Tag Archives: editing services

Adventures, Editing/writing life

field trip

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In school, did you like field trips? I always did. I’d do anything to get the hell out of the classroom.

Today the blog is going on a field trip to Kit ‘N Kabookle, the online home of fellow traveler/colleague Mary DeSantis. She has been posting visiting editorial tips for some months now, one per week, and I’m up to bat.

For my topic, I decided to talk about choosing an editing mode beginning from the writer’s viewpoint: in plain English, what exactly is a given writer seeking from an editing professional? “I need an edit” is very inspecific. It’s like saying “I need a car repair” without talking about what’s wrong.

I always think it’s nice to know the name of what one wants, myself.

Mary’s site has plentiful information resources. She was pleasant and professional in arranging and scheduling this, and I thank her for her kind e-hospitality.

Editing/writing life

A blueprint for becoming a well-paid, respected fiction author

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No, really.

You might not like some parts of it, but it would work. It would also, if I were a participant, make me less money–just in case one is tempted to imagine that this is a purely self-promotional notion.

It also involves marketing. Yes, marketing is icky and you hate it. I get it. It is also what separates the moneymaking writer, even if mediocre, from the impoverished writer even if superb. You either embrace marketing and decide to do it, or you pay to work rather than being paid to work.

If you’re still interested, you at least asked, “What marketing would that be?” That’s a start.

First: learn to write and tell a story. Do this by writing a short story, say 5K words, and hiring a competent editor for at least one developmental edit. Might need more than one. The logic here is that if you hire the right person, you basically get an intensive writing class. You would also get that if you wrote novellas or novels, the difference being that this will achieve it cheaper and faster. You will overcome all the tyro mistakes: stop using italics as substitutes for good writing, learn differences between dialogue and narrative, get over your adverbs and ellipses and em dashes.

Once your short story doesn’t suck, publish it on Amazon as a free giveaway. Yes. Free. No, I am not joking, and no, I am not nuts. If you can’t make it free, charge the minimum, which I think is $0.99. The idea here is to build up a following. Your first five short stories should be free. Keep writing them. Continue to engage editing support as needed, but your editor will cost you far less because s/he will have less mechanical stuff to do and will have moved you on to more advanced thinking as you shape your storytelling abilities.

You want reviews and people interested in more from you. You are building up your promotional base while making sure that you don’t charge people much for your earlier, less polished efforts. You are getting reviews, one hopes, feedback as to what readers like and dislike. You can compare public opinion to your editor’s impressions, ask for guidance relative to them. That’s part of what we do, evaluate review comments for validity or bogusness (bogosity?).

After you’ve got five up there that you are willing to make free as often as possible, start charging $0.99 for those going forward. Your base will take chances on you, because most people do not recognize $0.99 as actual money. It’s about the price of their coke with fast food. They will gladly pay that for a lunch read by an author they know they like. Word will spread. You will start to earn. You might not yet be breaking even, but neither will you just be pouring money down a sinkhole.

What you are doing here is creating a pool of passive income and marketing that keeps working for you after you have already paid for it, like rent-free billboards with your name on them. By using short stories, you are doing this as cheaply as possible. Editing and proofreading cost less. They do add up over the course of about twenty-five short stories, but each is a spend-once-benefit-longtime cost. If you think you are pretty badass, you can always try releasing a story without editing guidance and see how it’s received.

Yeah. I just told you it was okay to try skipping hiring an editor. If you have started to believe that you are special, and you want to test your theory, just try it without one and see how the reviews are. Do I think you should do this? Fundamentally, no; but if you are starting to ask yourself whether you want to keep spending that money, this is the only way you will obtain an answer you can believe. If it doesn’t seem to matter, then at least you’ll make informed choices. If it gets lousy reviews and people wonder what the hell went wrong with you, then you’ll have a metric for what good the editor was doing you.

Once you’ve got a couple dozen shorts out there that people can use for discoverability, come up with a novella. Maybe it’s based upon situations and characters that the readers liked; by now you have ample feedback on that. Have a developmental edit on the novella, because the issues facing longer work differ from shorter work, and you now need to learn these. It will be far, far less expensive than if you’d just busted out a debut novel and had to go back and forth three times while your editor taught you to get rid of passive voice and write decent dialogue.

If you stall out, and think that you have “writer’s block,” you’re incorrect because there is no such thing. If you are tired of writing, tell yourself the truth. If you just need a break, tell yourself the truth. If you can’t figure out what to write, tell yourself the truth. Deep down, you either do or do not want to keep doing this. If you don’t want to, stop; it was worth a try. If you want to continue, write something, anything, every day. Write naughty limericks, journal, send letters to the newspaper editor, do a blog, even write about how old this is getting. Doesn’t matter. People who want to and have the time and means to write are writing; people who do not want to write are not. Right now I want to write this blog post. Never, ever externalize your desire to write and assign it to the completely invented, non-recognized, self-sabotaging syndrome/disorder/dysfunction that goes by W.B.

So don’t give your novella away free, but don’t make it too spendy. Most of your readers, being readers, can do a little thumbnail math. If it’s 35K, and you charge a buck for short stories averaging about 5K, and you hit them up for $4.99 for it, that won’t seem unfair. Its audience will overlap with that of your short stories, but not completely; you may want to have occasional giveaway weekends if Amazon will let you. Depends how it’s doing. The idea is to leverage your past following to break into a different market segment.

If you want to do full-length novels, make a similar step up from novellas as you did from stort stories.

While you are doing all of this, build a marketing plan. Yes. The first conversation I have with most prospective clients goes this way:

“So. Is it a vanity book or a commercial book?”

“Oh, it’s definitely commercial. Absolutely. It is many adverbs commercial.”

“Great. What’s your marketing plan?”

“What do you mean, ‘marketing plan’?”

“That’s what makes it commercial. A ms without a marketing plan is a vanity project–and that’s not a putdown. Vanity projects are just fine and I am happy to help with them. I run off half my prospective customers just by being honest with them about how this world really works. I would rather do that than take money under deceptive pretenses. You can surely find someone desperate enough to resort to deceptive flattery, but that’s not me. So: you don’t have a marketing plan, and right now it’s a vanity project. But if you develop a marketing plan, you will have a method in mind to get your money back and then some. Either way, that’s my first guidance to you: examine your goals and be honest with yourself about them.”

Any whom that approach sends fleeing for an editor who “believes in my work” or otherwise makes them feel warm and fuzzy, did the right thing. If they aren’t comfortable with blunt honesty even when it acts against its own financial interests, they aren’t the clients I want. If I’m going to make less money out of principle, I damn sure want to like my work and feel good about my clients.

At any rate, if you spent that year or two developing and executing and refining a marketing plan, you should have significant residual income coming in from the shorts. With a little luck, some of them will have broken even or better, and their income streams might help you fund editing, covers, etc. for future work.

Now and then it might make sense for you to put out a new short story even if you’ve mostly gone to longer works. Might even make it a new freebie, depending on your marketing plan. There is even the outside, bizarre, fantastic possibility you might have made your peace with marketing by now, even if it is the same sort of peace you have made with your toothbrush: “I either do this, or I have really bad dental days.” Believe me, that’s about as far as I have gotten with it.

So. Easy? No. Workable? More than ever before. Requires time and money? Yes, somewhat, but if I could imagine a quicker and cheaper method, I would be recommending that.

Human relations, Social comment

Project Hamilton

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This isn’t about editing or writing.

This is Project Hamilton.

This is about current US society and economics. It may apply to others in other societies, but I am speaking to the only one I know and in which I participate.

This is me summoning the haves. If you’re doing rather well, I’ve got a suggestion for you.

Because of the disease, which it seems highly likely will soon enter its second phase and do multiple times more harm, there are two economic categories: the haves and the have-nots. The haves either have plenty of money or are still earning enough to live and save a little. Most of them are currently spending less money than they usually do, so they have some extra. The have-nots are chronically underemployed, working at risk, or deprived of all income. Few of them asked for those situations.

The reason the haves can still buy groceries and live through this in relative comfort is in large part because some of the have-nots go to work. The have-even-lesses can’t even do that. My answer is Project Hamilton.

The concept is simple. You probably don’t shop locally as often as you did before. When you do, kick in an extra $10. If buying groceries, give the extra bill to the checker, and ask her please to hang onto it until someone comes along who is obviously in serious distress, then contribute it to that person’s payment. If you are going to get takeout or drive-through from a restaurant, add $10 in tip. The drive-through people never get anything normally; the takeout people are probably waitstaff who normally rely on tips. Wherever you go, give them an extra ten bucks. If you need to, do like at the grocery store and have them share it with a person in need.

