Remembering the firefighters

One good thing about social media: It’s a great way to learn about news. There’s been many times I’ve seen a tweet on Twitter or a post on Facebook that caught my attention and had me Googling to see what happened. Or, I’ll check a newsfeed I have on my phone or scan the news on TV for updates on stories. Sometimes, though, if it’s major news, I’ll wait for the next day’s newspaper so that I can read a more thorough story about it.

That’s what happened last week, when I heard about the 19 firefighters who perished while battling a forest fire. I saw something about it on Facebook then read more about what happened on CNN and in my local paper. I was saddened and devastated to learn that 19 firefighters died while fighting a blaze. My heart really went out to their families. It’s such a sad thing that happened.

And I was thinking about it a lot last week. I have heaps respect for firefighters, mainly because firefighters saved my life when I was in that accident so many years ago. As a burn survivor, I am very grateful for all that firefighters do. They risk their lives to save people. They are true heroes.

I was especially thinking about that last week while I was busy working on getting my poetry book, Follow That Dream, uploaded at Createspace. As I reviewed the electronic proof of the book, I had to pause and reread the poem “Deserved Praise,” in which I thank firefighters for all they do for us. This is my only poem in the book that I wrote for firefighters, but in my next poetry book, Touched by Fire, there are more poems about being a burn survivor as well as poems that honor firefighters.

In fact, I was so moved by the newspaper article I read about the Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished, that I wrote a poem honoring those lost. I am thinking of including it in the next poetry book.

Poetry is just one way in which I remember and thank firefighters for what they do. I also wave to the firefighters who pass me by in their engines. That wave is me telling them, “Thank you.”

Advice to nonfiction authors: Don't lie

Some time ago, I read the book Roots by Alex Haley. It’s a very good book and I was impressed by how much time and research the author put into his book. Later, I went online to look up more information about it, because I was very interested in what happened after the book was published. I was dismayed to learn that Haley admitted that not all of the material in his book was true. Because the man did not have a time machine and could not go back in time to double-check everything and learn exactly how things were, he had to use literary license to fill in the gaps. I accepted this, but what I could not accept was how there were people claiming Haley lifted their stories as his own and that the main character in the story, Kunta Kinte, didn’t even exist. After reading all of that, I started to get suspicious with what was in the book. How was I to know if anything in the book was true or not? It was, after all, labeled a nonfiction book, but how could I know which parts of it were fiction?

The recent controversy over the now disgraced athlete Lance Armstrong made me remember this. Because of Armstrong’s recent confession on national television that he lied about doping to win the Tour de France, the world now knows that all of those times he fervently denied such accusations and everything he wrote in his books were all just a fake. They were his way of perpetuating the lie.

It seems that Armstrong has a long, tough road ahead of him in winning back the world’s admiration and respect. But it also appears that this lie is going to cost him A LOT of money. Not only are newspapers and magazines suing him for the lawsuits they lost or helped to defend, but readers of his books are suing him, as well. An article I read today discussed how two readers in particular are so upset over Armstrong’s public admission of the lie that they want to be reimbursed for buying his books.

This is not the first time an author of nonfiction books has been caught in a lie. But I have to wonder what’s going to happen after all is said and done, after everybody is paid and the whole thing blows over. What book would Armstrong write next? Bigger question: Will readers believe what he writes in them? Perhaps if he convinces the world he’s not a liar anymore or that he changes everything and becomes an honest man people can trust again, maybe readers will believe everything he writes in future books. Still makes me wonder, though.

But it’s not just readers that he has angered; it is possible his editors and publishers are not all that happy with him, either. Would they be willing to publish his next book? Armstrong now has an iffy relationship with his readers. What can be said of his relationship with his publishers?

Of course, the man is famous and brings in a lot of money no matter what happens. He’ll get published again.

But for the writer who is not famous, not worth millions of dollars and who is Very Lucky to get a nonfiction book published, things can be very different. This particular writer would have a harder time setting things right with readers again, let alone editors and publishers. And if an author's lie(s) in a book get so bad and build up a lot of controversy, it's very likely publishers won't want to work with this author again.

In my opinion, nonfiction should be nonfiction. There are no two ways about it. It should be as true, honest and as accurate as the writer can make it. Otherwise, you’re just writing fiction instead and should publish it as such. If you’re making things up or lying to readers, then that does not make the book nonfiction. It makes it fiction or, as some people have claimed, a fraud.

