The origin of the word magenta comes from a particularly bloody battle that was fought on June 4th 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence, between France, or more exactly, a coalition of French and Piedmontese armies (overwhelmingly French-58,000 French soldiers to 1,100 Piedmontese) and Austria in the town of Magenta in Northern Italy. Many men died that day. So many, in fact, that a mass grave was dug for the 7,000 dead.

Soon after the battle, a new purplish red dye was discovered called fuchsine (originally made from coal tar). Its color was also called fushsine, but was soon renamed magenta, purportedly in remembrance of the blood-stained battlefield of Magenta.

As a recent example, HSBC, a british multinational bank, admitted to setting up offshore accounts for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels which allowed them to launder billions of dollars. But instead of pursuing legal action against the bank, Assistant US Attorney General Lanny Breuer decided to settle with the bank for a measly 1.9 billion dollars, which is approximately five weeks of income for the bank. Basically, it was a slap on the wrist.

Breuer’s reasoning was that to prosecute the bank would create global instability of the worldwide banking system. But as Matt Taibbi wrote, that’s a load of crap. By not prosecuting, it ensures that banks will feel they can bend and break international law whenever it’ll make a profit. In the long run, that ain’t good for nobody. The recent collapse of the global economy is a testament to that fact.

Not to mention that it’s simply not fair that rich people get off scot-free while perpetrating horrendous crimes, while the little guy gets locked away and the key thrown away.

Another example hilariously exposed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show is how ex-congressmen Todd Tiahrt, with the help of NRA stooges, wrote legislation that effectively allows gun dealers to circumvent existing gun laws, to the detriment of society, because all these illegally bought and sold guns ultimately end up in the hands of criminals, gangs, and worse.

And why? Follow the money. It’s really that simple.

Ugh. And what can I do about all this? Precious little, which is kinda depressing. And to alleviate my sorrow, I present cute animal videos.

Two Cats Pass a Bowl of Food

Kittens and Ducklings

Bouncing Otters

Cat Wants to be Petted

Goat Imitates Chicken

Recently, my girlfriend, Kendra, my Dad, and I watched his movie Chasing Ice at the Toby at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Frankly, we were blown away. The movie is a documentary about James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, which spanned several years, and involved setting up specially designed cameras in extremely harsh environments near receding glaciers. The cameras took pictures every hour over three years and provided visible evidence of how quickly these glaciers are melting away. It’s one thing to read statistics, but it really resonates in a much different, and more visceral way, to see it actually happening.

Additionally, the movie was also a portrait of Balog himself, and how driven he was to document these glaciers. He overcame tremendous hurdles to complete this project, including making cameras that would withstand these harsh environments (none existed, so he had to design his own with the help of engineers), traveling and surviving in these environments, and even overcoming a knee injury and surgery.

So, if you get a chance to see this movie, I highly recommend it. You won’t be disappointed … at least with the movie. However, you may be disappointed in our inability to tackle the problem of climate change.

The Trailer:

The calving of a glacier the size of lower Manhattan:

James Balog’s TED Talk on ice loss:

What you might not be privy to is the reason we’re all still here. The parties responsible aren’t exactly glory hounds. They aren’t about to stand in front of a news camera and bray, or write a letter to the editor, or star in a reality TV show. They saved us all, but they’re more than a little secretive about it. And they should be, as their activities weren’t, and never are, exactly legal.

Let’s put it this way. You heard about that mess on Lake Michigan, right? You know, that ferry sinking and the police grousing about all those merry-makers in their boats, who may have contributed to the accident? Who goes out on Lake Michigan in the winter, anyway? You’d have to be nuts. Waves can crash against that shore and spray thirty feet high, and if there’s ice, well, you can kiss a small boat goodbye. Anyway, you probably heard about the accident. What you didn’t hear was that it wasn’t any accident.

Well, maybe. Sorta. In the category of accidents while you’re playing with guns.

Most of you will be satisfied with the police and Coast Guard explanation. Personally, I don’t see how anybody could buy that fireworks… Well, never mind. People often blindly believe the spin-doctoring of authority figures. But for you more discerning and perceptive citizens, there is a way to the hidden truth. Read Last Days and Times. This book lays out the whole truth of the Lake Michigan Incident and everything that led up to it. I was able to write such an in-depth analysis not because I am particularly privileged or brilliant in any way, but because I was lucky. I live in Indianapolis, where it all started, and I’m buds with some of the primaries involved. What happened happened. It was bloody, frightening, and I didn’t think I’d survive it. But I did.

I did, but many did not. So, for all those who fell victim to the horror, especially for those on the Canal Walk, I felt compelled to write and publish their story. Let them never be forgotten, which is why their story, the story of how we almost went over the cliff of human extinction, costs only $1.99 in ebook at Kindle, only $2.99 at Smashwords for everything that isn’t Kindle ( and for Kindle, too, for that matter), and only $13.29 at lulu for the trade paperback.

