#so the idea of an ebook formatted in such a way that it could be downloaded and printed and placed in a binder—

[sincerely-sofie]

[crow-caller]

Hey! I saw that you published some books (looking forward to checking them out, actually), but I was wondering how you did that? I'm not out of high school yet, but I've already finished my first draft of book one of my series, and have been working on editing and fixing up the second draft. I do have an editor, which is nice. I was wondering how you published? Any advice/ info would be greatly appreciated!

Hey, cool! My first book legit came out when I was still in high school.

I'm an indie author, so I'll talk about indie stuff... and traditional... and oh dear that's a lot.

Let's go over some pros and cons and what to expect.

Crow's (oops not) Quick Guide to Publishin'

Self Publishing:

This is what I did for Good Angel, Bad End, my duology!

Self pubbing:

+Total control of end product +No deadlines +Full control of changing it at any time -You do all the work (or pay) -It costs you money for jobs you can't (or shouldn't) do yourself like editing -Extremely limited reach of audience, very hard to sell

I queried GA/BE around a bit but ultimately decided to self publish it. It's just too niche for mainstream, being a weird genre mix up with way too queer characters. Multiple neopronouns used by funky angels in magic school slice of life that turns apocalyptic? yeah, I felt it'd be best I just put it out.

You'll need to

Edit the text (I'd recc multiple friends, a paid editor)

Proofread the text (I'd recc paying a pro)

Assemble the text files formatting (for digital, print)

Get a cover

Make pages for it on GoodReads etc and promote it

Self-publishing can be a lot of work. I did GA/BE's interiors myself using first Microsoft word, then adobe indesign for the recent revamp. Using Word/other text programs can give you a fully workable interior file, but abusing the free trial system of adobe will allow more advanced inclusions. Getting ebook files to work is a nightmare, and print can also be a pain- it's a lot of following online tutorials and trial and error I found. Calibre then is the program you use to finish digital files for release.

Costs for editing can be very high. Editing is a high skill, high time job- I got my books done on discount from a friend for next to nothing, but expect definitely a few hundred bucks. Research though fair prices. You don't need to hire someone to proofread or edit, but it is a good idea. That or outsource to many friends, ideally ones who give honest feedback. A proofreader is much cheaper as they only look for errors, I again got it cheap for 65£ per book. Art wise, I bought mine on commission- talk to an artist and make it clear it is for a commercial project and that you have the right to sell the end result. My cover for each book was about 100£

You might notice this is adding up to a few hundred quid, and yes: it cost me like, 350£ or so per book to publish, even with myself doing a lot of the work. This is a lot! Does it pay back? Usually no. I have at this point now "made a profit", but it took years. You can't typically go into self publishing looking for profit.

I really enjoy self publishing GA. It meant I could put a project out that I kinda only made for me, and have full rights to do whatever I want with it. I got to design the cover and choose what to do at every step... but it was a crazy amount of intensive work too. Marketing wise I've found is about impossible- your best bet 100% is to send the book to as many people as possible (digitally) for review and just try to get enough people reading it. Then you hope they like it and talk about it. I've found no other method of marketing particularly useful: word of mouth is still king.

Indie Publishing:

Indie pubbin:

+Don't have to spend any money (get paid) +Professional editing/cover/formatting +Backing of publishing house's marketing team -Deadlines -Less creative control -Contracted -Must query and be accepted

My first book was Angel Radio, which actually I sold when I was 17. came out when I was 18. The timescale for traditional publishing, even indie, is typically at least a year.

There's a lot of indie publishers out there, and we should read them more often. However, being published by an indie publisher (aka, a small, non-mainstream one- unlikely to ever be 'on shelves') takes extra, different work.

Do your research!!! There's a LOT of scam publishers out there. A publisher will never, ever, not even slightly ever, charge you money or pressure you to spend money (like buying your own copies of the book). A great way to check is to just look up 'publisher name + scam'.

Prepare a query letter. This is a pitch for your book, basic book info, and a bit about you. Every publishing house will have a 'submissions' page which explains specific wants (such as several pages of your book or a synopsis), so every application is slightly custom.

Query and wait. It takes many weeks to hear back with queries. Usually you should do them in small batches of like five. It's very rare to get a deal- it may not be your book, it might just be market trends or they already got a book about dragons on order.

DOUBLE CHECK YOUR CONTRACT. Contracts can be hard, so seek help if you want, though I've found my one contract to be not that long and readable. Still, you should always read a contract, especially as a scam publisher might try to trick you there.

Indie publishing is good because... it's more accessible and diverse than mainstream, but still offers the same benefits to authors. Just on a way smaller scale. I don't think my publisher, Harmony Ink Press, did much jack or shit for me marketing wise, and that's pretty typical. Marketing is very hit or miss and very expensive, so the onus is still on you to market (spoilers, these days marketing is on you no matter what). You also have more leeway in edits and covers- I designed AR's rough cover and worked with the artist directly! That's uncommon.

Most indie publishers also have a common royalty scheme where you pay it back. This isn't a hallmark of a scam, it's pretty normal: You get advance cash upfront, but then do not earn royalties until your book has paid itself off. Which it may not. Angel Radio sold for 500$, not a huge amount but not exactly tiny, especially for a teen. But I haven't earned a penny on royalties because it never sold well enough! I think I'm a little over halfway there.

Traditional Publishing

(I don't have a book of this type. yet...?)

Y'know, like, books?

+Large advance +Big support team +Marketing +Books on shelves +Most lucrative and recognizable -Sharper deadlines -Least control and rights -Must query (hardcore mode) -Still marketing yourself

Traditional publishing is the longest timescale and hardest method. Obvs. You again are looking to write a good query, but now you need to go through a literary agent. You query an agent with your book (again, should only ever be free), the agent then essentially queries publishers on your behalf ("out on submission"). An agent is your liaison to the business of publishing, taking a portion of your earnings for the service. You just can't make it into publishing without an agent.

A query letter ideally is... roughly, quickly, this is my format guide.

Hi there [actual agent name]

I'm here proposing my cool book, XYZ of ABC, a GENRE book of ??k words that IS SOMETHING UNIQUE SELLING POINT. MAIN CHARACTER is LIKE THIS but faced CONFLICT when PLOT HAPPENS, in SOME KINDA WORLD OR WHATEVER. THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU WRITE A 2-3 SENTENCE PLOT BLURB. But when TWIST happens, will MC have SOME EYECATCHING IDEA? This book will appeal to fans of THIS KINDA THING and is extra good because RELEVENT DETAIL LIKE OWNVOICES. I believe JUST KEEP SELLING KID. I myself SOME SORT OF ACCOMPLISHMENT LIKE UNI, PAIRED WITH A RELEVANT HOBBY. thank you for your time

Hot and dirty, something like that. You gotta recall at all times this is a market. It is economic. Your passion... matters, but uh. It doesn't matter. Gosh that sounds rough. But make your passion clear but your sound business proposal clearer: You need to show why your book is worth picking over thousands of other queries.

Querying is a horrible torturous process that does help you slowly build up exposure therapy to rejection and failure. Anyways, that will take a bit typically (I've been querying on and off for ten years for an agent, but a lot has been 'off' time). Then you wait and eventually, bam! Probably post some edits, your book is sold.

You still wait a long time though, and have a lot of work to do. So much work. Your book will come out on shelves at the end, sure, but that's still not a promise of success. The author these days is especially the product, and while you start on a higher stage (maybe even the marketing team will f---ing do something), you still gotta claw. There's a high level of scrutiny too on debut authors on any tier, but especially the traditional publishing tier. So your success is very dependent on each book you do, with it being harder and harder to sell books if you aren't doing fantastic.

Still, it's hard to deny the appeal of that mainstream success. Man, I'm chasing it myself! But it's not just easy book out there you go. I'm pals with traditionally published authors and you'll still be very busy, if you can get your foot on the ladder with an agent to begin with. Being on submission generally takes months, and even when your book is with a publisher it may be a lot of time and work before it ever comes out. Even then, hitting the shelves still doesn't mean you're set for life.

Still. Good luck. Go try!

(BTW look at my books, I guess, as a sticker on what I hope is good advice, and good luck! I first decided to try publishing Angel Radio with HIP because of a post by someone else published by them on tumblr... like 10 years ago now....)

Gum ebook

Amaz print

Goodreads)

[ink-flavored]

Hi! Just wanted to let you know you're one of my favorite writers! If not the most favorite, I met you through your Yu Gi Oh fics! You're an inspo for how I aspire to write.