At some point the nail salons and barbers will reopen, and you can take it for gospel they are all financially blasted (and sick of driving Uber or Grubhub). First couple times you go back, tack on an extra $10 above your normal gratuity, to help them catch up and rebuild.

If you cannot afford this, I’m not asking it of you.

If you can, I am. Share. Show people that you value them. Sustain this through the recovery. Right now the economic reality is that the dollars aren’t turning over. It is in your power to turn over some more dollars, which will help people have work and make money and stay somewhat afloat. It will also give people heart, which has its own value.

We have become a dystopian society, but this initiative has nothing to do with nationalism or politics. This has to do with whether we choose to share, or not to share. This has to do with how we each define ourselves. Are we really this dystopia, or are we better than that? Talk is cheap (including blog posts). What you do is who you are.

I have made my choice. Yours is up to you.

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Addendum: in the early response to this post, shared in a number of places, I have seen many method variations on its basic theme. All of those variations are great. Better still, many people were already doing them before I got around to this post.

I salute all of you who participate in any way, whether you were already doing so or have now just begun. Any generous way one chooses to do this is a correct way.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

An interview with time travel fiction author Shawn Inmon

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Today I have an interview with Shawn Inmon, one of a very small percentage of authors who earn a living at this, and one of what might be a smaller percentage of fiction authors who handle time travel well. With his most recent release now out, he was able to spare us some time to answer a few questions about this dark art.

JK: So, Shawn, first please tell us how you got into writing in the first place.

SI: I won a writing contest when I was fifteen years old and was named one of Washington’s Most Promising Young Writers. I was sure fame, fortune, and Pulitzers were right behind that.

As it turned out, I didn’t actually publish my first book for forty-seven more years.

That first book was a memoir–an easy entry for many a first time writer. In my case, life had handed me a pretty terrific story–falling in love as a teenager, having that romance forcibly ended and rekindling it thirty years later.

It made for a can’t-miss kind of story that was easy to write. The hardest part, as Bob Seger memorably said, was “What to leave in, what to leave out.”

And it was one hell of a tale. What inspired you to transition from non-fiction to fiction?

I honestly thought that first book might be it for me. Then, when it surprised me and started to sell well, I decided there might be a career there after all. However, I only had one love story to write about, so I knew I needed to segue into making up stories. That proved to be the right move. Fiction is limitless, whereas if I tried to continue to mine my own life for stories, that could wear thin pretty quickly.

Yeah, and any life would eventually run dry. Not much interest in The Rock I Tripped over When I Was Three. Who was your greatest fiction influence, and how/why?

I think I’m probably more influenced by Ray Bradbury than anyone else. I loved his natural style of storytelling. It never felt like he was trying too hard, but rather that he just sat down at his typewriter every day and magic flowed from his fingertips. I’m sure he worked and sweated as much as any of us, but it never showed.

Also, he was so workmanlike. I suppose that could be insulting to an “artiste,” but that doesn’t include me. I’ve always tried to bring my lunch pail every day and just get my words down.

Plus, I think Ray Bradbury was a good human being and I so often agreed with the themes he put forth in his books.

When I was a teen, Robert Heinlein was my guy. He swung his opinions like a weapon of war. I was attracted to that when I was younger. As I’ve gotten older myself, I find myself returning to Bradbury much more often than I do Heinlein. All these years later, I’m envious of what he accomplished so consistently and with such apparent ease.

So did you seek to emulate those strengths when you took to fiction writing, beyond the very obvious one that the lunchpail approach is one that gets the job done?

No, I can’t say that I did. I never consciously emulate anyone, though I’m sure all the reading I did seeped into my pores through osmosis. I’m more likely to take an idea from a book I read–a trope, or a situation–and file it away for future use. I have dozens of situations stored in my brain and hope that my subconscious will hand me the right one at the right moment.

For instance, in my most recent book, my protagonist met an antagonist. The antagonist took an instant dislike to our hero. That was the extent of my plan for that character. Then, they got thrown in together and grudgingly grew to respect each other and of course ultimately became like brothers. That’s a situation I had loved in a previous book that fell into place here. My situation ended up looking nothing like the source material (which is a good thing!) but grew from it.

My overall favorite author is Stephen King, and although I never attempt to emulate him, I know his habits have worked their way into my writing. I so admire his ability to connect me to a character in just a few words. Unlike some readers, I love his little side trips off the main plot. The difference is, his side trips are often ten thousand words. I try to limit mine to just a few hundred!

How long have you been writing time travel stories?

I started my first time travel book in 2015. I initially published it as six separate episodes, then bundled it all together into a single book in July of 2016. That was intended to be a standalone novel. About halfway through writing it, my first reader said, “This is going to be a great series!” I had no plans for a series, but that planted the seed.

When I finished that first book, Lord help me, I added a single line at the very end: “Coming Soon, The Redemption of Michael Hollister.” I had no idea what that story was or what it looked like, but I suddenly had a series.

I published the twelfth book in that series last September. I’m taking a little break from it at the moment, but I am planning to write the thirteenth book in October of this year. Essentially, that series–The Middle Falls Time Travel Series–took up all of my creative life for about three years.

And it has been an enormous success, with compelling characters in conflict–the essence of good fiction. What drew you to the genre?

To me, it’s just so much fun. There are so many ways you can go about it.

The first book I ever started (and never finished) was a time travel book. I just didn’t know enough about how to structure a story yet.

Time travel lets us visit different eras, which is fun. I remember reading Jack Finney’s Time and Again and feeling like I had actually been in New York before the turn of the twentieth century. When Stephen King wrote 11/22/63, my favorite part of the book wasn’t about Kennedy, but just what life was like in America in the late 1950s.

Then, there’s the fish out of water element. What happens when we take modern man (or woman–I’ve written three books with a female protag) and drop them into a completely foreign time zone? Whenever I start reading someone else’s time travel novel or start writing one of my own, I am still in awe at the possibilities.

What were some early struggles or issues you had to confront about time travel fiction?

So many! To me, it’s so easy to go astray writing time travel. So many hidden traps that we can fall into.

I remember when I first told you I wanted to write a time travel novel, you told me what you often didn’t like about the genre–that events continue to play out the same, over and over. Whereas, we know that in reality, just because a person does or says something in one version of reality, there’s no guarantee they would do or say the same in another go-round.

I took that to heart. So, when my characters wake up back at an early point in their life, things are initially–the first few minutes or hours–very similar. The farther they move away from that reset point, the more things change, though.

That can be used for dramatic effect, of course. What if a character is counting on something to happen because it did happen in their first life, but does not happen in their second, because they’ve done things differently and changed the world.

Of course, there’s the whole issue with “What if I traveled back and killed my father before he conceived me?” Blech. I have avoided those issues by creating a multiverse in my series. Each time a character is “restarted” at an earlier point in their life, it creates a new dimension, so there can’t be any conflicts like that. Essentially, I took the coward’s way out.

In my new series, I am using a portal for time travel, a la The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. That also does away with that kind of conundrum. Someday, I suppose I should write the more prevalent type of time travel–get in a machine, or step through a wormhole, or something along those lines.

What would you say has been the single biggest struggle or issue?

For me, it’s been how to keep a series fresh over twelve books. My series are all standalone novels, so there isn’t one overarching plot line. That means I have to essentially reinvent the wheel every book.

The central conceit–someone dies with unfinished business on their soul and wakes up at an earlier point to set it right–is unchanged from book to book. My challenge has been, ‘How can I write stories that adhere to that conceit, without getting repetitive?’ I’ve done so by mixing up sub-genres within the main time travel genre.

For instance, the first book centers on stopping a serial killer from killing. It’s a cat and mouse game. The second book, which features the antagonist from the first book as the main character is simply a redemptive arc for him, if such a thing is possible.

Meanwhile, the third book focused on a romance–how many lives would you live to get back to the one you love? The tenth book was a murder mystery combined with time travel, which is definitely an aid in solving a murder. With the twelfth book, I set a special challenge: create a main character on the autism spectrum, then give him only thirty days to live, and require him to change.

With that twelfth book, I found that all my ideas were riffs on books I’d already written. That’s when I took a break to write the portal fiction trilogy. Now that I have, a great idea for a thirteenth book has arrived: What if someone doesn’t want redemption? I’m looking forward to writing that one.

I think quite a few people will be looking forward to reading it. Happily, you are prolific. Would you call time travel its own genre, or a subgenre of others (such as SF, fantasy, romance, etc.)?