Playing "What if?" with the newspaper

The other day, I was reading an article in the newspaper about an apparent murder-suicide. What troubled me was that the writer of the article noted in his lead that the site of this tragedy was on the same street where a local teen girl was starved and murdered by torture at the hands of her mother in 2009. The mother recently was on trial (she was sentenced to death on Thursday). What I didn’t get was why the writer chose to start his article with this coincidence. Why mention the apparent murder-suicide happened on that same street? What’s the connection?

Unfortunately, there was no connection mentioned in the article, so why the writer chose to do that is a mystery to me. However, the writer in me started to wonder…”what if?”

What if it had NOT been a “murder-suicide”…but a murder? After all, police did not recover the murder weapon at the scene. (If they had, the writer should have mentioned this. I mean, where IS that murder weapon? Usually, if someone commits suicide with a gun, they find the gun used on the scene.) What if these people knew the mother and had information supporting her guilt? (There was a chance she’d get life in prison instead of the death penalty.) What if she’d managed to hire someone to murder those people so that they couldn’t say anything?

There was no connection in this newspaper article, but my imagination started to create one.

This hung with me for a while. It definitely has the stuff of a good mystery story.

And speaking of mystery, I had to laugh after I solved a Jumble puzzle in the newspaper the other day. I laughed because the words I unscrambled could easily be a secret message to warn someone of something: “Foyer,” “Album,” “Beware” and “Poison.”

Hm, another mystery story inspired by something I read in the newspaper? We’ll see.

It’s a Free Country – Except in Publishing

Attention aspiring writers: Gatekeepers exist for a reason. You know them: The people who wade through a bazillion submissions of books, essays, short stories, poems and articles to find that gem they’re ready to publish. They are commonly known as an “editors.” But when you are a self-publishing writer, you are (usually) your own editor. In fact, when it comes to having no gatekeeper at all, the same self-publishing writer may assume they have the right to publish any old thing they want to publish. And that’s where things can get dangerous.

A writer self-published a book through Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing program that promotes a crime: Molesting children. The person committing this horrible act against a child is known as a “pedophile.” Remember that word because it’s part of the title: The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure.

I was first alerted to this yesterday when I got an email from a cousin about it. “Boycott Amazon!” the email blared. Huh? I thought. What’s that about? I may devour news items on the Internet every day and read as many newspapers as I can get my hands on, but this was unknown to me. I did some checking around on the ‘Net. Then I realized there’s one place to go to get the information I needed: Blogs. I checked the list of “Blogs I read” on my Palms to Pines blog and, thankfully, Jenna Glatzer blogged about this. I read her post and, needless to say, the whole situation made me sick.

What’s worse is that Amazon.com was apparently not giving a crap about it.

Their reasoning is that they cannot censor what people publish through their site. Oh, it may be a free country, Amazon, but it’s not so free in book publishing!

See, this is what the gatekeepers are for: To filter out the garbage. I suspect the author may have tried (and failed) to publish his book through a traditional press, only to self-publish it after it was (rightfully) rejected. Sometimes, there’s a VERY good reason why a book is rejected for publication.

And it should have been rejected by Amazon, but it wasn’t.

Fortunately, there is strength in numbers. It would seem that enough people on the World Wide Web made such an outcry about the sale of this book, that Amazon finally came to its senses and removed it. Good riddance!

A writer who will try to enter a contest or submit a short story to an anthology will often see this warning in the submission guidelines: “We will not publish anything that promotes racism, violence, crimes against children, rape and hate crimes.” Or, something to that effect. That kind of writing promoting that kind of activity will only encourage readers of such material who do such things to think that, gee, that stuff must be a pretty good idea if there are other people promoting it!

But, no. That sort of thing is NOT a good idea. Neither is molesting children. I have no sympathy for a pedophile. They are sick and predatory. I know people who were molested as children and they still struggle with the nightmare of it all. This book was probably written with the warped and twisted POV of a pedophile, which makes it even more dangerous. Apparently, the author has no qualms about sexually abusing a child, and thinks encouraging other pedophiles to keep doing what they’re doing is something worth writing a book about.

But no book like this should ever be in print. Not ever. There shouldn’t be books promoting the “fun” of rape, explaining away the reason why more people should be allowed to commit hate crimes, or even encouraging a pedophile in their attacks against children. And, yes, that’s the kind of category this book falls into. It is just one more thing promoting something that is wrong in this world.

We may live in a free country, but it’s not so free in the publishing world. You are not free to promote your hatred, your poisons and your twisted logic over committing a crime. There are gatekeepers who will refuse to allow hateful and criminal material from seeing print. We need more of them.

UPDATE: This may be helpful to concerned parents.