Have any advice on writing? Particularly on forming a style or anything else you can think of?

aw jeez thank you so much!! <333 it's really nice to know my fics continue to inspire people even though i've been focusing more on my original projects these days

honestly, the only way to form a style is to practice. that's it. the only way you can create a unique voice for your writing, to make it memorable and noticeably "yours" is to keep writing until it develops on its own. i didn't consciously choose to write the way i do, it just came naturally after many years of practice.

in general, though, read books. and yes i do mean books (or audiobooks, ebooks, etc), not fanfiction, because as lovely as fanfiction is, there are some things you simply cannot get from reading them. go find authors that speak to you, that motivate you, that make you want to write, and do the work of picking apart why you enjoy their works. i learned how to properly format dialogue from reading a ton of books, i italicize characters' thoughts in my prose because my favorite books did that. one of the coolest things in any published book i've ever read was when "chapter 66" of a slowly dying character's perspective was a blank page. no words except the chapter header. it was awesome, and really expanded my ideas of what "writing" and "books" could do.

also!! finish at least one thing. being able to get through one story, beginning to end, complete it, and never touch it again is SO useful for your writer ego. it proves you can finish something, that you can finish MANY things, and that you're capable of telling a full story

uhhh that's everything off the top of my head! happy writing!

[altraviolet]

Hi! I have been a fan of the story since the first chapter release. I don't have a AO3 (but will get one) or twitter (they took away my ability to look without an account, rude), and was waiting to be anonymous on Tumblr to say, as sad as it will be when it ends, I cannot wait to see what other stories you will create! You are an amazing writer and I wish you nothing but the best! I would also pay money for a signed copy of the story when its completed, it's one of my favorites fics of all time. Would you even consider doing that?

Hi! Thanks so much for the very kind message! And thanks for sticking around! Chapter one was more than 3 years ago... O_O

Okay anyway re: other stories, I do have a lot of other stories! Since you don't have an AO3 account, you are unable to access the locked stories. (They are locked because they are rated E, cuz that's what I'm comfortable with) But there's other stuff there to check out in between chapter uploads :)

re other stories to be created: to be honest... I was kiiiiiiiiind of thinking of retiring from TF fic after Echo Garden. Because. I feel like there's just. No way I could ever have another fic this successful after TEG xD I base this on the fact that there isn't much interest in the past fics I've done. And. I just dunno what I would do next. It's kinda daunting to have a fic with so many readers. And it sucks that the parts of the franchise that inspired me most ended years ago. So long ago, in fact, that many TEG readers say they've never read the comics or watched the show :U Some of the new stuff coming out is great, but it doesn't have the worldbuildy/character stuff that inspires long stories in my brain. So. We'll see. I've always wanted to do a sequel for Face The Past. But again. Who's gonna read it? So yeah, I'm not saying I'm leaving after TEG is done, but if I do, don't be mad xD I wanna work on original stuff. Maybe if it's good enough, I can quit my job and be happy writing, because that's what I really would like to do, and unfortunately I can't make a living off fic.

re printing: .......................

................

...............

ok so to be very clear, getting fanfic professionally printed is illegal. print on demand companies are very clear about this fact, and if they catch you, your account will be deleted. I totally don't know this from personal experience. and I totally have never ever ever thought of professionally printing a fic. not once. but if I were to do so, the hurdle would be that I have no idea how to easily collect money and distribute. buying just 50 books up front would cost around $850 (you can tell I've never looked into this, not once). and like. pay/pal is not a friend. so...

I have thought of printing and binding it myself and not selling that cuz that would be illegal as well 👀 but that would literally take me months to do and cost me a ton of money and probably look like an amateur product

so you can see my predicament :'D

GOD I AM ABSOLUTELY DYING TO PRINT IT AND GET IT OUT INTO THE WORLD BUT I AM BOUND BY THE SHIT COPYRIGHT CONSEQUENCES OF ANNE RICE'S BITCHY ANTI FANFIC ACTIONS

I am planning to have a free ebook version of the fic available when it's done! Properly formatted for every kind of ebook, with author's notes and maybe some fan art if the artists are cool with it. I'll leave links when that happens.

But as for print... unless someone out there has access to a printer who's totally cool with this... I'm not sure how it would happen :c

But thank you so much for your interest, that truly warms my heart and I wish I could be on your bookshelf ❤️

[pricklyest]

What e reader did you buy? Do you recommend it?

I was waiting to answer this when I stopped being sick so I could maybe be coherent but at this point idk when that's going to happen so we're just going to go w it and hope this makes sense sorry

I bought a kobo clara 2e. I wanted the smallest ereader I could find that was a reasonable price and also waterproof because I like to read in the bathtub and I am not immune to dropping things in the water. have ruined more than one book that way, have also ruined a nintendo switch that way.

the kobo ecosystem is not bad in terms of ereaders if you exclusively buy your ebooks from the kobo store. the kobo store is better than the amazon ebook store imo bc it lets you download drm-free versions of your purchases without having to go through any conversions, which I don't think is true of the kindle store.

kobo also lets you upload your own epubs and pdfs to the ereader from your computer pretty easily (you can add them like you would to a flash drive or you can use something like calibre to manage your library for you). there have been a few times when I've plugged my kobo into my computer and it hasn't automatically connected so I had to disconnect and reconnect it but then it worked fine. so it can be finicky but ultimately you should be able to get it.

the software that actually opens the ebooks and that you read with is actually different based on whether it's an epub in the kobo format (the filename will end with .kepub.epub) or literally anything else. kepubs will support more features, like annotations and faster page flips and easy word lookups in dictionaries (especially useful for reading the locked tomb which is Full of vocab words). you can also actually make changes the the font type and size. whereas anything else it just displays and doesn't let you highlight, annotate, or select text text. you can zoom in on things, but that's about it.

the good news is there are a lot of tools that let you turn things into kepubs. I currently use a plugin you can get for calibre, but I'm thinking about trying kepubify bc some of the epubs I've downloaded have turned into funky formatting with the calibre plugin.

right now my kobo clara 2e downsides are 1) device is still bigger than I'd like*, 2) kepub vs other file formats thing is mildly annoying, 3) can't buy ebooks from kobo store via app on my phone, have to either buy from kobo website or from my ereader, 4) screen is often less sensitive than I'm used to with other touch screen devices (this may just be an ereader thing), 5) I can't send books to my kobo wirelessly unless I've purchased them in the kobo store (idk if this is something I could do for other ereader systems, I haven't looked).

*there aren't really any devices from any of the major ereader brands with screens smaller than 6in (which is what the clara 2e has). I also looked at the xiaomi inkpalm 5, which does appear to be an ideal size for me, but you have to do some annoying command line shit to get it running in english and it doesn't appear to be waterproof. I may look into it again if I get sick enough of not having my ereader actually fit in my pants pockets. you could also get an eink phone and use it as an ereader, but they're phone prices instead of ereader prices, and most of them have the same language support issues the xiaomi has. the other thing I looked at is the open book project and the m5 paper which are both diy ereader kits and I'm more inclined to fuck with one of those than the xiaomi if I decide to do something more fun in the future, but I don't have the bandwidth for that right now.

kobo also supports integration with overdrive so you can check out library books, but I have recently discovered my library card is expired and bc I'm sick I haven't gone in to get a new one yet so I have no idea what that looks like and whether or not reading library ebooks uses the good reader (like with kepubs) or the no features reader.

one last annoying thing is the kobo store on the reader keeps trying to tell me to subscribe to kobo plus, which is basically like spotify premium but for ebooks and/or audiobooks. but not all titles ever are included so I haven't really looked into it v much bc rn I've found what I wanted to read through other methods (shout out to standardebooks.org)

anyway overall I would say I'd recommend it if your use case is exactly the same as mine, which is I wanted something small to read in the bath and carry around to hopefully replace my doomscrolling habit with reading like I used to when I was a kid, and it so far has been mildly successful. I did start wearing a fanny pack on a regular basis so that way I could actually carry it around everywhere like my phone, but even with a fanny pack I don't think you could fit something much bigger than 6-7in screen, so I'm not sure anything else would work. if you wanted a bigger ereader, I know someone else who has one of the larger kobos (not sure which one, we don't talk super often) and seems p happy w it. I briefly entertained the idea of getting one from kobo w a stylus and using that to take notes in class bc I saw some people in the ereader subreddit say they liked using it for that, and then I remembered I have an ipad and apple pencil to do that exact thing already and I'm already really happy w that setup.

[wheresarizona]

Have you thought about putting Learning to live on Goodreads? Pls I'd love to add it, this is one of my favorite fics ever 🩷

Oh my goodness!! I’m so honored that you’d want it on there!!! 😭😭😭 I honestly had no idea fanfiction could be put on Goodreads and I looked into it and found you can put your book length fic on there, it just needs to be completed. SO, once Learning to Live is done, I’ll absolutely put it up! 🥰🥰🥰 But, we’ve got quite a ways to go before we get to the end…

I’ve also been transferring it into a novel format with shorter chapters (all the same stuff/nothing cut), and made myself a sweet ebook, that I’ll happily share when completed, too.