I suppose it’s a sub-genre, although it could be located under either Science Fiction (if it is science based time travel) or Fantasy (if it is portal fiction). To be completely honest, although I call my Middle Falls books Sci Fi, they’re really not. There isn’t a bit of science in any of them. They would more accurately be labeled as Metaphysical Time Travel, or even Reincarnation, but Amazon doesn’t have categories for that.

The truth is, I just write the stories I want, then figure out how to market them later.

Who else is excellent at writing time travel, and what makes that author’s work excellent?

Probably my all-time favorite time travel novel is Replay by Ken Grimwood. Sadly, he passed away shortly after it was published, so the follow up he was working on was never published. Word is that his estate has been looking for someone to finish the book, but so far, no one has come knocking on my door.

In contemporary fiction, my friend Nathan Van Coops does an excellent series called In Times Like These. His books are filled with humor, adventure, and he does a great job at making the reader feels like he’s there.

That’s what I feel great time travel writers do: they bring you into a time with just a few short stabs of details. Some writers will do a bunch of research and then beat you over the head with it. Clever writers slip those details in as part of the story, instead of long info dumps. I love those writers.

There’s a big difference between storytelling and showing off, and plenty of writers seem not to realize that, I think.

Speaking of which: You’ve surely seen a lot of bad time travel writing. Not going to ask you to name names, but what are some of the tells that signal a badly done time travel story?

Thank you for not asking me to throw other writers under the bus!

The first sign to me is what I just mentioned–the info dump. If I start a book and the writer spends the first three pages setting the scene, I’m outta there. Too many books waiting on my Kindle.

With my new book, I have my hero discover the mysterious door in his basement in the first few thousand words. By the second chapter, he’s being dive-bombed by pterodactyl-like creatures. If it’s an adventure story, let’s have an adventure.

Of course, plot holes are easier to create in time travel than just about any other genre. I’m more forgiving of those, though, as I might slip into that pothole myself from time to time.

More than anything, though, I think the sign of a bad time travel book is when it’s more of a situation, rather than a story. I can throw a guy two thousand years into the past, but if I don’t do something interesting with him once I get there, it’s all for naught. All the elements of a good story–tension, conflict, goals and goals blocked–need to be just as present in a time travel book as anywhere else. So often, I find a writer will create a cool scenario, then not have any real idea what to do with it from there.

We all know that reviews can be ignorant, cruel, or quite frequently both. What’s the most unjustified type of review comment you see on time travel books?

I never mind bad reviews, really. If you go to Thomas Weaver on Amazon, the Top Review lists all the reasons people shouldn’t buy my book. (The book has 300 reviews, but that one stays at the top!) The thing is, I love having it there. The things she complains about (although she exaggerates somewhat) are things that other people will look at and say, “Hey, that’s for me!”

Occasionally, a reviewer will say something that flat out isn’t true – an element of the book that just isn’t there – but I feel like I’ve just got to move more copies of the book, which will result in more reviews, which will drown out the white noise of those few negative reviews.

I came to grips with the idea that not everyone is going to love what I write, no matter how hard I try. That was pretty freeing. Now, when those bad reviews crop up, they don’t hold any sting. The other thing is, if I’m just getting positive reviews, that probably means I haven’t done a great job of reaching a wide enough audience.

Initially, I try to swim where the water is warm and get the book to my readers that I know are prone to like it. Eventually, though, I’ve gotta toss it out there where there be sharks.

Which is a good outlook. But can you give an example, without singling anyone out, of a type of review comment you have seen often on a time travel book (yours or someone else’s) and thought, “That’s just ignorant.”? For example, when I see the snippy “obviously she should fire her editor,” that’s one of my own triggers. It says to me: “This reviewer doesn’t know how books are assembled.” Any category of comments like that, with respect to time travel?

Overall, I find that people confuse editing and proofreading. I think that’s because editing is mostly invisible. If an editor saved me from wandering down the wrong path, it just never shows up in a book. However, if a stray typo survives, that’s noticeable to anyone.

I think the kindest thing I can say is that there are different levels of readers out there. Many readers just want to skim along the surface and if they don’t pay attention and bump their noses against something because they weren’t paying attention, they may complain loudly about it.

I occasionally hear from readers who have put a lot of time into thinking about the concepts and themes of my books. Every writer loves that, of course, and I’ve had some enlightening conversations with people that helped me see things I didn’t even know I had put in the books.

Speaking of reviews, I have written an entire book because of a fairly negative review. It was on the third book in my series and the reviewer complained that my protag was too single-minded in the pursuit of his goal. I wasn’t put off by that comment, because that was a feature, not a bug, of the book. I wanted him to be single-minded to the exclusion of all else.

However, that review set my mind off on another path and I eventually wrote the fifth book in the series as an answer to it. Essentially saying, ‘Okay, you want a non-tunnel vision character? Here she is!’ I mentioned that in my Author’s Note for the book and the reviewer eventually got in touch with me. (He must have liked the series well enough to read at least two more books.) We had a good laugh over it.

Talk about abiding by the lemons and lemonade parable. I no longer need to ask you the question about “where do you get your ideas?” Because we know how authors love that one.

Ha! They do come from the oddest places!

The tenth book in the series came from listening to a sportscaster one morning. He said, “So picture this–eighteen year old kid is suddenly given fame and millions of dollars. You can imagine what happens next.” He was right–I could. It turned out to be a pretty good story, I think.

Of course the first book in the series drew from my own life. One of my cousins killed his older brother in a car accident, and I used that as the inciting incident in that first book. The serial killer came from my imagination, though. If I know any serial killers, I’m not aware of it.

And we’re going to keep it that way.

Since I’m close to the SF community, I talk to plentiful writers about time travel story concepts. What guidance would you offer a fiction writer new to time travel?

I guess to look beyond the setting to the story.

It’s always about the characters and the story. Do we care about them? If we don’t care about the characters, we sure don’t care about the book. We need someone to root for and maybe root against.

I just finished Blake Crouch’s Incursion. What an intricately plotted story! I felt my mind bending into a pretzel trying to keep up. It was exciting and full of twists. And yet, I forgot about it right after I finished it, because, for whatever reason, the characters didn’t resonate with me.

There’s a tendency I need to fight against, as well, and that’s creating “too” characters. Characters that are “too” good. Too competent, “too” whatever. I constantly try to remember yin/yang, and that there is a little of each in the other.

Yep. I see that all the time, the character where the author pounded me in the face with “this is the bad guy/gal.” Okay, I get it, now stop belting me with that.

You’ve got a new book out, one that looks to begin a new series. Can you please supply a purchase link, and tell us how your past work has influenced this new release?

Here’s the new book: A Door Into Time.

This book is essentially opposite of The Middle Falls series. That series is all about contemplation, introspection, redemption. This one throws a modern Special Forces member into essentially a prehistoric world, strips him of all his weapons, and challenges him to survive.

My favorite books as a young teen were John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and The Mysterious Island. The problem is, those books were written 100+ years ago, so they are stilted in style and delivery by today’s standards. This book attempts to update that sub-genre of throwing a normal guy into an impossible situation.

I had such a great time writing it, and I hope that shows in the final product.

I am sure it will. Shawn, thanks so much for taking time out of your post-release schedule to answer these questions in such detail. Best of continued success in your work.

Thanks, J.K.!

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Please see the numerous links in the interview body for more about Shawn and his work. Others:

Shawn’s Facebook page

Shawn’s Goodreads page

Shawn’s page on Audible (most of his books are also available as audiobooks; he’s way ahead of the world on that)

Human relations, Social comment

Dear Girl Scouting parents: please hush

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Not entirely, of course. But kindly let the girls answer the questions on their own without opening your traps unless the girl asks for your help.

I admire Girl Scouting, in spite of the fact that my wife got kicked out of them for cursing and refusing to sell cookies. (As Weird Al teaches us, some girls like to buy new shoes, and others like driving trucks and wearing tattoos. I married the second variety.) Girl Scouting is inclusive, teaching a number of worthy values. It helps to raise generations of strong women. As an aging man, this is worth whatever it takes to achieve because–assuming I don’t seize up like an engine out of oil–I’m going to be elderly in a world that these girls will one day be managing.

Selling Girl Scout cookies can be an important link in the process of developing those values–but much more so if you will please shut up.

Here’s the deal.

  • I know the cookies are very expensive.
  • I know this is a rather more educational and practical fundraiser than simply asking for money.
  • I do not actually want any cookies.
  • I absolutely should not eat any cookies.
  • If I were acting in my own best interests, I would blow past the cookie table and send a cash donation to my local GSA organization. I would spend less money, they would pocket more profit, and I would have less pork to walk off. Stopping for cookies is not what I want to do.