What's to love about newspaper articles? For some of us, it's not length

This morning, I came across the article Cut This Story! by Michael Kinsley. I was logged in at Twitter at the time and shared the link, as well as comments, but I feel compelled to comment further on Mr. Kinsley's claim that newspapers are going the way of dot matrix printers only because the articles in them are too long.

As an avid reader of newspapers, and not just a journalist for one, I must disagree with this claim. Yes, I feel that in some instances, writers dump unnecessary and wordy information on their readers, yet some of that information Mr. Kinsley has cited is actually quite useful. I would like to know who a particular source is, why they are being quoted, and what relationship they have to the topic. I'm sure they were included as a source for a very good reason, some of which may require a little lengthy explanation by the writer as a means of introduction.

Additionally, one point I noted in my Twitter comments is that some writers sacrifice good writing and organization just to keep their articles short. I want to read a well-written article, and if that means a lengthy article to read, then so be it. Don't clutter your article with more quotes and less writing. I also appreciate it when the writer of a newspaper article goes in depth on the topic which they are writing about. I want the FULL story, not some 500-word summary I could find in a copy of USA Today. I want to know both sides of an issue, the details of what exactly happened, why this is newsworthy, why I should care and how this relates to us, as a society, on a human level.

As an example, I recently read a story in the (Eugene) Register-Guard of how cattlemen are finding their cattle stolen. The article began with one rancher's story of a discovery he made one day in which some of his cattle were missing, with tell-tale clues that they just didn't wander off. Someone advocating brevity in newspaper articles may claim that such a lead should be cut, or heavily snipped and pruned, because it tells us nothing about the topic at hand. I say, leave it. This is putting me into the victim's shoes. This is showing me on a personal level what the rancher is going through.

In that same newspaper, a reader once complained that a reporter's details about an infant's murder were too grisly for print, and should not have been included in the story. Well, I would like to know what exactly happened to the baby.

Why should journalists and newspaper reporters all of a sudden become gatekeepers of what they write and report, all in the name of "protecting" readers from unpleasant information -- or even more words to read?

My point is, if I'm going to take the time to read a newspaper article, I want to get the WHOLE story. I want all of the information and all of the facts. Don't leave readers hanging just for the sake of keeping an article short.

Yes, length can be an issue for some readers, but what must come first when writing a newspaper article is the ability to report on the news as in-depth as possible. Cover all your bases. Answer the 5 W's and H. Make sure readers can read "all the news that's fit to print" -- and that it is indeed all of it.

Was it stress to meet a deadline, or poor research?

In light of the recent story about a financial writer who dropped the bomb with reposting an old story as "news," I have to wonder if this was the result of her trying to rush and beat a deadline or if she was just too lazy to do a little further reading to verify her information. Regardless of what it was, United Airlines took a hit for her screw-up.

Case in point: A writer for a newsletter Income Securities Advisors Inc. caused a stir among investors when she took a story about United Airlines filing for Chapter 11 protection which ran on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel website she came across on the Internet and posted it as a current story. Problem was, the story dated back to December, 2002, which she failed to figure out herself. In other words, she screwed up big time. I guess this writer was too lazy to look into that story any further than the actual report because she took that story as gospel and passed on the news to the newsletter. And that very act made the news story get posted on Bloomberg. Five seconds later, the stocks for United Airlines plummetted.

Ouch.

And no matter how you look at it, it seems like this writer decided not to look for the source of that article. It was reprinted from the Chicago Tribune. Had she looked THAT up, it would've shown it was a 2002 story. It really irritates me when someone sees something on the Internet and thinks it's "news" or "current" without even looking into it further. If you do a little digging, maybe some scrolling, the date of a story, blog post, work posted online, etc., will be revealed in all its glory.

In the writer's defense, the date of the filing (December 9, 2002) was not revealed in the story. Okay, fine. That's no excuse for sloppy reporting.
And she must've had to search for a long time because I did the same thing she did and didn't see that story come up until after several clicks.

But guess which kind of related story came up first? That's right: The story telling the WHOLE world about her mistake. Link after link after link.

All I will say is, writers, do your homework. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. Question everything and READ everything.

Here is the link to the story online:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-united-old-story-sep8,0,7800230.story

Here is the original story, courtesy of chicagotribune.com:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/chi-021209ual,0,4177704.story

For further reading on this subject:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=150236

http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2008/09/sunsentinel_error_temporarily.php

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/tribune-findings-united-airlines-story/story.aspx?guid=%7BF42DE17B-72B9-46D6-AB0A-2FB2B0D278F1%7D&dist=hppr