[spanishskulduggery]

I'm currently at the learning stage where I'm reading tons of side-by-side English/Spanish stories and I just have to say...the translations *really* leave something to be desired. Would you ever do side-by-side translations of, like, public domain stories? (Edgar Allan Poe could be fun?!) and sell those as mini ebooks? I would buy them so fast and it would be a GREAT learning tool for your blog readers. Not to give you an assignment lol.

I might in the future if I can find the right formatting for it

In theory, doing a side by side translation would be easy enough assuming I can find out how to have English on one side and Spanish on the other and having them mostly the same as far as page for page

If anyone has any idea how one does that, let me know

But yes, I understand what you mean about some translations being... off

The problem I have with a lot of older translations is that so many translators tried to make things flow by sacrificing the original feeling of things

Some translations are particularly egregious. I remember reading a translation of Don Quixote side by side with the English and this dude full on inserted a special side story because he was so pressed that Cervantes forgot about Sancho's donkey

Some of those translations go more into officialized fanfiction in my opinion

As a personal preference, I do my utmost to give an accurate translation even if it sounds clunky. If needed, I adapt it and leave a note or a footnote to explain myself

The only time I think it's generally appropriate to be more liberal with the translation is poetry if you're trying to preserve the rhyme scheme, which is extremely difficult along with the meter. I usually just translate it very literally and make a note of the general rhyme scheme or any puns I notice

There's an interesting theory (for lack of a better word?) about translation that's like a punnett square - beautiful, ugly / literal, non-literal

Essentially your translations can either be beautiful and literal [the dream], ugly and literal [faithful but lacking in flair], beautiful and non-literal [thin ice], and ugly and non-literal [you failed]

On our best days translators try for beautiful and literal, or ugly and literal.

There are a few cases where beautiful and non-literal is okay especially for poetry and cases where you're trying to fit an established rhyme or meter, or there's a joke or cultural reference that doesn't translate well. Humor, poetry, and cultural references are the hardest to translate and also sometimes the hardest to catch as a translator. I tend to abuse footnotes in that case

It's really hard to defend ugly and non-literal, especially if you intended it that way. I would hope that ugly and non-literal translations are just mistakes or misinterpreting the text, but there are people in the past who have purposefully misrepresented texts for political or religious purposes and it's really hard to defend that

[donotexterminateupgradepudding]

Black Sails - update on Captain Flint’s reading list - quick thoughts

I’ve been working my way through what I’m calling Captain Flint’s reading list - or the key books he either owned or were key to the plot of the show.  To keep things fresh I have been reading more than one book at a time.

A few books were hard to find as e-books or based on the original formatting that has been maintained for the copies, I chose to purchase the hard copy.

After getting my Covid booster shot, I popped into a bookstore and got a hard copy of Meditations.  I’d been getting tired of the free ebook with rather over the top language.  This copy is hailed as the first translation in a generation from 2003 by Gregory Hays.  I’ve been taking my time with it and find this translation to be more direct in its intentions.  It still keeps the true feelings of the text, but it does shy away from the more dramatic:

- You should be like a rocky promontory, against which the restless surf continuously pounds.  It stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet.

which is what Miranda reads to Richard Guthrie as her favorite selection.

The Hays translation instead goes with:

- To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over.  It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

The ebook version has this variation from a translation by Casaubon, which is edited by someone who isn’t credited in the document.  It is clear though that Casaubon took liberties with the translation - including paraphrasing things for the current reader of 1634 or 1635:

I have a feeling that some of these 17th and 18th century translations seem to have taken a rather loose interpretation of the text for their contemporary readers.  I’m now personally curious to go digging around for the original Latin text and see if I can clear out the cobwebs of my own Latin skills which have gone unused for over twenty years.   All in all, I’m starting to favor Hays’ translation which has that more exact vibe I recall from translating prose myself many moons ago.  Latin is always so clear what is going on with its over the top number of verb tenses and noun declensions, but damn, they do tell you exactly what it going on.

Leviathan - by Hobbes.  This is one that I’m still reading the ebook version since it would be pretty thick. Honestly, this was likely not the best -or- maybe the best choice to read around Midterm elections.  I could just absorb the Hobbes-ness of it and feel smug as the political theatre was turned up to 11.

I love the transcriber’s notes on the text in the second paragraph - ‘and sometimes, it seems, just because.’  I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement. 

My favorite parts so far are the oft quoted ‘of accidents of bread and cheese’ and his refusal to use consistent spelling of ‘we’ or ‘wee’ for ‘we’; sometimes using both spellings in the same paragraph!  Lastly, his spelling of corn as ‘corne’.

Joking aside, it is a very interesting read.  The first part goes about defining what is man, common sense, human nature, fighting against that human nature which would be a state of war and general crappiness.  The idea that people suck and will sink to their lowest level = conflict/war is pretty obvious.  It ties on the idea that uncivilized places would be in this state of war while a civilized commonwealth would not.  But anyone watching Black Sails knows that the longer the series goes on the more and more you wonder what is a civilization? What makes a civil society?  When is it justified to fight for your rights and wage war against an oppressive force?  The pirates of Nassau both wage war upon merchants (and each other) yet have democratic crews voting on leaders and choices and giving leadership to someone with their consent which is a great transition into part two.

The commonwealth where people put aside those natural instincts and surrender their rights to the commonwealth to maintain order and stability.  This commonwealth is led/cemented by the sovereign, who can drive all policies even if the people feel they are incorrect or flawed.  What reading the text really highlighted for me how loosely the concept of the social contract and the role of the sovereign are communicated in passing.  Multiple times Hobbes is quite clear that the ‘sovereign’ can be a single individual or can be an elected government of a collection of individuals.  Furthermore, if it is a single individual, he’s staunchly opposed to the idea of that power being hereditary since it would just make him a king.

Are we as viewers to see the juxtaposition between England being civilization where the people of the commonwealth put up with the government to manage them while the pirates exist in a more primitive state of nature?  Or is it through the process of removing oneself from the colonial naval complex where one is ruled by fear and punishment (that state of war/conflict) and by breaking free of this and forms a commonwealth where a crew democratically elects a captain and quartermaster, thus creating a social contract in a state of ‘lawlessness’?

Does Flint’s knowledge of Leviathan both feed into his belief that most men are dumb and would revert to that state of nature? E.g. Flint to Silver - “If left up to their own devices they’d eat it raw.” However, is it by joining his crew and his commonwealth, they escape that state of nature by forming a social contract with him?

I’m currently stuck in part three where he discusses the Christian commonwealth b/c well, he sort of has to address the geopolitical elements of the time and the power of the Church and the Church of England.  It is a rather dry part of the text but there is no way it would have been published without the religious element.  I’m not as excited by a man using Biblical text to back up his thesis that a commonwealth lead by a sovereign is key to advancing society and government. La Galatea - by Cervantes (Gyll translation).  I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book.  It is stated to be a pastoral romance - an excuse to have lots of poems in homage to the man who really solidified the genre - Virgil.  The idea that it is a single romance is misleading - it is all sorts of romances between shepherds and shepherdesses as well as a few cavilers and more noble ladies.  The book introduces the famed Galatea, a beautiful shepherdess who has two men very much into her, Elicio and Erasto who happen to be best friends.  I found some of the more exciting stories of Timbrio and his horrible luck in all of his travels. 

The worst part is that the book ends with Elicio going forth to try to “rescue” Galatea from an arranged marriage by her father.  And then Cervantes ends it with a statement that if the book is received well and his patrons give him some money, he’ll write book two.  However, there is no book two!  We’ll never know what happens.

For Black Sails, this means that James gave Miranda a book where the two boys never get the one girl!  The prose is interesting and the poems are pretty much entirely about all sorts of romances/love/rejection/lust but there is no way to know how this ends.  I have to admit, I wanted to know what happened! However, if Flint read the beginning where it describes Elicio as the more sophisticated shepherd and Erastro as the overly educated and eloquent but of the proletariat with a lovely lady who has their attention. . . . Well, he likely saw it as representing Thomas and himself.  Two very different men (strange pairs in Thomas’s words) with a single woman between them, Miranda.  Or are we to feel terrible that Miranda was given a book which didn’t reveal what happened thus her stuck with her ultimate fate while James and Thomas remain?

After talking with a friend, I was told to give Don Quixote another try.  She’d also complained she struggled with it previously, and that I should seek out the Edith Grossman translation.  I’ll see if I go down that path in the near future. Lastly, I’ve started Hugo Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis - with a harder to find edition of the second English translation by William Evats.  I’d originally gotten a version from a right wing publisher in Indiana which annoyingly split each book up into an individual version as a part of their ‘Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics’ and references a 1738 version of the translation after the end of the series.  I found the Evats’ translation from a law book publisher which dates back to 1682 and completely replicates the original text, odd printing format and all.  Plus, it includes all three books in one volume.  The language is quite similar to reading Hobbes with the need to define what is right, war, nature etc.  But that makes sense since it was published in 1625 and Leviathan in 1651.