I do it because this is my village, and these girls are its future, and among the most important things a girl can learn is poise in dealing with the public–especially with older men, who could in theory seem like hairy intimidating monsters. Older men who have thought things through will understand that they have a dog in this fight, and may/should do the following in some form:

  1. Stop and say hello to the girls. Speak with respect: “Good afternoon, young ladies.” Model the way men should treat them, so that they learn what that is. Later on in life, when asshole men treat them otherwise, they will recognize the difference.
  2. Whichever girl responds, ask some thoughtful questions. What does your troop do in the community? Which of these contain peanuts? Are there any new kinds this year? What have you learned from Girl Scouting? What do you like best about it? What did you do to earn that badge?
  3. Listen to the answers. You asked, now shut up and let her tell you. Show interest. Ask a follow-up if you wish. Be friendly, of course, not grouchy, but process the answers you receive. Be engaged.
  4. Don’t ask the parents anything. The parents aren’t the vendors; the girl is. Give her the dignity and experience of directing every question to her.
  5. Pick out at least one box of cookies, to show them that poise in dealing with the public earns trust, respect, and business. Pay the girl and wait for the change. Thank her and accept her thanks.
  6. When you get home, give the cookies to someone who can eat them.

I hope you see where I am going with this. Now that I’ve entreated your handling of this, let me do the same for the supervising parents.

First: you are doing an outstanding thing. Thank you. Without your unselfish dedication, none of this would be possible.

Second: with all due respect and with great gratitude for your volunteerism, please shush. Be silent. For the love of whatever deities you serve, let the girl answer unaided until she asks you for help.

When the customer asks questions, s/he is trying to help the girls. The customer is doing his or her part, in a small way, to teach. Except in rare cases, the customer does not actually care that much about the answers. Therefore, kindly let the girl answer the question. If she falters, continue the fine art of “shut the hell up.” Do not butt in. Shut your mouth. Let her think. She has a perfectly good brain. How she uses it will determine her destiny.

What if she’s stuck? Teach–in advance. Teach her to ask you for help if she needs it. If she does not know the answer, she needs to know that it is all right to ask for help and knowledge. Explain to her that you’re going to let her handle this, but that if she doesn’t know the answer, she should ask you and then relay the answer.

You must not answer for her. Do not make eye contact with the customer. This is her customer. Do not parentsplain. Let her learn to handle the customer and seek answers she does not yet have. In time, if you will just shut the hell up until asked by her, she will be confident handling all sorts of odd questions.

Do you seriously think she’s too stupid to subtract five from twenty? Don’t laugh. I had a parent butt in and interrupt a girl today while she was making change (for the day’s second box of unwanted cookies bought by me). Good lord! If Common Core means that a nine-year-old girl can’t subtract five from twenty in her head any more, then we need to send in our resignation from the ranks of developed countries. Let her make change!

If she does something wrong, unless it would somehow deprive the customer of fair value (which is when you do butt in), wait until no one is listening, then teach. Parent. Counsel. Educate. Guide. Help me out. “You forgot to thank that customer. That’s very important.” “Remember that it’s okay to stop and think for a moment.” “Did you treat that customer like the most important person you were dealing with right then?” Gentle, supportive, educational. Help her be better and let her see that being better produces better outcomes.

I’m serious. Help me out. I’m perfectly happy buying overpriced cookies I don’t want, but for the love of Pete, help me help the girls.

Let them handle the deal.

If you are one of society’s blurters or helicopter parents, and are just busting at the seams to open your trap, wait until she has handled the transaction and I’m leaving. At that point, I will probably reward her poise by looking to you and thanking you for volunteering to teach fine young ladies like these. Now you can talk. Now it’s about you. It was about her, now it’s about you. Bask a little. Let the girl see that volunteerism earns respect and that she and you are part of an organization much valued by the public.

If you did as I asked, by shutting up long enough to allow me to do my little part, you’ve earned that.

P.S. One week later, and it still goes on. Coming out of grocery store today. Began to ask Brownie the relevant questions. Girl attempts to respond. Adult present kept butting in. I am tired of this and I’m done tolerating it. Quietly, behind my hand: “Young man, I am addressing the vendor. I’m trying to help this girl learn. Please kindly let her answer.” To his credit, he tried, though he butted in again, and when she showed herself perfectly capable of giving a $5 in change for a $10, felt it necessary to coach her on making change. Gods save us all from well-meaning helicopter parentsplainers who won’t shut the hell up and stay out of it until they are needed. I feel like I’m teaching fricking first grade, and it’s not the girls I’m having to instruct.

One more, later that day; at last, some parents with their act together. I asked their girl about her bridge emblem, and about what they do in the community. She and her sister were obviously poised veterans, and she told how they are saving money for a veterans’ breakfast. Perfect trigger point. “Well, ma’am, that sounds like the kind of thing I want to support.” Not a word from mom and dad. On the way out, I praised their daughters’ confidence. Dad: “They’ve been doing this for six years, so they know all the answers. They can take care of it.”

Yes, young man, they can.

And as you age and falter in your days, they will remember you from their youth as a man who–more than any other man–taught them how men should treat them, and who let them find their own strength, and they will revere you to your final hour and beyond. When lesser men treat them less well, they will know the difference and demand better.

I didn’t tell him all that, of course, but I thought it as I pushed the grocery cart across the parking lot.

My favorite encounter involved a young Indian-American girl whose mother was behind her. I asked her what her troop did in the community. To her great credit, Mom remained silent. Girl: “We’re saving money so that a troop in Kenya, which can’t afford to travel, can come to our jamboree.” My throat caught; I had to take a second or three to collect myself. Then I decided, pulling out a twenty and laying it on the table. “Young lady, I don’t need any cookies for this. It’s a contribution. You are doing wonderful things and I’m proud to support your goal. You’re outstanding, and are going to be even more outstanding. Best of success to you.” Her mother’s eyes watered, radiating justified pride. I had to get out of there before mine did too.

Of such moments are destinies shaped, and the public has a special role to play in them if we will but embrace it.

Privacy, Technology

Deceiving Facebook advertising by urinating in the data pool

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Ever since the Ad Preferences thing became general knowledge, Facebook users have known a good way to feel creeped out. Yeah, we knew they would do this, and we can’t stop them.

However, I have figured out a way to ruin it, at least a little.

First off: why do that? “What part of ‘free service’ do you not understand? If you impair their ability to make money, you will no longer have a free service! You use this voluntarily! No one forces you!” Answer: because we aren’t getting paid enough. We, the users, are the product. Our compensation is not tied to the revenue we generate for a publicly traded company. Our views are the deliverable.

If Facebook were to pay us, that would be one thing, but it never will. Because it never will, it’s moral to mess up their income stream. And I laugh my head off at using Faceplant to publicize this notion.

How would one do that? At first, I though that deleting all the ad preference indicators would make sense. I then learned an odd thing: if you delete them all, they are soon repopulated with many more even if your FB usage is way down. I’ve been very busy the past couple of weeks and have spent far less time on the site. I checked last night and my “Ad Preferences” were as big a stew as I had previously accumulated (before the first Big Deletion) in years. If you delete them all, it seems, they are repopulated. Quickly. Like an ant colony.

All right. If you insist on keeping a dossier on me, I will ruin it. I will turn it into the hottest garbage I can.

Next time, don’t just delete all your ad preferences. Next time, go through them all and delete all those relevant to you: your leisure, your work, your beliefs, your hobbies, your passions. Leave only those that are complete whiffs. You like quilting? Delete any having to do with fabric. Oregon Ducks fan? There’s help for that condition, but in the meantime, keep any displayed ad preference that indicates you might like the Beavs or the Huskies. You voted for Jill Stein? Leave Joe Biden on there and remove Jill. Make sure that all the remaining preferences represent lies.

There is nothing Facebook can do about this. It amounts to urinating in the data pool. It also takes less time than deleting them all, and is much more amusing. You’re a millennial? AARP is on there? That one gets to stay! You’re a stay-at-home mom? Facebook thinks you like diaper pails? Hell, no, you do not!

Another method entails your page ‘likes.’ If you have not by now caught onto the reality that those are used to paint your advertising profile in order to sell your views to people who use words like ‘branding’ and don’t own ranches, you’re never going to. But if you have, great. Every so often, do this:

Pick a random term in which you have zero interest, and which is even whimsically stupid. A perfectly healthy 20something? “Colonoscopy.” A non-drinker? “Scotch.” An atheist? “Baptist Church.” It can be something like “boot soles,” “glassware,” or “potassium chloride,” even “nickelback.” The only rule is that it have nothing to do with the person you truly are.