If you are at all conscientious about the world, read this historical account of a shadow watershed event in human cruelty and heroism. You need to. After all, the barely-averted threat was turned away, not defeated. It’s still out there.

The only defense against it is vigilance.

The Lord of Misrule may have originated in an earlier New Year’s celebration called the Feast of Fools.

Great ideas and titles for a short story.

Happy Holidays from all the folks at Pen to Paper!

This is one reason authors are more and more opting to self-publish. It isn’t necessarily because every other avenue tells them “no!”. More and more often, it’s because those authors don’t want to deal with the lengthy, nearly medieval process of submitting to standard channels. It takes forever, and little consideration is given to the needs of the artist, without whom the literary industry cannot exist.

Now, I don’t really blame the publishing company for this intolerable chain of circumstances, I just recognize what’s happening and what the results will likely be. The publishing industry is getting pushed aside by the self-publishing phenomenon. Each year, more and more of the books available come to us through self-publishing sources. I think that, if the traditional publishing houses and the agents that feed them wish to be anything more than irrelevant in the coming decade, they need to change the way they operate. Okay, so it takes weeks or months to check out a manuscript. I can understand that, given the volume of manuscripts they receive. But, they must learn to accept, even encourage, simultaneous submissions. They should also take the time, however inconvenient, to reply to every submission, even if it’s just a form letter or form email. Sure, doing so means an aggregate of tons of extra time, but so what? That’s called customer service.

I believe I’m becoming typical of writers when I say that I would love to be published by a traditional company. It’s easier. The author might even make less money than if he published on his own, but the hassles would be gone. The formatting, the design, distribution, and much of the financial stuff would all be handled by the publisher. It would be nice. But, the hassles thrown up by the traditionals have their own drawbacks, and are, for many, more onerous than the alternative.

The alternative, over time, is becoming the first solution.

I like my reading to surprise me, to challenge me, and to be about something other than what is physically happening to the characters. I like my reading to be about something.

Okay, let me revise that last statement. I like my reading to really be about something. Harry Potter is about the trials of growing up into an adult world, to which I say, so what. You can tell Harry Potter is not on my list of must-reads. I find the writing bland, the characters tired retreads of stuff I’ve seen a hundred times, and the idea overarching the kiddie superhero plot is straight out of the generic aisle of the theme market.

I hear many groans, even gasps of horror and dismay. After all, Harry Potter is wildly popular, so what is wrong with me? I submit that Harry Potter is so popular simply because it does not surprise, it does not challenge, and it is amorphous in its ideals. It’s easy.

Well, sure, but it’s for kids, right?

That’s no excuse. What does it say about the state of art if something meant for kids is acceptable if bland? To Kill a Mockingbird was originally marketed as a children’s book. Nothing bland there. Huckleberry Finn. Nothing bland there.

So I come back to my original worry: what has become of the taste of our mass readership? The Hunger Games? Really? Fifty Shades of anything? Really?

Oh, well, maybe it’s always been so. I recall (not first hand, of course) that Don Quixote had quite a lot of empty-headed competition back there in the Romantic period. Archeologists have found porn in the trash dumps of ancient Palestine. Maybe I wonder at a problem that doesn’t exist.

Anna Karenina has come out, again, as a movie. It makes me want to read the book again — for the sixth or seventh time. I wonder how many of the present moviegoers have read the book at all.

This is always an auspicious day, a grand day, a scary day. My ancient Egyptian fantasy novel, Isis Wept, has gone through three writers’ groups, final edits, and the nail-biting ordeal of query letter and synopsis, and is now free in the world. I sent it out to its first prospective agent today. Will it be met with open, enthusiastic arms? With rank derision? With apathy? Only Ma’at can know.

But that brings up the important subject of sending manuscripts off to agents, and rejection letters.

First, the agent. There are rules about sending work to agents, and no, these aren’t the usual “rules” of writing, which are really no more than suggestions. These are rules, laws, adamantine edicts. You have to be careful when approaching an agent. You only get one shot at them.

You see, agents are busy people. As busy people, they don’t like to have their time wasted. So you treat your prospective agent with respect and a certain amount of deference. Definitely, definitely, give them what they want.

When choosing an agent for your work, pick one who specializes in your chosen form of art. See who they represent and read some of those authors. That way, you get a decent idea as to whether you and that agent will mesh. You can find information about agents in the usual traditional sources, like Writers Market and Writers Digest, both of which you’d find at the public library. Or you could go to the web, to resources such as Preditors and Editors or WritersNet. Find your agent, go to their web site, and carefully read what they have to say. Pay particular attention to their submission guidelines, including what they accept and don’t accept, or whether they’re taking any submissions at all. If they match your needs, then submit your work exactly as they direct. If they ask for a query letter, do not send a manuscript. If they ask for a query letter or synopsis, follow their precise directions on how to create those documents. If they offer no directions, then search the web and your library for advice, templates, and examples to follow.