This will likely become more interesting as I get further into the book as it defines when war is justified, if the law applies in war and all sorts of other issues that are always swirling around in the series.  The index references piracy several times where it concludes that robbers and pyrates do not = a civil society despite their equity among themselves.  I was a little eager to see what Mr. Grotius had to say on the issue and I’ll see how it fits into the context of the greater work soon-ish, when I get to book III.

[paranormalrealism]

FULL INTERVIEW WITH 

AUTHOR Juliette Willows

Orville: Tell us about yourself:

 Juliette: Juliette Willows is a nom de plume I created. There’s quite a story behind it. It started off with me wanting a pen name that “sounded romantic,” seeing as I want to write romance. You’ll enjoy this first part, Doc, seeing as you’re a fan of the paranormal.

 Growing up, the house I lived in was haunted. Actively so. Our main “resident” was a girl (sometimes a child, sometimes an adult) we named Juliette. We were all quite fond of her. So I borrowed her name.

 Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been obsessed with willows. Weeping willows, pussy willows, even the name Willow. I never knew why. My mother recently told me a story she’d kept secret for over 40 years, but I have permission to talk about it, so I’ll tell you all.

 Before she had me, my mother was raped and almost killed. She never reported the crime, even when she miscarried at 4 months, alone on a deserted beach. The baby was a girl. She named her Willow, and buried her in the forest. There are other factors that fall into this, but now I wear the name proudly (just like the willow bough tattoo around my forearm) - for the sister I never knew I had, who died so I could live.

  Orville: How long have you been writing?

 Juliette: I’ve been writing ‘seriously’ for about five or six years, I would say. When my daughter left for university, and I found myself a very young empty nester. But I’ve always wanted to write, and I wrote my first real poem at the age of 13. I know it by heart, to this day.

  Orville: What got you interested in writing?

 Juliette: I think reading got me interested in writing. I would devour all these amazing stories that would allow me to just disappear from my life. The best form of escapism, especially when life isn’t the best it could be. I wanted to be able to do that for someone, too. Write stories that would let them escape for a little while, and be transported to other places.

  Orville: How many books do you have published?

 Juliette: So far, the only novel I’ve published is The Lady Phoenix. I did have a poetry book on Amazon (I believe it’s still visible), but I’ve pulled it because, in all honesty, it was rushed, and is horrible. Filled with mistakes, and horrific formatting. You live and you learn, or so they say. I plan on republishing it once it’s had a complete overhaul.

  Orville: Are your books self-published or traditionally published?

 Juliette: The Lady Phoenix is self-published. I had my heart set on one particular agent, and I told myself if he said no, I would self-publish. He didn’t say anything at all, and so, my book baby was sent out into the big bad world.

 That being said, it’s still a dream to have at least one book traditionally published, so I plan on trying again with the next novel (and the next, until someone says yes to something).

  Orville: Where can the reader find your books (include a link)?

 Juliette: My book is available in multiple places, so the best way to find it is by clicking on my website where I have the links to many of the places it can be found. (I’m still fighting with Amazon to link the versions, so if the reader is looking for the eBook version, they’ll have to click on my name on Amazon to see it.)

 http://juliettewillows.com/

  Orville: Are you a plotter or pantser?

 Juliette: This one is easy, I’m a pantser, through and through. I’ll often have a general idea of where I want to take the story, but for the most part, the characters tell me what to write. I know that might sound silly – “they’re not real, they’re make-believe characters” – but to me, they’re real. They’re living, breathing, feeling beings, and they know their story better than I do, so I tend to let them lead the way.

  Orville: What makes your writing unique?

 Juliette: I don’t know that anything is truly unique anymore, in the way that every theme/idea has been done, and done, and done. But it’s not so much about finding something that’s never been written about before, and more about what the particular story looks like through my eyes. I think we’re all unique individuals; ten of us could be given the same topic to write about and come out with ten different, unique versions of the same story.

  Orville: What are your hobbies outside of writing?

 Juliette: Hobbies? What are those? Hahaha Honestly, between writing, my business, and my day job (unfortunately, I’m not yet at the point of not needing one), I don’t have much time left over for hobbies these days. Although I try to read as much as I can (it’s never as much as I’d like to), I enjoy singing, designing (interiors – I have a diploma in interior design that mostly collects dust), and love horseback riding. I haven’t been in a couple of years, and I miss it terribly.

  Orville: Who was the greatest influence in your writing career?

 Juliette: My greatest influence will always be the Queen of Romance herself, Nora Roberts. There are many amazing authors out there, both old and new, traditional and indie, but she will always be my number one.

  Orville: Do you have a favorite quote?

 Juliette: Do song lyrics count? There are so many, here are two.

 “[Let’s] be the breeze that won’t stop blowing” – reminds me that no matter what, regardless of what comes by way, what obstacles are put in my path, I need to keep going. The breeze never stops blowing; sometimes it’s hard to feel, but it’s always there. (Young, Alive, and in Love - by Tim Hicks)

 “Some believe in destiny and some believe in fate, but I believe that happiness is something we create.” – Although I do believe in fate and destiny to a certain degree, I do also believe we're the writers of our own stories, and that we’re the only ones responsible for our happiness (I talk about that in my upcoming non-fiction book, All Kinds of Happy Little Things: A Probably Flawed Guide to Finding Happiness.) It’s taken me a long time, and every day is still a work in progress, but I’ve finally accepted the fact that if I want something to happen in my life, I need to be the one to make it happen. (Something More - by Sugarland)

  Orville: Tell me about your work:

 Juliette: Besides writing, I’m also co-owner of a company I started with my best friend in January of 2020. Affinity Writing & Editing Services (AWES) is still technically in its infancy, given the state of the world, but I’m so proud of the work we’ve been able to do so far, and I look forward to many years to come. It’s my goal to grow in the next twelve months, hopefully to the point where we might have to bring on another editor to help out (fingers crossed!). Before the summer of 2024, it’s my goal to be writing and working AWES full time.

  Orville What genre do you write?

 Juliette: I refuse to niche myself, which I understand is probably a mistake, but I write multiple genres. Romance is something they all have in common, however, as I’m a sucker for a happy ever after.

The Lady Phoenix is a romantic thriller, but the second book in the series will be more of a drama (and also LGBTQ+). My current fiction WIP is an urban fantasy with a heavy dose of…er…the kind of stuff I won’t allow my mother to read. And then, of course, my non-fiction, as I mentioned above. This, however, will most likely be a one-off, as I much prefer letting my imagination run free in the land of make-believe.

  Orville What are your book titles?

Juliette: My published book is The Lady Phoenix

Orville: Is your work on Kindle Unlimited?

Juliette: It is, yes.

  Orville: What are you currently working on (when will it be available)?

 Juliette: My two next publications will be:

(As mentioned earlier) All Kinds of Happy Little Things: A Probably Flawed Guide to Finding Happiness – I’m hoping to have this published before the end of 2022.

And, Author of Discord (to come in 2023)

 Also coming up in the next couple of years will be: Kindred (book 1 of an urban fantasy trilogy based in New Orleans), and Birth Rite (title may change) - this was meant to also be part of a trilogy, but I believe I’ll be re-working it to be a standalone. This was the very first manuscript I finished, but the first draft is extremely rough and needs a complete overhaul. This one probably won’t be for everyone (mainly those who don’t love the ‘chosen one’ trope), and is based in the Midwest (USA) and Northern Ireland. (Also very much inspired by Nora Roberts.)

 I would also love to have the second book in my Haven Shore series (following The Lady Phoenix) published before the Blue Bird Book Tour in the summer of 2024. I’m not sure if I’ll meet that goal, but I’ll try my best!

   Orville: Who is your target audience?

 Juliette: My target audience is definitely adult. I think anyone who might have enjoyed the Virgin River series (also on Netflix) might also enjoy The Lady Phoenix and what will follow in that series. I do touch on sensitive topics and use some foul language and explicit sex scenes, so it’s definitely not for everyone.

  Orville: What advice would you give a young person planning a writing career?

 Juliette: I think the best advice I can give to a young person is “don’t wait.” Don’t wait for ‘one day’ or ‘someday’ – the timing will never be just right, perfection is unattainable. If you want to write, then write!

 The next piece of advice is probably the most important one: ‘Don’t cut corners.’ Meaning, don’t skip any of the important steps. If they’re planning to go the traditional route, most of the steps are covered. But if they’re planning to go indie, it’s SO important to not cheap out. Yes, it can get expensive, but if this is something they’re serious about, then they need to treat it as such. Don’t skip the editors. Don’t skip the formatting. Don’t skip the beta readers, or the critique partners, or the proofreaders. Every step matters if you’re going to put out the best version of your work.