Search on that term, winnow it down to Pages, and Like the first twenty or so that you come across. Every so often, pick a new term and do this some more. If one turns out to be a fountain of crap, you can unfollow it without unLiking it. All of this feeds into the profile they create about you. If they are going to market you, this will damage their marketing.

I still see feed items related to “durian,” but I’d rather see those than know I did nothing to strike back.

Have fun. We may not win the privacy war, but some of us will fight it just for enjoyment and pride.

 

Social comment

Things many people say that are illogical

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I hear them all the time. It’s my belief that we should examine the things we tell others and ourselves. Maybe they just don’t make any sense. Many are mindless, some are untrue, and most emanate from the tendency to believe that a clever-sounding slogan acquires truth.

My abhorrence of these had its genesis when I was about eleven, watching All in the Family with what passed for a family. That show was one of the best sitcoms of my lifetime, because it combined some drama with good comedy and powerful social comment. Since some of my audience is younger, I should take a moment to explain. The stars were Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, who played a row-house Depression-kids-era working-class couple with heavy accents in an eastern city, maybe in New Jersey. Archie Bunker was a pudgy working-class xenophobe. Edith was the matron of the era, self-sacrificing, trying to please everyone, pretending less than her full intellect. Their daughter, a standard issue baby boomer, was married to a guy with longer hair who didn’t get along with Archie on politics, social issues, or much of anything. Their debates and arguments were those of the day.

At one point, Mike (the son-in-law, played by Rob Reiner) was talking about a commune. “People who live in comm-unes are comm-u-nists,” snarked Archie. In those days, calling someone a communist was like calling him a terrorist today: It was the demon word, the thing we are all programmed to hate and fear. And my father said: “I guess that’s right.”

It wasn’t until college, a decade later, when I came to realize what a stupid statement that was. A commune is a group of people living together, pooling their efforts and resources. A communist is someone who believes in the abolition of personal property and the striving toward a utopian state where all wealth is shared. If used to define people who live in communes, it loses that automatic meaning unless the individual in question advocates actual communist change in society.

To understand the prevailing social hatred of the day, understand that my debating the point in such a fashion would have been tantamount to failure to confirm the demonization of communism, which in turn would make me suspect as a communist sympathizer or ‘com-symp.’ In the 1950s, that could get one an FBI file. It went so deep that in 1990, when the Warsaw Pact collapsed and the Cold War was over, our leaders had a temporary quandary: whom do we tell the people to hate and fear?

Since most of those leaders weren’t bright enough to adjust, and intuitively knowing that we were (and remain) a people who must have an exterior enemy to distract us from our own leadership’s greed and evil, they just kept doing what they knew. They picked on Russia, spiking the political ball in eastern Europe, helping create the climate in which a dictator like Putin would arise. Only 9/11 rescued them from the dilemma: at last, a suitable hate target to hand the people.

The millennials now have children, who will have no more memory of 9/11 than I had of Khrushchyov’s “We will bury you” shoe-pounding moment, and their kids will not understand why they are required to hate and fear all Muslims and Arabs but especially Muslim Arabs, and the divide of unshared experience will repeat itself in different form.

Archie’s statement was just a dogmatic snark, but it was a snark that sounded good enough for even someone as well educated as my father to swallow. Dad surely had no idea in the moment that he had planted a key seed of dormant discontent, one which would destroy his intellectual credibility with me. Once I began to deprogram myself from the obligatory religious and social beliefs repeated at me over and over growing up, I would question everything he had tried to ingrain in me, with the tendency to believe his views tainted by association with a tainted source. I would reject his religion, his bigotries, even his notions of love and family (which amounted to “Family is abusive, that’s just how family love is”). And for all my days, religious missionaries trying to lecture me about Christianity would have no idea what a hornets’ nest they were breaking, as they tried to promote a belief system that I had experienced as a blunt instrument of conformity and abuse.

Albeit lengthy, that explains why I despise stupid statements that people repeat without thinking. I associate sloganeering with cheap mind control, oppression, anti-intellectualism, and most of what I loathe about humanity in mass. Over the course of many months, I began to collect stupid statements and debunk their stupidity. When I had enough, it was time to publish this piece, and when I’d accumulated some more, it was time to update it. Therefore:

“Change is good; embrace the change.” Okay. I had a tumor growing on my spinal cord. It was changing gradually, deforming the spinal cord and putting me in intense discomfort. By now I would no longer be alive without the surgery. The change of a growing tumor was not good, and it would have been pretty stupid to embrace it. The change of neurosurgery was great and I embraced it. Some change is good, some is bad; some is smart, some is the vision of nincompoops.

“If you don’t exercise your rights, you’ll lose them.” Evidently untrue, considering the many rights many people do not exercise, but do not seem to lose. A more sensible thought: if you abuse your rights, you might lose them, so exercise them with some sense.

“You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.” Oh, yes, you can. Some family members need to be fired: to wit, anyone who considers the familial relationship a reason to be pardoned egregious wrongdoings.

“Tastes like chicken.” Why do people blurt this about any new form of meat, and think that it’s high comedy? Some things taste like chicken. Some don’t.

“It never hurts to negotiate.” Oh, yes, it can. If it’s already a good deal, and you’re just beating the seller up for more money, especially if the amount is piddly, he or she may just tell you it’s no longer for sale to you, period.

“If you don’t like the weather around here, wait [insert length of time], and it’ll change.” People blurt this even where the weather is so predictable that it is the preferred destination for meteorologists who flunked out of college. I used to live in such a place. Dolts blurted it all the time. They were the same people who said that everything tasted like chicken. They were also the same people who, in the grocery line, asked me about my beard: “How long you been growing that?” A little critical thinking would have told them that after a certain point it would not matter, because it would have been trimmed. Over and over. For maybe thirty years.

“Violence never solves anything.” True. The way the Allies stopped the Holocaust was through non-violent persuasion based on reason and compassion, right? The reason the Japanese Empire shut down its bioweapons facility in Manchuria (after using military-grade biological weapons against Chinese civilians and Allied POWs, and trying several times to use them against our own military) was not because we sank their whole navy, shot down their whole air force, and used incendiary and eventually nuclear weapons against them. It was because we had a nice talk with Tojo, and he saw the error of his ways.

That said, it is true that violence very rarely solves the underlying conditions that led to a bad thing. But once the bad thing is going, violence might be needed to stop it. When someone takes a teenage girl hostage, and a sniper saves her with one well-placed rifle bullet, that’s violence and it solved two problems. One, it saved the girl, and two, it prevented the hostage-taker from doing the same thing again.

“If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This is not always bad advice, but it’s terrible advice when the circumstances merit saying something that is not nice. For example, someone is being a jerk and needs to be called out. This is one of those platitudes often mouthed by people who think it’s more important to be nice to the bully than to the victim.

When it is applied to situations where confrontation cannot help anyone, of course, it makes perfect sense: While in fact your child’s picture is deeply crappy, it will not help anyone for me to say so, thus I will shush and just say that she must have worked hard on it, even though I know that is probably not true.

“Hate only hurts you.” Not necessarily true. Anger, while it has its place, does take its toll. It should be rationed, applied only where it will do some good. Hate, on the other hand, I consider essential to an ethical outlook. There is a lot of evil out there. Loving evil does not cause it to stop being evil. If someone can’t hate evil, I’m not sure s/he and I can ever understand one another, because I do not see how one can have a functional moral compass without the extremes of judgment. We may not concur on the definition of evil, but surely we each must have one.

The trick is to consider hate a judgment, a status, a consignment–something that just is, rather than something dwelt upon. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, needs and deserves to be hated. Hating them doesn’t hurt me a bit. If I ever stopped properly hating them, though, I’d hurt myself plenty, because I would compromise what matters to me. Frank Herbert said: “What do you despise? By this you are truly known.” Dune is one of the great marriages of subversive social comment with science fiction.

“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Declining to participate in or validate a process is irrelevant to one’s right to speak one’s mind. One may say that one will not validate the opinion of a non-voter who complains, but not everyone wants or needs (or even values) such validation. Anyone wanting to tell me I can’t complain should first step up and offer to pay my tax bill.

“Everyone has a story to tell.” Nah. Take it from someone in the business of trying to fix stories: not everyone’s story is interesting or should be told. Some are, some are not. Writing and storytelling are different arts, and storytelling is the more difficult in my opinion. I’d rather review a ms written in atrocious English (which I can fix), that tells a great story, than an impeccably written but soul-numbing tale.

