spying on us: how loud does the whistle have to blow?

I don’t give a rat’s ass damn why Edward Snowden blew the whistle–whether he’s a spy, a patriot or a nut.

What I do care about: I have been classified a criminal.

And so have you.

Our government feels it is equally important to collect information on you, me and Al Qaida.

On September 12th, 2001, Americans agreed with an array of security measures in order to feel safe again. So now the government bugs reporters’ phones. I don’t remember agreeing to intimidation of a free press.

Parents of a deceased Navy Seal who have questioned the circumstances of his death, have reason to believe their phone has been surveilled. I didn’t agree to harass grieving parents.

All of the major companies in social media (except Twitter) hand tons of data over to the government. No reason. No warrant. Just because we are all guilty, until proven otherwise.

Think of it. Who you called, when, and for how long. Maybe even what you said. Your photos, your documents, your messages, purchases, bank and credit card transactions, your geographic location. What you surfed on the web.  Information all gathered without rationale, without showing a judge probable cause, without a warrant.

I am damn sure I never agreed to that.

Anybody remember what happened after 9-11 when the FBI tried to demand lists of books that patrons checked out of libraries? The librarians told them to take a flying leap, that’s what happened. ALA’s standards are to protect their customers’ privacy.

Listening, Google?

There have been previous NSA whistle blowers, who contended that U.S authorities were violating Fourth Amendment rights. Nobody cared.

Well, care now.

The IRS goes beyond the scope of its warrant to gather files concerning the financial dealings of an employee of a health institute, and seizes the health records of ten million innocent people, even though workers inform them they are violating HIPPA laws and their own warrant. (Yes, that is a horrible run-on sentence. I am blind passion.) Oh, well. At least the IRS has canceled its spyware purchases. Probably because they got caught.

A 95-year-old lady with leukemia, in a wheelchair, is forced to remove her adult diaper by TSA.

Have a fender bender in New Jersey, and soon the cop might be able to confiscate your cell phone. Ostensibly to see if it contributed to the accident, but what if you’re videoing your interaction for some reason and the cop doesn’t like it? (Which you can do.)

All those laws that chip away at your freedom sound like a great idea at the time, but guess what. If they can be misused, they eventually will be. Because when citizens allow their government to treat all of them like criminals–without reason, without provocation–it isn’t long before disagreeing with the government becomes a crime.

Tell the truth. Since you’ve found out that Google, Yahoo and Facebook turn over aggregated data to the NSA, have you thought twice about retweeting something? Posting something on Facebook?

Writing about certain topics on your blog?

If we really want to be safe, we can allow Homeland Security into all our homes, let them inventory all our stuff and microchip us. After all, that’s what we’re currently allowing, virtually.

I don’t want to be that safe. I want my business to be my own–not because I have anything to hide, but because dammit, it’s none of anyone else’s effin’ concern.

I am a lawful citizen.

I demand privacy from my government.

My life belongs to me.

The IRS, currently in the midst of scandals involving the targeting of conservative groups and lavish taxpayer-funded conferences, is ordering surveillance equipment that includes hidden cameras in coffee trays, plants and clock radios. – See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-buying-spying-equipment-covert-cameras-coffee-trays-plants#sthash.I5PdOztK.dpuf

IRS Buying Spying Equipment: Covert Cameras in Coffee Trays, Plants – See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-buying-spying-equipment-covert-cameras-coffee-trays-plants#sthash.I5PdOztK.dpuf

IRS Buying Spying Equipment: Covert Cameras in Coffee Trays, Plants – See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-buying-spying-equipment-covert-cameras-coffee-trays-plants#sthash.I5PdOztK.dpuf

IRS Buying Spying Equipment: Covert Cameras in Coffee Trays, Plants – See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-buying-spying-equipment-covert-cameras-coffee-trays-plants#sthash.I5PdOztK.dpuf

IRS Buying Spying Equipment: Covert Cameras in Coffee Trays, Plants – See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-buying-spying-equipment-covert-cameras-coffee-trays-plants#sthash.I5PdOztK.dpuf

 

stories of ghosts and us

I’ve been everywhere, man. (Cue music.)

Across the deserts bare, man.

Breathed that mountain air, man.

You get the idea.

One of the things we did last week, was go on a ghost tour in Old Town, in Albuquerque.

Now, there’s some fun.

Two guides and only seven people in the group. Excellent stories, videos, pictures, EVPs, (electric voice phenomena) and history lessons.

Yes, history lessons.

It occurred to me that really, the tour boiled down to one gigantic history lesson.

Because where does a ghost come from, but the past? Whether it’s 1998 or 1698, ghosts are reminders of what came before us.