 Even in doing so, things can still be missed (as I’ve found out). I’m currently working to fix some missed errors in The Lady Phoenix so I can republish a more refined version.

  Orville: Do you think there are writing themes that are underrepresented?

 Juliette: Honestly, I don’t believe so. There are so many writers out there writing stories from every possible theme. Especially these days, I think every world issue, every movement, every belief, or lack thereof, and everything in between, can be found in literature. Whether fiction or nonfiction, there’s something for everyone.

 The issue of underrepresentation comes with lack of marketing (something I’m having trouble with, myself), and I feel that’s something many of us could afford to get better at doing.

  Orville: Share anything you want to have included

 Juliette: I’m going to veer off slightly with this one, and talk about Twitter, since this is the platform this is being shared on.

 It’s common knowledge that the writing community is THE place to be if you’re anyone in the writing or reading world. It’s also pretty common knowledge that we like to have fun over here, and that fun isn’t always centered around the business of writing.

 That being said, I’d like to emphasize the importance of being respectful, especially with someone you don’t know, or have no previous rapport with. People might see all colors of flirting between a bouquet of different people – these people almost always have previous rapport.

 Don’t assume to know someone, someone’s personal life, or the motives behind anything they say or do online, simply by what you see (or think you see) on Twitter. We all carry burdens, we all walk through our own storms, most of which are not shared.

 This isn’t high school; we are all adults, and, for the most part, chasing the same goal: to gain some level of success as a writer. So let’s check the drama at the virtual door, get along, and have fun while chasing those dreams

[sweetfirebird]

Have you tried Draft2Digital for formatting? That's free. I don't know how it works with Smashwords (I've never published there) but I never have problems with their formatting options when I use those files anywhere else I publish.

Draft to Digital is getting folded into Smashwords, and it will be interesting to see how that goes. I generally only use D2D for some library distribution so idk. Atticus offers ebook and paperback formatting, and it's the paperback formatting I was after. I can, and generally have to, do plain, serviceable formatting for the ebooks myself. Mostly because of Smashwords, which protests anything too fancy. Siiigh. (Smashwords still refuses to work the Beings boxset)

I wanted neater, cleaner, prettier paperbacks so I thought I would try Atticus.

What annoys me most about this is... well lots of things but largely that this platform (Atticus) wants to position itself as a rival to Vellum (which I loathe for being Mac exclusive and classist as fuck). And it's fine, probably, for basic things. BUT it has some flaws that, when you ask for help or point out the flaws, you get very friendly customer service people who seem to imply you are an idiot for not knowing the current workarounds to the problems or that it isn't a problem.

In this context, everything was fine. I had reviewed the documents many times. But Atticus has a (stupid, stupid) thing where if you import the document versus writing the document there, the quotation marks won't all convert to one style automatically.

Why, I have no idea.

The quotation marks as you are typing in Atticus all look like straight quotes even if they are curly in the formatting, but if you use their (tiny, tiny) 'format as you edit' screen, you can see where some don't convert. Usually following and em dash, and fixable.

But some are not fixable, and if the workarounds don't work, as they didn't in my case, they have a Smart Quotes option to change all the straight quotes to curlies.

Since I had tried everything else, I did that. Then I went to the (tiny, tiny) 'format as you edit' screen and looked and all the problem straight quotes had been curlified.

Done! I said to myself, and then fixed all the other Beings paperbacks and sent them on their way.

Only for--on release week no less--someone to email me to tell me that *random fucking end quotation marks* had been reversed all through the document.

It seems to have something to do with italics. But anyway. Not something you'd anticipate a program doing, so why would you check for it?

It reversed quotes that weren't an issue??? And when I emailed them, I got more chipper advice to send them screenshots so they can see the problem 'for the future.'

!!!

So because it's release week, I spent hours in their fucking format as you edit tiny-ass fucking screen changing all the wrong quotes I could spot *by hand* with my own workaround because theirs didn't work, and I probably missed a few but I spent the rest of the day resting my eyes from the strain of that.

So now I have to go through ALL OF THE OTHER BEINGS PAPERBACKS and look for this problem and do that all again.

In short, no, I don't recommend Atticus. But if you are going to use it, since, in theory it does make formatting a paperback neater, then do not ever use their smart quotes and do not ever write directly into it unless you only write into it and import nothing.

I will likely stick with them for the Beings so that everything matches in the future. But uh... not for anything else. Not unless they figure their shit out.

Anyway, I kind of want to cry about it but that would just give me another headache. I feel very much like all tools for writers or small businesses now either suck or want to charge you for everything relentlessly, and it's just disheartening.

Anyway. Sorry. Had to vent.

[asynca]

Hey! So, after a long time of wanting to read Under My Skin I finally bought it, and its sequel, through Smashwords, since I had already bought Solver for i there. The thing is, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, because maybe you took care of that, but the editing, as in the formatting of the text (like how it's distributed on the page) was a bit of a mess.

And that was only on the surface, because the html looked like it has been edited by 3 or 4 people at the same time, each using different methods. Like I said, I don't mean anything bad with that, and normally I'd keep quiet and just fix it for my personal use, but I love Solve for i, and by extension your writing, too much to leave it at that.

I dunno if you'd be interested to change the versions there with my own, and maybe that's too presumptuous of me, but if you are and want to see what I did, let me know, I can send you a few comparison photos I made.

Once again, I hope I don't offend you in any way with this message and if I do, I apologize. In no way this is meant to be a critique of your work or the skill of the person that edited the book.

And I am by no means a professional, but I am an very obsessive perfectionist and have a long story of re-editing ebooks and audiobooks to calm my OCD, to the point I spend more time editing than actually reading or listening.

But maybe it was done like that because you wanted it like that and I'm just being an idiot, in which case feel free to ignore me or tell me to fuck off, whichever you prefer. In any case, I'd rather no one sees this ask besides you, so if you want to see those comparisons, just make a post that says something like "Send me those pics, OCD nonnie."

I'll obviously do it by DM, I'm only doing this through anon because I'm too scared of you getting angry and knowing my name, even if it's just my online name. A bit spineless and pathetic of my, but the idea of you being angry at me, even though anon, is already making me feel a bit sick.

Anyways, sorry for the wall of text, it happens when I'm either excited or too nervous/anxious. I hope you have an awesome day. I know I will, because I'll be reading Under My Skin. Bye!!

Huh, does it look like a dog's breakfast? I don't do the eBook editing myself, but I do check the copies on my PC and phone (and tablet, for .epub and .mobi). My understanding was that books don't get approved for mass distribution by Smashwords if the formatting is terrible.

Not disbelieving you at all, I just haven't personally seen it.

Very happy to receive screenshots of the poor formatting so I can speak to the service who set it up for me. There's no need for you to use your precious time doing it! You could be reading loads more book <3

[purehealthpulse]

A Mindset Shift for Financial Success: My Experience with The Wealth Signal Download

Confession time: for the longest time, I felt stuck in a financial rut. My bills were paid, but there was never any wiggle room for savings or that dream vacation. I'd tried budgeting apps and financial planning tools, but nothing seemed to truly change my mindset around money. Then, I stumbled upon The Wealth Signal Downloads.

Intrigued by the Concept

The Wealth Signal Downloads piqued my interest with its focus on rewiring your subconscious mind for wealth attraction. The idea was that by changing your inner narrative around money, you could unlock greater financial abundance. It sounded a little out there, but the testimonials were compelling, and the price point was reasonable. So, I decided to give it a go.

A Treasure Trove of Resources

The Wealth Signal Downloads turned out to be a treasure trove of downloadable resources, including ebooks, audio guides, and even worksheets. The content covered a range of topics, from identifying limiting beliefs about money to practical wealth-building strategies. What I particularly liked was the clear and concise format – perfect for busy Brits like myself who don't have hours to spend buried in financial manuals.

Building a Positive Money Mindset

One of the most impactful aspects of the program was the focus on building a positive money mindset. The exercises helped me identify and challenge negative beliefs I held about wealth. For example, I realised I often associated wealth with greed, which was holding me back from achieving financial goals. The Wealth Signal Downloads helped me reframe my thinking and see money as a tool for security, freedom, and pursuing my passions.

Actionable Steps for Financial Growth

The program wasn't just about mindset – it also provided actionable steps for financial growth. There were modules on budgeting, investing basics, and even passive income generation strategies. While some of the concepts were new to me, the guides explained them in a clear and easy-to-understand way.

The Power of Daily Rituals

The Wealth Signal Downloads also introduced me to the power of daily rituals for financial success. This included practices like visualisation exercises and affirmations specifically designed to attract abundance. At first, I felt a bit silly whispering affirmations to myself, but over time, I noticed a shift in my perspective. I became more focused on opportunities to increase my income and started making better financial decisions.