“Who are we to judge others?” I don’t think even the speaker ever believes that. Whether you buy into our social model (in which case you validate the right of judges and juries to judge), or you simply have a functional moral code (in which case you feel you have every right to make judgments as you see fit), you do believe someone has the right to judge, be it you or somebody else.

“Profanity is a sign of limited vocabulary.” Really? I have been accused of many things in life, sometimes with cause, but never yet a limited vocabulary. I swear now and then. It says nothing about my vocabulary and everything about how I feel right then, what I seek to convey. In any case, just because one has a substantial vocabulary does not mean one must show it off at every opportunity. To let vocabulary hinder communication is to miss the entire point of language. You’d think that those asserting expertise in this area would realize this.

“All children are precious.” No, they are not. There are children who are downright evil, just as there are adults who are downright evil. Not all of either will permit themselves to be salvaged, or have the capacity to permit it. That doesn’t mean we should be too quick to throw in the towel, but the statement itself is demonstrably false.

“Names can never hurt you.” This lie is fed to nearly every bullied child in this country, over and over, and it compounds the bullying. Names can only not hurt someone who is completely sociopathic, immune to all desire for peer respect. Tell someone that names can never hurt him or her, and you may get that exact outcome: a person who simply does not care how anyone else feels. As I remember it, those saying this are generally trying to persuade a victim to just suffer abuse rather than fight back. They are the enablers of abuse. The enablement of abuse, the siding with the harmful over the harmed, is morally bankrupt. And whether we admit it or not, siding with the bully is one of our cultural ethics.

Godwin’s Law. (For those unfamiliar with it, this arose in reaction to the tempting tendency to compare anything to Hitler or the Nazis. It states that whoever does so concedes the argument.) Its threat does restrain some of the more mindless and extreme comparisons, and it does serve a useful purpose in discouraging trivialization of the Holocaust. That acknowledged, in fact our observation of the rise of Nazi power is too valuable and pertinent to disallow as an analogical tool. If someone is twisting reality and manipulating simple people through hammering away at the same semi-truths and outright lies, that is exactly how Joseph Goebbels manipulated German public opinion. It is just fine to call that ‘Goebbelsian,’ for example.

“Everyone deserves [insert benefit or right].” Very few people believe this when they articulate it, no matter what the deserved item or condition or benefit may be. What most mean, but refuse to admit to themselves: “Everyone, except for a few people I happen to consider exceptionally heinous, deserves […].” As I see it, there are plenty of people who do not deserve certain things. Not every kid deserves a trophy. Not every kid deserves to graduate. Not every adult deserves a decent job. Not every [insert member of deified profession] is a hero. Do you think everyone deserves a decent meal? Great; when you hear of the next long-term animal abuser, looking at the pathetic images of the poor creatures, and you’re saying what should be done to him, be sure and leave starvation out of your proposed penalty. Do that for everything you believe “everyone deserves.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” It just sounds so good, and our parents repeated it so often, that we forgot to ask ourselves whether it was dumb. Someone punches you. You punch them back, partly to show them that being punched hurts, and partly to defend yourself. You just used violence. According to this infantile saying, you are now wrong too. We don’t even believe it as a society. Unless, that is, we believe that attacking Axis forces during World War II–thus using violence to drive them out of lands they had conquered and begun to oppress–made us just as bad as the Axis, or even worse (since we dropped more bombs on cities, including two nuclear weapons).

By this saying’s reasoning, all assholes should always be allowed to get away with all bad acts without being struck back in consequence. Now: is it always moral and suitable to respond exactly in kind to a wrong done? Of course not. There are times when it definitely is not. If a four-year-old stabs you with a fork, and makes you bleed, clearly you must not stab the child in return. There are times when it makes more sense to respond with greater force, such as when a woman’s date rape has begun and all he’s done so far is tear her blouse open. Suppose she can lay her hand on a screwdriver. Should she not then shove that thing into his neck, thus ending the rape before it reaches its logical conclusion? Don’t tell her “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“It isn’t bragging if you can back it up.” The hell it isn’t. However, if you can back it up, it’s more acceptable than if you’re bullshitty about it. Bullshitty people are those who don’t really mean much of what they say. Once you identify someone as bullshitty, I see no reason to take them at face value. Ever.

“You can tell everything about someone by whether they return their grocery cart.” Talk about a completely propagandized perception engineered by corporations to take jobs away from real people. At one of the grocery stores I go to, there’s a developmentally disabled guy (let’s name him Donald) who goes about and brings in the carts. His co-workers and even the bank where he goes seem to love him; I’ve seen it.

Anyone who really hates Donald (and in my view is thus semi-human at best) should always bring their own cart back, because if they all do that, the store no longer has to pay Donald to forage for them. Donald, who deserves his job more than most of the pious cart-return evangelists, would not benefit. I’m not saying one should never return the cart; I’m saying there’s more than one way to look at it, thus making the statement mindless. It was brought about by corporations, a brilliant cost-cutting move: It got average people to screw people barely scraping by on what the corporation pays them.

“Everyone deserves fundamental inalienable human rights.” Really believe that? Okay. Do you really mean everyone, or only the people who haven’t done things so awful you’re making exceptions for them? Say “Osama bin Laden, John Wayne Gacy, and Nathan Bedford Forrest all deserved fundamental inalienable human rights,” if you can make yourself puke that out.

Society floats along on a sea of slogans and gnomic sayings we have heard so often that most of us no longer question them. If you do question them, you’ll become one of those weirdo freethinkers who does not fit into one of the accepted pigeonholes. Your intellectual life will be much more interesting, since media will daily serve you bowls of falsehood and bad assumptions. Full disclosure, though: only do this if you dread being invited to vapid parties.

Editing/writing life, Epinions (reclaimed), Technology

The death of Epinions

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Word has come of the final demise of Epinions.com, one of my early writing sandboxes. I can’t say that I’m sad, but like an old apartment where one lived for a time, one may look back at it and say: there is a piece of my life’s days.

To explain why it matters, I must tell what it was and why it became popular. Epinions was born as what we might call the people’s product review platform. Anyone could create an account and write reviews of books, diaper pails, cars, wines, cell phones, travel destinations, games, what have you. And therein lay its greatest flaw: you could only review what was in the Epinions database, which meant a significant delay between purchase and waiting for the item to be added. By the time the leads put it out there, the product might be discontinued, though people tried hard to keep the database as current as possible. That wasn’t a factor at Amazon, where if you could buy it, you already had an account and could review it. It’s not hard to see why Epinions reviews failed to become a go-to product research resource, in spite of significant talent and effort.

Epinions also meant exposing one’s work to public critique, because anyone could comment on and rate a review. Enough negative reviews, and your review wouldn’t show up as readily. If people didn’t like something about your review, they’d say so–although one learned to be careful taking on the site’s evident intellectual heavyweights. It developed its own culture: product detail fanatics, wiseacres who wrote reviews not meant to be taken too seriously (hi, there; my name is jkkelley), lazy two-line reviewers, moms trying to out-mom all other moms, honest hard workers, prats, and idiots.

Oh, and one got paid. At first, quite a lot, enough that unscrupulous people created click circles to scam the site out of wads of venture capital. As I arrived, pay became a trickle. I probably made $500 for over a hundred reviews spread over the course of ten years, heavily concentrated in the first three. I’d guess that I made less than $1/hour. When I started to get paid real money to write, I became less interested in donating my creativity to a site that avowedly shopped my writing to other sites with no extra compensation for me. While that wasn’t the only reason I stopped writing, I’d be false if I presented it in idealistic terms. When I learned that my work was worth more than Epinions would ever pay me, the incentive was gone–unless I had an ax to grind, as I sometimes did.

I came to know a good number of great people at Epinions. A couple are now acclaimed authors. I met perhaps a dozen or more in person. I stay in touch with quite a few. It had a few freaks, most easily avoided. Some I became close to in real-world terms that I knew would long survive the site. Some I have seen through major life changes, been drunk with, mourned. Some I’m pretty sure would take me in if I were homeless, and a few would more likely give me the coup de grace.

Epinions was a good place to learn how to write, thanks to the open-ended platform and potential for critique. Not all of it was constructive, but even the mean-spirited and bitchy critiques taught me things. I wouldn’t call it a finishing school for writing, but it was a useful boot camp. If people were heckling one’s reviews, well, there might have been a reason for that. One learned to organize one’s work (or not). One learned to be sure of one’s facts (or not). One learned how to handle critique with grace (or not). For many, Epinions was the first place where they turned to face the blast furnace of public reaction to writing.