When Great Aunt Melba rattles around in the attic, we communicate with our ancestors. Union soldiers at Shiloh allow us to affirm the continuity of our country.  Incan ghosts at Machu Picchu let us know that even if the glory of our civilization dies, we will not.

I’m thinking about writing a ghost story for my next novel. Of course, in order for a ghost story to be interesting it has to be more than haints floating around a dilapidated house. There has to be some sort of psychosis involved.

I’m wondering if the more the main character connects with the ghost, the more frightening it is. The better the ghost can infiltrate his psyche, and therefore, the reader’s, the more the ghost can play him like a fiddle.

I mean, aren’t we all so OVER monsters?

I dunno. Still puzzling this out. Tell me what you think.

horror in real life is why we write horror in fiction

After a week of non-stop horrible, real-life punches in the gut from Boston and West, Texas, I’ve lost enthusiasm for revising my current manuscript.

I write YA—edgy YA—with foul language, violence, terror and gruesome details, when necessary.

But witnessing real suffering all week has exhausted my capacity for such things. Telling stories seems silly. Useless.

Disrespectful.

But that’s wrong.

In a horrible coincidence, the week before the Boston Marathon Bombing, my daughter saw a woman suffer a “traumatic amputation”. My daughter wouldn’t talk about it, all she did was tell me it happened.

Then the Boston catastrophe occurred. And stories were told through text, video and still picture.

My daughter called. She asked if I had seen the picture of the man in the wheelchair who had lost both his legs. She recounted the story of how the man in the cowboy hat grabbed him up, saved him.

Then she finally let the nightmare out of her head and told me about the day she watched a woman become an amputee.

We need stories.

So tomorrow I will start back again. I will get it all as right as I can.

I write so those who’ve never experienced terrible things can understand those who have.

I write so those who have experienced terrible things can find a way in to talk about it.

marriage for everybody!

GAY MARRIAGE!!!

Should not even be an issue.

Government needs to get out of the marriage business all together.

Marriage, after all, is a religious institution. Let the churches handle marriage, let the government handle Civil Partnerships.

See, everybody should have a partner in life, someone who’s got your back. And that person should be designated your “next-of-kin” for legal purposes–insurance, benefits, debts and assets. Health directives.

A Civil Partnership could be two seventy-year-old widowed friends with no family, no interest in remarrying, living a Golden Girls life.

Maybe two people do not want to marry but are committed to raising children together–for whatever reason. A partnership might be two siblings who must live together and raise six orphaned nephews. Why shouldn’t those siblings have the tax advantages and insurance rates a married couple has? They certainly have the expenses that the married benefits were designed to mitigate.

Yeah. No one’s brought that up. Because they are nimrods.

Because they are too busy DRAWING PICTURES IN THEIR HEADS OF WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING IN THE BEDROOM.

Yes, in my perfect world, just as religiously married people currently are also civilly married, a religiously married person would also have a legal Civil Partnership. But you would not HAVE to be married, to enter into a Civil Partnership.

It’s none of my effin’ business, what floats somebody’s boat. And it’s just plain rude to speculate on such matters.

So quit waggin’ your collective finger. Quit judging each other. Allow everyone to decide what is best for them, guided by religious, philosophic, and scientific institutions.

The only thing left for the government to decide, is what is equitable.

write, wrote, have written

Writers live in the past.

We have to.

If our dialogue is going to ring true we must listen to hours of conversations between real people, then recall those words later, at the keyboard.

To put a reader in a setting we must know that place, even if it is a place we’ve never visited, or a place we’ve created in the clouds.  Either way, the sensory clues will be the same. Sights, smells, sounds—all things the writer experiences and files away to call upon when she opens her work-in-progress.

The plot springs from something that happened to the writer, or happened to someone he knew, or it’s something he read about. The finished story might not resemble the original spark in any way, but it certainly didn’t pop out of nowhere, unattached to the human condition.

Emotion.  The hardest thing to put into our manuscripts, the shadows of our past we don’t want to examine. Even if the reason for the character’s emotion is vastly different than the circumstances the writer faced, it’s painful to put ourselves in that space. To be that raw. And then spill it on the page.

People cherish truth.

The best writers will time-travel to get it for them.

characters make or break a story

I’ve been watching the TV series Supernatural for the last couple of months on Netflix.

Purely so I can talk to you about character.  *cough*

Supernatural is short on plot, shorter on logic. Shortest of all on production values. In my next life, I want to be the guy who stands around on the Supernatural set with a bucket of blood to throw on a wall right before the commercial.

And yet, Supernatural is highly entertaining. It’s in its eighth season, for crying out loud.

What’s the secret?

The main characters.