Taking Control of My Finances

Since using The Wealth Signal Downloads, I've noticed a significant change in my relationship with money. I'm no longer on autopilot, and I feel more empowered to take control of my finances. I've implemented a budget that works for me, started a small emergency fund, and even dipped my toes into the world of stock investing. It's a gradual process, but I'm finally moving in the right direction.

A Valuable Tool, Not a Magic Bullet

It's important to remember that The Wealth Signal Downloads isn't a magic bullet. It takes effort and discipline to implement the strategies and change your mindset. However, if you're serious about improving your financial well-being and are willing to put in the work, this program can be a valuable tool.

If you're feeling stuck in a financial rut and are ready to rewrite your money story, I highly recommend checking out The Wealth Signal Downloads. It might just be the key to unlocking your full financial potential.

[hrarticle]

How To Create Interesting and Informative Infographics: Part 1

Everyone has a favorite learning style and method for absorbing knowledge that works best for them. For some, an auditory technique involving speaking and listening, such as a lecture, would suffice. Words, as well as reading and writing text, are important to others. According to the Social Science Research Network, roughly 65 percent use visual learning. This could explain why so many people enjoy infographics and why marketers are eager to use them to their maximum potential.

What is an infographic?

An infographic visually represents a set of data or information in simple terms. Typically, an infographic will explain something and, by focusing on the visual aspect, does it in a way that words cannot. However, there are some disadvantages.

‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,’ as the adage goes, but being brief and to the point is not easy. If you use Twitter, you’ll understand what I’m talking about (especially when you first start getting to grips with the character limit).

The same may be said about infographics. They will become less intriguing and work less well as they become more complicated and convoluted.

As McCandless’ famous TED talk “The Beauty of Data Visualization” demonstrates, data visualization is a science in and of itself.

The greatest and most effective infographics will be engaging, easy to read, and packed with useful information. However, this is difficult to achieve. It’s not as simple as putting a couple of charts together and filling in the blanks with colored boxes. It necessitates a great deal of planning.

Your hard effort will be rewarded with a fantastic piece of content that will assist promote your message. A well-designed infographic with fascinating ideas is likely to be shared widely online, allowing you to reach new audiences.

What makes a good infographic?

A good infographic will have a clear goal, be logical, tell a compelling tale, and contain reliable data. It will also be in the most appropriate format for the information it represents. Consider how users prefer to consume specific types of information and format your material accordingly. Further down the page, we delve deeper into a content format. For the time being, here are the points to consider when making an infographic.

Infographic format

Supporting content

Accuracy

Design

Technical aspects

Infographic format

Infographics aren’t necessarily always for digital use. They may well be useful when printed out too. You would need to think about different formats for both of these cases. Online, infographics work best when they are up to a max width of 735 pixels and no longer than 5000. But for print, you’re probably best considering traditional sizes, such as A0-A6, so they can be printed off for the wall, or used as a pocket reference guide.

Supporting content

An infographic also doesn’t have to be a stand-alone item (although that often works well too). Think about how you could supplement it with an article, eBook, or any other kind of content, perhaps explaining the concept in greater detail.

Accuracy

Make sure your data and information are 100% correct and accurate. Always quote your sources. Not only does it add credibility to your content, but it can do a lot of harm if you’re caught misrepresenting information.

Design

The overall design is a key component of any infographic. It certainly isn’t something that can just be thrown together. While it will most likely need to fit with your overall branding style, it doesn’t have to. But at the very least, always include your logo and contact details. Making decisions over color palettes, design elements, and overall arrangements takes skill. It’s best handed over to a professional if you want to ensure you achieve the best results. And always remember, the less text the better.

Technical aspects

Make sure that your infographic is as easy to share and embed as possible. Think about including tracking into the embedded link, so you can track how it spreads.

[billconrad]

I Used to Write Many Letters

    Before my authoring adventure began in 2016, I wrote a few short stories, four miserable patents, and many technical documents. This means that I did not consider writing to be a core skill. At best, it was a tool to help me communicate with known audiences.

    Last week, I was putting my second backup drive into a fireproof case. Since our home robbery, I have become paranoid about backups and have multiple backup locations. Inside the case were around 500 hand-written pages (500? Really?) from when I was 15-20. I wrote the bulk of these to my high school girlfriend and kept photocopies of the originals. Why did I keep this mess? Now, this backup paranoia makes a little more sense.

    I decided to shred them because I did not want my family to read my personal thoughts. Why? I am a different person now. Alright truth, I was concerned they would see my bad grammar, goofy ideas, and the fact that I wrote 500 pages of personal thoughts.

   It was no surprise to me that I flawlessly organized everything, and the condition was perfect. As I shredded, I read several pages, and the content shocked me. They contained deep and well-communicated feelings. I took a deep dive into ideas, life, invention ideas, the future, friends, events of the day and my passions. I had no idea that I used to write with so much intensity.

    These “raw” documents looked remarkably like my present style. I had a knack for freely expressing opinions and my passions. Plus, I still use the same verbs and sentence structure. Yet, I uncovered many differences. Young Bill could not spell to save his life, had no grammar ability, his thoughts went nowhere, and his repetitive vocabulary droned on like the Energizer Bunny. This is to be expected from a young writer. Side note: My handwriting has degraded.

    I was stunned to realize that writer Bill existed back then. He had passion, drive, and a positive attitude. This young guy wanted to make a big impression on the world and felt his mind contained all the necessary tools. Way to go!

    I now understand the source of my passion for writing. I began as a good writer. I suppose I knew this fact but did not accept my early ability. Side note: When I told my mother that I wanted to write a book, she said, “You were always a great writer.”

    What did my discovery tell me? To be a good writer, a core talent is necessary, along with a healthy respect for the topic. I wrongly assumed that my ability was a recent occurrence.

    You’re the best -Bill

    June 01, 2024

    Hey book lovers, I published four. Please check them out:

    Interviewing Immortality. A dramatic first-person psychological thriller that weaves a tale of intrigue, suspense, and self-confrontation.

    Pushed to the Edge of Survival. A drama, romance, and science fiction story about two unlikely people surviving a shipwreck and living with the consequences.

    Cable Ties. A slow-burn political thriller that reflects the realities of modern intelligence, law enforcement, department cooperation, and international politics.

    Saving Immortality. Continuing in the first-person psychological thriller genre, James Kimble searches for his former captor to answer his life’s questions.

    These books are available in soft-cover on Amazon and eBook format everywhere.

[transition-with-the-torah]

Title: When Bad Things Happen To Good People

Author: Harold Kushner

Format / Cost: Ebook (free via Libby). The version I had access to was copyrighted in 1981. The introduction and Chapters 1 and 7 include the use of the r-word to refer to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and Chapters 4 and 6 use cripple/cripples to refer to physically disabled people (additional chapters may also use crippled instead of disabled). It's not a malicious use of these words, but for people who skip past the copyright info and are not already aware of when this book was published, it may be a bit jarring to suddenly see this choice of words.

Overall, I can see why a lot of to-read lists include this book. Some people may appreciate considering why there's suffering in the world generally, but this is very much coming from a perspective that's more theistic and ultimately thinks that God and/or religion can still be a source of comfort, especially if interacting with some sort of community. (Kushner's a rabbi. The God/religion/community thing shouldn't be too surprising, nor should the Jewish examples like sitting shiva.)

Basically, the idea put forward is that God is not all-powerful, which may be kinda scary to think about for some. There can be bad luck and randomness in the universe, natural laws of this world aren't going to be miraculously altered, bad things can happen because of humans having the moral free will to do so, and the conceptualization of God as a parent who will punish us in order to teach us a lesson can bring about more blame, guilt, shame, and alienation from whatever comfort God/religion/community could provide than ultimately do most people good. More or less. But I think 'God is all-loving but not all-powerful' sums it up.

(This has been tagged with #reviews for personal blog organization purposes and may not be considered a full or satisfying review for anyone else. Some quotes are below the read-more.)

Chapter 1: Why Do the Righteous Suffer?

To ask "Why do the righteous suffer?" or "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is not to limit our concern to the martyrdom of saints and sages, but to try to understand why ordinary people—ourselves and people around us—should have to bear extraordinary burdens of grief and pain.

.

One of the ways in which people have tried to make sense of the world's suffering in every generation has been by assuming that we deserve what we get, that somehow our misfortunes comes as punishment for our sins [...] This is an attitude we will meet later in the book when we discuss the whole question of guilt. It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable. We give people the best possible reason for being good and for avoiding sin. And by believing that, we can maintain an image of God as all-loving, all-powerful, and totally in control.

.

Sometimes we try to make sense of life's trials by saying that people do in fact get what they deserve, but only over the course of time. At any given moment, life may seem unfair and innocent people may appear to be suffering. But if we wait long enough, we believe, we will see the righteousness of God's plan emerge.