My own specialty at Epinions was the art of the parody review. It was designed so that it could not deserve bad ratings, because it still contained helpful consumer information. It was experiential without taking the concept seriously. I reviewed Hustler as a women’s magazine. I reviewed a sippy cup for utility in drinking alcohol while operating power tools or behind the wheel. I reviewed Grand Theft Auto III as a homeschooling tool. I reviewed a CD called The Power of Pussy by Bongwater. I reviewed a game called Team Barbie Detective, playing it with my own inclinations and seeing how it went. Amused yet annoyed by a freakout review by a religious fanatic of a children’s animated DVD, which alleged that it was demonic, I bought the same DVD and evaluated it as a practical guide to demon summoning. (Hey, kids need to know this stuff.) Epinions had some review topics that just pleaded for mockery, such as ‘How To Use Action Figures And Sets.’

At times, I got serious. I reviewed Everclear, telling the story of the time it came near to ending my life in its second decade. When I decided to hammer a stake through the heart of the University of Phoenix, I was all malice and business. It wasn’t all comedy.

The defining moment, I suppose, was the breast pump review. They told me it was the funniest, craziest thing I’d ever done at Epinions. I’m not sure I’d agree, but I enjoyed the reception it got, especially from quite a few women who had actually deployed a breast pump in anger at some point. There’s a story behind it. Mark Arnold, of St. Louis, was one of the funnier writers at the site. Those of us who felt there was room for mirth commingled with the consumer helpfulness were something of a fraternity at Epinions, and Mark was in good standing. He was also dying, rather swiftly, of kidney cancer. We could do precious little for him, but we could bring our A-games to make him laugh while he was suffering, and thus convey to him our affection. I am reliably informed that we made a real difference for Mark, and I’m proud of my own small donation to the cause.

And that it may be preserved for those who enjoyed it, and survive the fall of Epinions’ flaming timbers, I present it here in modestly edited form. We remember you, Mark. You were a good guy and a funny writer.
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Venturing among the forlorn, giving a whole new meaning to “self-expression”

Evenflo Breast Pump Kit Press and Pump Battery/Electric, reviewed by jkkelley on 2001-09-05

Pros: can be returned to Wal-Mart, sex toy potential

Cons: didn’t make me lactate, painful, noisy, sold at Wal-Mart

Summary: not recommended for milking your breast, though you might get someone aroused with it

After posting my fiftieth review at Epinions, I hit upon an idea for #100 that I nursed, so to speak, for four months. At Epinions we hear a lot about stay-at-home moms this, the Mommy Brigade that, and so on. It’s mostly silliness, but there’s an element of truth in it.  My own mom was a stay-at-home mom, and she worked hard.

So, in regard for moms everywhere, I want to write for Kids & Family. Who says you have to have kids to write in this area, anyway? Bah. A fresh perspective is needed: one from someone who has no children, has not even been to Chuck E Cheese’s, and therefore has no biases. For, as we all know, it is true that just once in a great while, the occasional Kids & Family junkie gets just a little militant.

Did you realize that men too can lactate? It’s not a simple matter; our normal acquaintance, at least in the case of straight men, involves a radically different approach to the breast. Milking our own is usually not on the agenda. But we can; just ask any doctor. And we should. Who says that only women can nurse babies? I call upon males of all persuasions to break these chains of oppression and show that we, too, can be nurturing and life-giving.

With that, I resolved to milk myself, if I could, and in so doing, review a breast pump. I figured that a new viewpoint would add a lot of consumer value, result in Informed Buying Decisions, and help me gain valuable Kids & Family-related insight so that I could better relate to the plight of nursing women.

Now, granted, unless I attempted to do the dairy routine in the shopping mall food court–and since I wasn’t going to have to clean up any baby barf–I admit that I knew in advance I wasn’t getting the Total Lactatory Experience. That part I couldn’t help. But I tried valiantly anyway, good reader, and if you’d like to hear the story, read on.

It was a typical Tri-Cities August afternoon (about 95° F) one fine Tuesday when I did something which normally for me would be anathema. Something so bizarre I had to really psych myself up to get through it. I would venture to a circle of Hell to walk unto the tormented and the damned, with faith in nonconformity as my fortress.

I went to Wal-Mart.

First priority:  avoid being ‘greeted’.  I chose my entry timing with care.  Evading the underemployed senior in blue, I moved with a purpose toward the pharmaceutical section. I was in the Wal-world, as they say, but not of it. I stepped over dropped pork rinds (that is not a joke). I disdained a cart. I dodged corpulent, aimless cartpushers lacking in depth perception. I met the vacant stares of staff and patrons alike without flinching; just as in a burn ward, it is important to people not to deny their humanity even when in a state of degradation.  Exile from humanity is far worse torture.

How unfortunate for me, then, that I couldn’t find the damned breast pump section with both hands and an annotated map. I wandered around for a good twenty minutes (the place was about the size of a big league ballpark) before at last bungling across the breast pumps. Naturally, some Queen Bee had her cart parked right in front of them. Naturally, it took several minutes for it to occur to Her Majesty that I might want one, and that I might greatly appreciate it if she would kindly back her rig up. This is normal in the Tri-Cities. They mean no harm; it just doesn’t occur to anyone that they could ever possibly be obstructing anyone, so they just stand there doing nothing, letting the mental solenoids work.

My main decision was whether to get the manual or the electric one. Since I knew I would be returning it anyway (no other reason to set foot in Walton Memorial Arena), I splurged on the electric one.  Perhaps I could milk myself while reading, or preparing possum stew, or playing solitaire Pictionary.

The waiting is the hardest part, and never more so than when being in line to check out takes you out of the Brownian motion of shopping and forces you to register what you see.  Two of the three customers ahead of me had some problem or issue (probably a twenty-cent discount that they failed to receive).  It took about fifteen minutes before I finally got to plunk down the card. During that time, the Mother of the Year behind me threatened to cut her son’s finger off if he touched a pack of gum. (I shot the boy a look of solidarity. If I’d had a sow like that for a mom, I would have wanted a few looks of solidarity.)

The checker, a thirtyfiveish woman with a sad expression and a fading shiner that spoke volumes, couldn’t determine whether the credit card slip she printed was for a credit or debit card.  This is normally a fairly elementary question, I believe, but the elementary is complicated at Wal-Mart. After seeing the black eye, I gave her incompetence a pass.  My façade fading, I just signed the slip and bugged out of there.

To my great joy, I also evaded being ‘greeted’ on the way out. Exultation of the kind I felt when I was leaving Hell High School for college. Ha, you gravy-suckers. You got to borrow my money for a week, but you didn’t get my soul. You didn’t even provoke in me any reaction but pity. I get to leave, and you will remain here, slaving away for the world’s worst employer outside of a few shoe factories in Shenzhen. I had a sense of triumph and achievement as I headed for the White Lightning, my truck, which I’d deliberately parked in the lot’s farthest corner. At the 27th and US 395 Wal-Mart in Kennewick, Washington, that effectively meant parking it in Idaho.

After my appointment that afternoon (I wonder how the nice elderly lady having trouble getting her Verizon dial-up going would have reacted if she knew; I felt slutty), I headed for the barn, pump safely stowed atop my briefcase full of computer and business paraphernalia.

I showed my beautiful bride my purchase.

“NO! You aren’t really going to milk yourself, are you?”
“Why, certainly, dear. Why should women get all the glory?”
“You are such a freak.”
“By the way, dear, I need you to help me.”
(groaning) “Oh, god. With what?”
“The before and after pictures, obviously!”

She looked at me in shocked disdain. She is so culturally conservative sometimes.

That evening I tried to assemble it. Deb’s efforts to help made the task more challenging; I had to shoo her off, on the grounds that I couldn’t evaluate the assembly directions fairly if she did it for me.

Instructions: lousy. In English, Spanish and French, interspersed together, but in a way that’s difficult to follow. The drawings are not to scale, so the parts they’re showing as being big are actually small and vice versa. I’m reasonably mechanically inclined, but I found them badly formatted and confusing–the fact that I understand Spanish and French notwithstanding. I can only imagine how much fun this might be during postpartum depression.  Hell, even during partum depression.

In the back, also in three languages, are some questions and answers about breastfeeding. Engorgement (full hooter syndrome, basically), storage, refrigeration, scheduling, milking oneself and massage techniques are all covered. None of them helped me personally, though some of them look promising as foreplay.