Give the agent what they want, only what they want, and how they want it. They don’t have time for your ego.

Remember, in your correspondence with an agent, that you are attempting to enter into a business relationship, and it’s a buyer’s market. You are not doing the agent a favor by allowing them to see your awesome manuscript idea. They have a hundred other good, solid authors lined up behind you, and they’re only taking on two that day. Be polite.

When they ask for a query letter or synopsis, do not knock those off in a lazy afternoon. Stew over them. Remember, the agent hasn’t seen word one of your manuscript. They are deciding if they will represent you entirely on the query and/or synopsis, so those had better be good. Write them up, put them away for a few days, then pull them out and rewrite them. Put them through your writers critique group. Rewrite them again. Pour over them looking for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Make sure you spelled the agent’s name correctly. Make sure you spelled your name correctly. Grab the agent’s attention, but don’t be pushy. Showmanship helps, but don’t look ridiculous. These documents are your foot in the door. If they don’t stand up, your manuscript has no chance.

Get it all together, all the stuff the agent requests, make it all pretty, informative, professional and short, then send it off in your agent’s preferred manner. And wait.

Even if you are God’s gift to literature, your most likely response from the agent is … rejection. You get that little slip of a papercut in the mail, and it’s like you opened a greeting card from the Unabomber. Poor you. This is where it helps to have developed a writer’s thick skin. Understand, though, that rejections are not personal. The agent is just saying, “No, thanks.” They could reject you for any of a hundred reasons, and they are unlikely to tell you any of them. They’re busy, remember? Your only professional response is to mark that agent off your list and start hunting up another one.

I hope you get an acceptance on your first try, that your book goes on to become a New York Times bestseller, win lots of awards, and get made into a movie starring [fill in A-list actor here]. But the most likely outcome of sending out your work is rejection. And rejection. And rejection. Stephen King amassed over six hundred rejections before he sold his first story. Carrie, his horror classic, was rejected more than thirty times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was rejected thirty-eight times. Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected twenty times. So. if you get a rejection letter, or even a lot of them, you’re in good company.

I think Isis Wept is a good story well written. I feel it in my heart and liver. But I also expect it to be rejected, just on the odds. I further expect to send it out again until it finds the right venue, the right match for whatever destiny awaits it.

Why do we fall? they ask in the latest round of Batman movies. So we can learn to pick ourselves up

Some writers outline. They map out the story from beginning to end, chapter by chapter, usually in writing. That way, they know exactly what they need to accomplish scene by scene, chapter by chapter. This technique, if enforced across all authors, would make me want to jump off a bridge. Not that there’s anything wrong with outlining, it just isn’t a technique that awakens my muse. Too much like writing high school research papers.

Then there’s the “seat of the pants” writer. These are the ones least likely to finish a story. They sit down at the computer (or lie on their back with the iPad, like I am now) and just start typing, willing to let the story go where it will. Their writing is free, unfettered by the plodding restraint of following an outline or generally knowing what you’re doing. Maybe these writers get lucky and wind up somewhere near a logical end to a cohesive story. More likely, they get lost. They come to realize they don’t know where they’re going and they give up on getting there. Seat of the pantsers are those guys with a dozen beginnings to books they never finish.

Somewhere between the outliners and the pantsers lie the musers. Musers come up with a story idea, but they don’t hunch over a keyboard or paper and write down every linear aspect of it. Nor do they get to the writing right away. The muser thinks about the story, let’s it germinate in his head, develops its plot and theme over a long period of time. He wants to know what happens, and why. He wants to know where the story will go. He may consider the story for weeks, or months, before he settles in to write the first word. So, he kind of outlines, but in his head, not on paper. And he doesn’t order every little thing, or even every big thing, but instead lines up ideas and meaning. Not “John goes to the grocery. He buys a banana. The banana is bad. He takes it back. The grocer shows him a sign that says, ‘All purchases final’. John learns he should read the sign and check the banana before he lays down his money.” It’s more like “Main character makes a minor mistake that teaches him to think ahead”. I’m a muser.

Figure out which writer you are. There are strengths to each, if they fit your personality. The outliner is more efficient. The pantser is more organic. The muser is both. On points, the outliner, if he ever gets out of the outline phase, is the most likely to finish a story, and faster. Which brings up the next concern in this whole idea of how we build stories.

