals, and that is a far different mission than anything Mr. Eggers set out to do when he launched McSweeney's.

He found that he was operating on a shoestring that was normally frayed. Meeting salaries can be a nightmare when sales are down, and with not enough spare change in the average reader's pocket to buy a book, sales are down these days. Digital publishing is less costly, to an extent, but then there is the marketing expense and a publisher just can't make ends meet.

Instead of relying on income from sales, McSweeney's will rely on donations from people who want to become members. Those who believe in what Mr. Eggers is doing can donate to the new non-profit McSweeney's, and he hopes to see the publisher's finances turn around so that he can complete some projects that are languishing for lack of funding.

Without the pressure to generate capital, Mr. Eggers can return to what he does best, and what he wants to do more than chase dollars. He can concentrate on his writing, instead of fretting about the empty cupboard and the employees expecting to get paid at the end of the week.

Some of us at Newcastlewest Books know exactly what he means. But we're not ready to turn into a non-profit. We know we're non-profit already, but sometimes it isn't about the money.