Assembly: poorly thought out. For example: to get the bottle in place like the manual says, you have to shove with all your might, bending the plastic. I was sincerely scared that I would break it, which would give me postpartum depression (because then I couldn’t take it back to Wallyworld). I tried every direction and method. If you follow the instructions, you will ultimately damage the pumper. My recommendation is to lightly grease these parts with Vaseline or something so you don’t have to honk on it so hard.

What it looks like: imagine a white one-demitasse coffee maker, if such a thing exists. Then imagine a milk bottle about the size of a champagne split, topped by a clear plastic trumpet bell coming out at an angle. You position the little valve on top of the bottle on the drip part of the coffee maker, at an angle, then cram and force the bottle vertical.

Attachments: it also comes with a little blue bag, so that you can cart it around in public without horny guys forming a pack behind you waiting for you to uncover an inch of breast flesh.  There are also some nursing pads (probably to mop up in case you’re doing the Old Faithful thing), a little ‘silicone nipple adapter’ (a euphemistic term for ‘miniature mammary adapter’), and a rubber hose called the ‘flushing tube’ (for if you get truly infuriated with the thing and find yourself about to flush it down the can). In some ways it was sort of like a little Kirby vacuum cleaner.

Getting going: one problem most women don’t have to face is chest hair. Like Esau, I am ‘an hairy man,’ so I shaved off a circle of chest hair centered on my nipple. The trumpet bell thing, which we should just call the sucker, is about the diameter of a baseball; I shaved an area about like a saucer. Having not shaven anything in four years, I actually had to go digging for a shaving razor. Finally found one in an old travel kit. It was that or steal from the wife.

Firing that sucker up: the instructions said to stimulate my “let-down reflex” by relaxing, thinking about my baby, and massaging my breasts. Since I don’t have a baby, or much in the way of breasts, I substituted thinking about experiences I’ve had in the past that sucked, such as Micron’s warranty service, talking to Dell Computer on the phone, and dining at Casa Chapala. Day by day I recorded my experiences:

Day 1: had some difficulty getting a firm seal (some of these aquatic mammals really need to take up Tae Bo), and when I did, yeouch! I immediately turned down the suction.  It felt like I was nursing a remora. No middle ground; either there wasn’t enough suction and it fell off, or there was enough to hurt like all hell. Five minutes of this left my whole nipple area swollen, and if I’d kept it on full, I’m sure I’d have blown a blood vessel.

Day 2: the problem with this thing is that the suction level doesn’t stay put, meaning it keeps sliding up until it could suck-start a Harley. Nipple very swollen and tender. This isn’t for wimps, let me tell you. Feels like a baby, all right:  a baby badger.

Day 3: hurts even worse, though I’m getting the hang of keeping my thumb in the right place so it can’t do the Electrolux thing to me. Feels like a needle in my nipple. It is absolutely impossible to do anything else during this–can’t chat online, can’t write, can’t even read a magazine.

Day 4: I’m building up my endurance a little here, though the thing is still painful. I’m beginning to despair that I’ll actually get any milk this week. (It was at this point that I actually, for the first time, asked myself what in the world I would do with it if I did in fact begin to do the dairy thing. Sell it on eBay, I think.)

Day 5: left the suction up higher this time and sucked it up, so to speak, when it came to the pain. I paid the price–I think a blood vessel is about to go. Tomorrow I’m going to have to shave again. In the mirror, with my shirt off, I look pretty odd.  I would have a lot of explaining to do at the beach.

Day 6: weird effect; my areola (the skin around the nipple) is getting all wrinkly, like women’s do when their nipples get erect. We may be getting somewhere here, even though with the pump attached it still feels like my nipple is in a pair of vise-grips. This has real potential as a S&M sex toy. It would give a manageable amount of mildly erotic pain.

Day 7: oh, great, I’ve finally developed a tolerance for the ‘high’ setting now that the experiment is over. It hurt acutely at first (and my nipple is always tender) but after about five minutes it didn’t bother me. The hell with it; I’m taking this back. I’m also saying the hell with the before and after pictures, on the grounds that I have to admit that it didn’t do me any visible damage.

Results: very poor. This device failed to express even a drop of colostrum from my nipple. I therefore cannot recommend this pump; I must join the ranks of the many dissatisfied customers. I see now why it has the unflattering nickname: “The Nipple Ripper.”

I don’t know of any women I’d wish it on. Couple guys, maybe.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current read: Sisterhood of Dune…and a bit on how *not* to write

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Being one of the only people who liked all of Herbert’s Dune books, it was natural to try his kid’s prequel series with Kevin J. Anderson.

Of course, we didn’t expect it to be Frank Herbert. To his credit, the son did not try to pretend to be the father. There’s only one problem: the writing now is…very flawed. The story is okay, and I’ll read it to finish the story just because I’m nine books in, but seriously, these guys need help. A couple of examples, quoted for fair use review purposes:

—From p. 10, paperback version—

Looking down, breathing heavily, she said, “Back at the Swordmaster School of Ginaz, I slew hundreds of these things. The school still has a standing order for functional combat meks, so trainees can practice destroying them.”

The very thought soured Manford’s mood. “Ginaz has too many functional meks, in my opinion–it makes me uneasy. Thinking machines should not be kept as pets. There is no useful purpose for any sophisticated machine.”

Anari was hurt that he had criticized her fond recollection. Her voice was small. “It’s how we learned to fight them, sir.”

—

So what’s wrong with this picture? The red part (color added). Do not ever, please, tell me the feelings. Show them through action. This is lazy writing. It was too much work to make her sound wistful when she said the first part. It was too much work to put her second part in a hurt tone. Instead, we were simply told. This is what mediocre writing looks like. This should be shorter, more fluid and subtler. It should not insult the reader’s intelligence. It should let the reader infer and gather emotions through skillful word use in dialogue and narrative.

Here’s another ‘how to do it wrong’:

—From pp. 29-30, paperback version—

“You are going to tell me where those captives are being taken,” Vor said.

The man groaned again and gurgled something that sounded like a curse. Vor didn’t consider it an acceptable answer. He glanced up, saw the fire spreading along the roofs of the houses. “You don’t have much time to answer.”

Receiving no cooperation from the man, Vor knew what he would have to do next, and he wasn’t proud of it, but this slaver was far down on the last of people for whom he felt sympathy. He drew his long skinning knife. “You are going to tell me.”

—

Like it wasn’t already obvious that a gurgled curse wasn’t the answer Vor wanted. Why tell us that, as if we are stupid? And obviously, anything but an answer was continued non-cooperation. No one is so slow in the uptake that this needs to be spelled out so. Wasted words, the kind that push the covers of a book too far apart. I guess it’s easier than writing…

Okay, that was waspish, but I dislike this immensely. It is lazy, it radiates ‘phoning it in.’ If you are trying to improve your writing, this is one of the best and most important lessons you can absorb. Where humanly possible, show rather than tell. It will read smoother, cleaner and your reader will not be jarred, nor have her intelligence insulted. ‘Like your reader’ includes ‘respect your reader.’ This means that you write clean stuff that doesn’t waste her time or treat her like she isn’t smart enough to figure out a cue.

Anyone who considers him or herself in the intermediate phases of developing writing skill is welcome to rewrite either passage in comments, and I’ll be glad to make some observations. Show me how it should have been done.

Married life

Making the dog sick

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This morning, Deb and I were having a discussion about dogs and logistics. It wandered, much like Fabius’s mind. Fabius is the elder of her two dogs (black Lab). Leonidas, the junior, is a miniature Schnauzer. I’m not a dog person, though I accept my obligation to assure that they have humane conditions and care as needed.

Anyway, the original understanding was that she would take care of all dog needs wherever humanly possible, and with her being laid off from work for some months, clearly this has been humanly possible. Unfortunately, Fabius has settled upon some very inconvenient latrine areas of late. One definition of an inconvenient latrine area is ‘anyplace I [J.K.] like to be in the yard.’

I decided that it was time to bring this issue up, especially after some unfortunate footwear events last week when I happened to be walking around in the yard. In fact, I was drawing something of a line in the grass, complaining about the issue and asking her to stop promising and start picking up. Fabius was farrowing on the floor (his favorite posture looks very much like that of a sow with new piglets, on his side, legs out), while Leonidas sat on a folded blanket, on the ottoman in front of Deb, following this dog-related discussion with interest.

Just as I articulated to her that I would determinedly resist any notion of getting any more dogs if the situation did not improve, Leonidas assumed the vomiting posture. Before I could complete my little rant, he indicated his dissent by throwing up on the blanket. The look on Deb’s face was priceless.

While the issue will not simply vanish in a small pile of slightly used dog food, that at least tabled it for the time being. For one thing, I couldn’t stop laughing.