Avoid those traps that distract you from your purpose. If you’re the outliner, remember that your goal is to write the story, not the outline. There comes a time, when you have at least the beginning, middle and end of your tale, and some number of elements among them, when you need to stop enumerating isolated points and settle into creating a narrative from them. If you’re the pantser, stop going back and rewriting sections you think you might not have done to your best. Your job is to write the story, from the beginning to the end, not from the beginning to the middle, to the beginning, to the middle, to that part just before the middle, to the middle… Leave rewrites to the rewrite phase, which is after the first draft is finished. Finally, if you’re the muser, don’t muse too much, and don’t muse too little. Can you see here the danger of musing? The danger of never starting in the first place? The danger of starting too soon and becoming a de facto pantser? There’s also the danger, since you don’t write down your musings, of forgetting your story. I’m serious.

All this, and my last couple of posts, are by way of pointing out the difficulty of just the logistics of writing. It’s hard just to get started, which is why so few people end up being writers. Think about it. How many times do you hear someone say that, due to personal difficulties, they just haven’t had time lately to write? Like writing requires a certain time. They can only write at their special desk between the hours of two and four on odd-numbered Tuesdays. With a special pen. While listening to Ravel. All that is silly. If you, as a writer, want all that for your writing pleasure, that’s fine. But on the days where you can’t get into your office, write anyway. Shoehorn it into every little nook of time you can find. Write on the bus, while standing in line at Wal-Mart, while on the toilet. Or admit you aren’t really interested. Maybe you have priorities, like you have a day job. So make writing your night job, or your four in the morning job. Perhaps, for whatever reason, you’re too overwrought to write. This is possible, I know. So write about what makes you overwrought.

Writing isn’t that hard. We all start learning it in first grade. Writing well, now that’s another story, and a scary one. Getting started writing in the first place, then finishing that thing you started, that’s the sweetest story of all.

I don’t, perhaps can’t, write yarns. I’ve tried. No matter what my intentions might be at the beginning, I can’t avoid injecting my stories with Big Questions and Guiding Principles. It’s a disease, perhaps. I know folks, though, who write engaging yarns, stories about pirates and space ships and cowboys and what have you, but about little else. Escapist literature, not introspective literature. And it’s good. I’m thinking right now of an ambitious, excitable yarn I love and have read a couple of times, Dogfight, by Dick Thomas (only $2.99 at Smashwords!) It’s pizza delivery boys vs. werewolves, and not much else. But, do you really need much else?

That’s the yarn. Then there’s the GEHC, in which the artist first and foremost seeks to expose some important facet of who we are as a people, why we are here, and where we are going. You’ve seen them. I’m thinking To Kill A Mockingbird, American Gods, and anything written by a 19th or 20th century guy with a Russian surname. These can be awesome books to read, the kind of books that educate you about yourself, or they can be wandering, obtuse, obfuscating nightmares like Winesburg, Ohio. Not the place, the book.

Then there are people, and I fit into this category most of the time, who do a bit of both. They write the escapist yarn that slips in a bit of the Big Question. Or the Big Question with a flavoring of escapist yarn. Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. Benchley’s Jaws, which is still ma better telling of Moby Dick than Moby Dick was.

What you write, if you write, is a question of your personal sensibilities. Don’t worry about what others might expect. Don’t worry about what might be commercial or whether you might be “selling out”, just write what wants to come out of you. You’re likely to find that you really can’t write anything else.

I once tried to write a romance novel on a bet, seeing as I am noted for my hatred of the romance genre. I tried, I really did. I made an honest effort to limit my words to the conventions of that genre, which I knew well. But, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make a story center on the passionate love of one person for another and their trials in their journey to consummate that love. That, to me, was just stupid. Who cares? Especially when the journey requires certain character actions and plot devices at certain word counts in the story, and, yes, mountain lions (or a reasonable facsimile). Has anyone ever noticed how many problems in romance stories are solved through the judicious application of mountain lions (or their reasonable facsimiles)? I got about ten thousand words into the story and had to divert it to another path, one pondering the GEHC. I guess the romance still went its course,  but it became the secondary, perhaps tertiary point of the story, something to pull the reader from one introspective thought on humanity to the other. Big fail, if you wanted a romance story. But, I liked it!

So, here’s the thing. When you find yourself wondering, as a writer, if you should write this or that because it may not be commercial or it may not be what the reader expects, ask yourself one question. Is the way you want to write that story the way it wants to be written? Then go for it. There is a publisher for every well-written story, if you can find him or her.

Lastly, if you’re a writer who desires to write a yarn, something with space ships and rocket packs and virile, young, lantern-jawed heroes and beautiful half-neckit women, then go for it. There are tons of people who want to read that story. There are tons of people who want to read the predictable, formulaic romance story, too. Not me, but if that’s what you want to write, do so, and with gusto. I won’t be buying it, but many, many others will.

As long as your grammar and spelling are passable, and that goes for everybody.