I can't say I recognized Psalm 92 as an example of this coping mechanism, but it isn't just anecdotes about families in his congregation that are providing examples.

Often, victims of misfortune try to console themselves with the idea that God has His reasons for making this happen to them, reasons that they are in no position to judge.

See also: 'The Lord works in mysterious ways'.

Let us now consider another question: Can suffering be educational? Can it cure us of our faults and make us better people? Sometimes religious people who would like to believe that God has good reasons for making us suffer, try to imagine what those reasons might be. In the words of one of the great Orthodox Jewish thinkers of our time, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, "Suffering comes to ennoble man, to purge his thoughts of pride and superficiality, to expand his horizons. In sum, the purpose of suffering is to repair that which is faulty in a man's personality."

I think quite a few people nowadays would push back on the example of a parent spanking a child to teach them a lesson, but ultimately, the analogy of God in a parental role can still be parsed. Kushner pushes back on this educational idea by pointing out that a parent disciplining a child without making it clear what fault needs to be changed is more just randomly punishing the child, and it can be just as unhelpful to try to make the educational aspect be for the surrounding people.

If God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate far too often.

In the last few years, I've run into a meme that's along the lines of: God sends [fill in the blank] to His strongest soldiers. I'm more used to it be used in a light-hearted manner, but I must admit that it feels less light-hearted to have a bit more background on where that was likely coming from [Abraham was being given a test in being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac].

When all else fails, some people try to explain suffering by believing that it comes to liberate us from a world of pain and lead us to a better place.

On the one hand, I'm reminded of earlier reading where there were explanations of how the World To Come even became a thought in Jewish thinking (and how it was a reaction to Roman persecution), so this can sometimes make sense for some people. On the other hand, yeah: "since we cannot know for sure, we would be well advised to take this world as seriously as we can, in case it turns out to be the only one we will ever have, and to look for meaning and justice here."

This chapter ends with the proposition that God may not actually be the source of suffering – "Could it be that 'How could God do this to me?' is really the wrong question for us to ask?" – and sets up the exploration of the Book of Job in the next chapter.

-

Chapter 2: The Story of a Man Named Job

A long, long time ago, scholars believe, there must have been a well-known folk story, a kind of morality fable told to reinforce people's religious sentiments, about a pious man named Job. Job was so good, so perfect, that you realize at once that you are not reading about a real-life person. This is a "once-upon-a-time" story about a good man who suffered. [...] At the end, God appears, scolds the friends for their advice [to give up his piety], and rewards Job for his faithfulness. [...] [Our anonymous author] was so upset with this pious old fable that he took it, turned it inside out, and recast it as a philosophical poem in which the characters' positions are reversed. In the poem, Job does complain against God, and now it is the friends who uphold the conventional theology, the idea that "no ills befall the righteous."

I'm not going to give a play-by-play, but Job's friends don't want to have to give up on the idea that God is all-powerful, just, and fair, so they're willing to give up on the idea that Job is a good person. Job, with the firm self-knowledge that he's not any worse than others, is more willing to give up the idea that God is good. Instead, God is "above notions of fairness, being so powerful that no moral rules apply to Him" (and more similar to an insecure, ancient king in the fable who rewards people for their loyalty instead of their goodness).

Let me suggest that the author of the Book of Job takes the position which neither Job nor his friends take. He believes in God's goodness and in Job's goodness, and is prepared to give up his belief in proposition (A): that God is all-powerful.

This includes the part of God's speech about having trouble capturing a sea serpent in a net, which would not be unreasonably interpreted as a deity having trouble capturing disorder and chaos (with parallels or similarities to some other mythology of that time/place).

Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. Our question will not be Job's question "God, why are You doing this to me?" but rather "God, see what is happening to me. Can you help me?" We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.

I didn't pull out the specific quote from Chapter 1, but one of the potential drawbacks of seeing God as the source of suffering is that some people [who would otherwise like to get comfort from God via prayer] don't feel like they can, or are allowed, to seek that type of help from God if God is trying to teach them a lesson, punish them, test them, etc.

-

Chapter 3: Sometimes There Is No Reason

This is perhaps the philosophical idea which is the key to everything else I am suggesting in this book. Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe? Some people cannot handle that idea. They look for connections, striving desperately to make sense of all that happens. They convince themselves that God is cruel, or that they are sinners, rather than accept randomness. Sometimes, when they have made sense of ninety percent of everything they know, they let themselves assume that the other ten percent makes sense also, but lies beyond the reach of their understanding. But why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can't we let the universe have a few rough edges?

There several examples (who lives during a mass shooting, which homes burn in a wildfire, etc.) but the refusal on Kushner's part to accept God having a reason for Martin Luther King Jr dying when he did has an evocative line: "Why can't we acknowledge that the assassination was an affront to God, even as it was to us, and a sidetracking of His purposes, rather than strain our imaginations to find evidence of God's fingerprints on the murder weapon?"

Rather than strain our imaginations to find evidence of God's fingerprints on the murder weapon. (That's the type of phrase you underline or circle in a book.)

Suppose that Creation, the process of replacing chaos with order, were still going on. What would that mean? In the biblical metaphor of the six days of Creation, we would find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Friday afternoon. Man was just created a few "hours" ago. The world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God's thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain. Most of the time, the events of the universe follow firm natural laws. But every now and then, things happen not contrary to those laws of nature but outside them. Things happen which could just as easily have happened differently.

This isn't the sort of idea that's supposed to be a definite answer for everyone. It's more of a way to accept that randomness is a possibility, and Kushner uses an example of where hurricanes ultimately wind up making landfall. (He also pushes back on some purported beliefs that earthquakes are a punishment from God for the "alleged homosexual excesses of San Francisco" and such sinful judgments. Post-2005, I remember someone used to use the example of Hurricane Katrina being a punishment for America for progress on gay rights.)

Or it may be that God finished His work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. Residual chaos, chance and mischance, things happening for no reason, will continue to be with us, the kind of evil that Milton Steinberg has called "the still unremoved scaffolding of the edifice of God's creativity." In that case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.

-

Chapter 4: No Exceptions for Nice People

Laws of nature treat everyone alike. They do not make exceptions for good people or for useful people. If a man enters a house where someone has a contagious disease, he runs the risk of catching that disease. It makes no difference why he is in the house. He may be a doctor or a burglar; disease germs cannot tell the difference. [...] Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone. No matter what stories we were taught about Daniel or Jonah in Sunday school, God does not reach down to interrupt the workings of laws of nature to protect the righteous from harm. [...] Would this be a better world, if certain people were immune to laws of nature because God favored them, while the rest of us had to fend for ourselves?

Kushner pushes back a bit on acts of nature being called 'acts of God' by insurance companies, and then he transitions from 'Why do good and bad people experience XYZ?' to 'Why do people in general have to feel pain, get sick, or die?' as a line of thinking. Pain is important for taking care of our bodies (to prevent worse injuries, say) even if we can't always imbue the pain with meaning and significance. Getting sick is more presented as cause-and-effect and us gradually learning more about how humans get sick, though it'd be nice to not have that fatphobic example. (Eugenics is also a bad idea even if certain illnesses have a genetic source.) Death is presented as a species benefit from looking at drawbacks of fictional immortality with a clear acknowledgment that this perspective doesn't provide comfort to individuals dealing with death or grief.

-

Chapter 5: God Leaves Us Room to Be Human

There's this whole thing with how humans were created as part animal, part not-animal [in the image of God]. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil presents a differentiation from animals just living based on pure instinct. I can see how this is getting to Kushner's point that a certain amount of bad things happen because humans have moral freedom and the free will to choose to do bad things, but I also feel like I'm not entirely convinced by some of the specific examples being used to get to that point. (This is probably a difference in approaches to animal intelligence and social capabilities in 2024 versus 1981.)

In order to let us be free, in order to let us be human, God has to leave us free to choose to do right or to do wrong. If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either. Like the animals, we can only be convenient or inconvenient, obedient or disobedient. We can no longer be moral, which means we can no longer be human. [...] Our moral freedom means that, if we choose to be selfish or dishonest, we can be selfish and dishonest, and God will not stop us. If we want to take something that does not belong to us, God will not reach down and pull our hand away from the cookie jar. If we want to hurt someone, God will not intervene to keep us from doing that. All He will do is tell us that certain things are wrong, warn us that we will be sorry for having done them, and hope that, if we don't take His word for it, we will at least learn from experience.

There are small scale examples that support this idea, but Kushner does include the Holocaust as a bad thing that happened due to humanity's moral freedom instead of a specific plan on God's part.

-

Chapter 6: God Helps Those Who Stop Hurting Themselves

One of the worst things that happens to a person who has been hurt by life is that he tends to compound the damage by hurting himself a second time. Not only is he the victim of rejection, bereavement, injury, or bad luck; he often feels the need to see himself as a bad person who had this coming to him, and because of that drive away people who try to come close to him and help him. Too often, in our pain and confusion, we instinctively do the wrong thing. We don't feel we deserve to be helped, so we let guilt, anger, jealousy, and self-imposed loneliness make a bad situation even worse.

There's a section that calls back to the chapter on Job, but it also broadly covers guilt and blame. We can accidentally affirm someone's feelings of guilt, we can carry baggage about deserving blame for bad things into a present situation, and sometimes we actually should feel guilty (the anecdote used was someone who had cheated on his wife with his secretary). There's also a section on talking about death with teenagers and children, including some care with 'stock phrases' that can accidentally affirm guilt or blame.

There's a sliding scale of truly understanding what death means for children – whole books are devoted to explaining death to youngsters, so this section won't handle everything – but one should definitely be mindful of young children blaming themselves or thinking a death was punishment for something that happened recently. Odds are that a teen trying to increase their independence from their parents will feel some amount of annoyance with them, want them to go away, or otherwise not be a perfect example of gratefulness or communication, and one should try not to imply that these relatively normal teenage things are to blame for a parent dying [the anecdote featured a teen whose mother died from cancer].

Anger isn't uncommon in the grieving process. Sometimes a situation will have a very clear cut person to be angry at, but other times, there's so much anger that it can get a bit misdirected. I'm not certain that I'm sold on the idea that depression is anger turned inwards, but I suppose it's sometimes that way, maybe moreso in specific grief and self-blame examples. Unsurprisingly, some people will be angry at God, but Kushner holds that it's better to be angry at the situation and leave room for some sort of religious comfort.

Actually, being angry at God won't hurt God, and neither will it provoke Him to take measures against us. If it makes us feel better to vent our anger at Him over a painful situation, we are free to do it.

I don't know if some psychologists actually do trace the origins of jealousy to sibling rivalry, but jealousy is also an unavoidable feeling when dealing with overcoming hard situations.

The afflicted person is not looking for an invitation to join the Suffering Olympics. But it would help if we remembered this: Anguish and heart-break may not be distributed evenly throughout the world, but they are distributed very widely. Everyone gets his share. If we knew the facts, we would very rarely find someone whose life was to be envied.

-

Chapter 7: God Can't Do Everything, But He Can Do Some Important Things

If we believe in God, but we do not hold God responsible for life's tragedies, if we believe that God wants justice and fairness but cannot always arrange for them, what are we doing when we pray to God for a favorable outcome to a crisis in our life?

There are certain types of prayer that are considered ineffective, and one shouldn't expect God to be able to answer them: When an event has already happened and we don't know the outcome yet, we shouldn't ask God to "go back and rewrite the past" for us. God cannot change the laws of nature for our benefit. We shouldn't pray for harm for someone else, and we shouldn't pray for God to do something we have the resources to do and are capable of doing.

This doesn't mean that there's nothing to even bother praying for, but the point of prayer (and religion in general) is community. You sit shiva, eat the meal of replenishment (se'udat havra'ah) after returning from the cemetery, and attend services to recite the Mourners' Kaddish because it's a means of accessing community.

One goes to a religious service, one recites the traditional prayers, not in order to find God (there are plenty of other places where He can be found), but to find a congregation, to find people with whom you can share that which means the most to you. From that point of view, just being able to pray helps, whether your prayer changes the world outside you or not.

Kushner contrasts two prayers said by Jacob at two points in his life. When he first leaves his home as a young man, he does the typical 'whatever you want, I'll do it' sort of barter. After building a family and 20 years going by, when he is going to return to his childhood home, he acknowledges that he's afraid and does more of a 'can't do this alone' sort of prayer.

The God I believe in does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with the problem. [...] One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real, and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope, and courage so often find resources of strength, hope, and courage that they did not have before they prayed.

-

Chapter 8: What Good, Then, Is Religion?

A book telling people how much I hurt would not do anyone any good. This had to be a book that would affirm life. It would have to say that no one ever promised us a life free from pain and disappointment. The most anyone promised us was that we would not be alone in our pain, and that we would be able to draw upon a source outside ourselves for the strength and courage we would need to survive life's tragedies and life's unfairness.

Posts about martyrdom and the Air Force member who killed himself have been circling back around on my dash, though it's no longer a recent news story, and it feels important that this book is trying to affirm life.

Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not, "Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?" That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be "Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?"

It kind of reminds me of some radical acceptance posts I've seen – I think from a chronically ill person doing DBT – about figuring out how to live with chronic illness and disability post-diagnosis.

God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help. As a nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi once put it, "human beings are God's language."

Examples touched upon are people who help in natural disasters, people who research diseases (like cancer), people who become doctors and nurses, and people who reach out to your family when living with a diagnosis (not in big, immediate ways, but in treating you and your family like fellow neighbors and friends in the small ways, even years on).

Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people? That depends on what we mean by "answer." If we mean "Is there an explanation which will make sense of it all?"—Why is there cancer in the world? Why did my father get cancer? Why did the plane crash? Why did my child die?—then there is probably no satisfying answer. We can offer learned explanations, but in the end, when we have covered all the squares on the game board and are feeling very proud of our cleverness, the pain and the anguish and the sense of unfairness will still be there. But the word "answer" can mean "response" as well as "explanation," and in that sense, there may well be a satisfying answer to the tragedies in our lives. The response would be Job's response in MacLeish's version of the biblical story—to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all.

A previous section covered Archibald MacLeish's play J.B., which is a modern retelling of Job's story. J.B. loses his children and house in a nuclear event, the comforters have been modernized a bit (such as a Marxist saying that J.B. had the bad luck to be a capitalist during capitalism's decline), and J.B. ultimately begins a new life with his wife (the possibility to have future children replaces God restoring all that Job lost).

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be?

This is from the ending where the question of why bad things happen is turned into questions of how we respond to the bad thing and go forward. I pulled this particular section out because it feels like an apt way to round out a chapter based on figuring out how to respond to religion in a broad sense in the wake of all these other chapters.

[someplace-that-is-else]

GOOD MORNING, LIKERS!!! #also...HAPPY HUMP DAY!!! I hope now that #spring is here, the weather has started to get warmer for you.

And #speaking of warm...in case you missed the headsup yesterday...Amazon #uk was set to have my DARKENED series on sale next week. Darkened Soul, Darkchilde, and Darkened Tabula...#all at a discounted price. So...happy #Easter?

Now...how was the week shaping up? Well...let's see. Otherwise known as...EDITING, TYPING, and WRITING.

EDITING. Well...here we are.

It was the #final formatting sweep before the upload to Amazon for HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. After that, I double...okay triple check how the formatting looks on Amazon.

It had been a minute for me. 2020 to be exact. I suspect already that the ebook would be a problem versus the book. But...we'll see...

TYPING. In case you missed it as well, my blog was #live!!!

YES!!! The elusive blog was no longer elusive. And it could be viewed with my other blogs at: https://www.tumblr.com/someplace-that-is-else/745798287550021632/traces-of-you-part-the-second.

Meanwhile, my mind was already onto the next blog. On one hand, yay!!! On the other hand, that meant that I had a few ideas in my head. How to #decide...hmmm.

I would like to get my blogging back up to its own routine. At the least, once a month again. It made me wonder...how creative could my mind be? One way to find out for sure. lol.

I #always wanted to rotate. I usually rotated. A writer-based blog one week. A tv show related blog the next. And then back again. So I felt that I would be doing that again.

I even had a tv show in mind. It's been on my mind for a while. And with a surprisingly amount of time on my hands as of late, I definitely had the viewing #research time. But that was going to be a chore for the tv show blog.

#Or...a good challenge.

We would see.

PS. I also have another writer based blog on my mind. Perhaps a #continuation of my 'Traces of You' series that I've been posting.

Hmmm...gotta love the brain and how it works when it's on fire.

WRITING. I was #adamant last week that I would find writing time. I was going to write. But...alas.

I only have myself to blame. So many balls in the air. What could I expect? Well...for one...#better time management. And that I was seeing going on a lot this week. Thank you, Universe, for my manifestation. ;)

So today should also be the return of writing sessions in my life. I felt a bit nervous about that. To be honest. lol.

But I think that was because I have not sat down with myself and outline where I wanted the story to go. And I was scared of my muse. Just like I was with HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. Of course...same #muse. Also it has been a minute since I've touched on #horror...a genre I have been wanting to get back to.

So as I work today, I'll be mentally #plotting where I want the first few chapters to go. I'll be thinking about characters' motivation. I'll decide which prologue I like better cuz I have two. #suchawriter I would think about Ben (my main character)'s inner life.

In other words, letting the #wip breathe.

That's how this week was looking. :)