Dean and Sam Winchester are two orphaned brothers who hunt supernatural creatures. Sounds ridiculous, I know. And it is. But the interplay between the two brothers is fun, fascinating, heartbreaking and universal. One episode might portray the theme of forgiveness, something we all have to do at some point in a relationship. Then the next episode might play up the silly rivalry-banter brothers indulge in. And the next week the Winchesters might team up to stop the Apocalypse. Like I said, thin plots.

But the relationship between the main characters peaks and dips, becomes complicated and gets repaired. We care about these guys. Bunches.

That’s how to make your reader stick with your novel. Create characters who they feel attached to, and want to keep company with to the end of the story.

 

Sub It Club–let us query together, my friends

Heather Ayris Burnell has started this cool thing, and she let Dana Carey and me in on the ground floor. After months of planning and plotting and messing around with social media, we are happy, proud and a little dazed to present:

SUB IT CLUB

Now, now. I know you’re excited.

What is SubIt Club, Mrs. Cauthen?

Well I’m glad you asked, Timmy. It’s a confederation of writers who stand together and curse the dying light–I mean…

 ”You’ve written it. You’ve revised it. You’ve edited it, Now it’s time to QUERY. Submission support!”

How do you do that?

• blog posts chock-full of practical info
• a weekly critique of one member’s query by the full membership (and only the membership–closed to the public!)
• a place to declare your query goals, then report back
• informal chat where members can share their query questions and knowledge
• weekly formal chat with topic–membership only. WE WILL LET IT FLY, SISTER.
• links a’plenty–to tips, hints, submission calls, ways to keep your cool while querying, everything we can find!

 

Oh man that is the best dang thang I ever heard of. I don’t want to be left out! Take me! Take me!

Whoa-whoa-whoa! Slow down, pardner. First, like the Facebook page. Then go from there:

Facebook Page

Blog

Twitter

Pinterest

Facebook Group

WordPress Chat

Yup. We got it all. Join us. We’re gonna have a fun and productive year.

 

 

yahoo, you’re hacked, but good. admit it.

I don’t like being played for a fool, but I think I’ve been played.

Like a honky-tonk piano.

Gather ’round kiddies. Maybe you’ll discover you’ve been duped too.

I hadn’t worked with email from my PC for two weeks except to put the KidLit Scoop together, which takes all day Sunday. At the time, my email was sketchy–hard to get into, logging me out, taking forever to load an email, timing out, etc. I changed my password twice, emptied my PC cache a billion times and managed to get done what I needed to get done.

By week three the whole email experience became hopeless. The server’s website urged users to report problems, but made it impossible to do so.

So I complained on Twitter.

Nearly immediate response from Yahoo.

I won’t go through the ridiculous suggestions they gave me to “fix” the problem. Suffice to say I spent days and days working on nothing but The Yahoo Email problem, taking and giving Yahoo feedback through Twitter DM.

I ended up with a the damn brand new iteration of Firefox–which, who wants the newest release of ANYTHING, before they have worked out the bugs? Had to set up all my marklets and pinlets and special thingies, some of which I lost because they don’t work in this new Firefox incarnation, and pick the icons and toolbars and skins in the new interface WHICH I HATE WITH A PASSION THAT KNOWS NO BOUNDS. But, I like it better than Chrome or the others. I know this because I downloaded other browsers to see if my Yahoo mail would work in them.

Oh, yes. I tried everything.

I watched for an official announcement of some sort from Yahoo that would give me some confidence that they knew what they were dealing with and would at some point repair it, but there was nothing.

Nothing in the news.

Nothing on tech blogs.

Nothing on Yahoo’s site.

But plenty of complaints in Yahoo Answers and on Twitter.

I really like my Yahoo. Been with them eight years. With a heavy heart I researched other email providers, because I just couldn’t lose any more work time.

I settled on Outlook. It’s got unlimited storage, huge attachment allowance, you can direct Gmail through it, all kinds of stuff. And I tweeted about my decision to leave Yahoo loud and clear, last night.

Today, my Yahoo email works. Pretty much perfectly.

After nearly a month of glitches building to outright unusability, it works.

Huh.

I went back to this link my good friend Vivian Lee Mahoney sent about a hack attack on Yahoo. Supposedly in just the last several days. I’d dismissed it as the cause of my problem because I knew damn well I hadn’t clicked on anything. And my trials had started weeks before this past weekend. So I surfed links from article to article, reading comments and…

Here’s the deal.

There’s an asshole in Egypt who figured out a hack that allows him to get into Yahoo accounts without a password.  What’s more, there’s a cottage industry in the Middle East, finding ways into big companies’ programs and selling the illicit information on internet boards. Furthermore, big companies know this, and the smart ones pay bounties to independent hackers who find holes in the programming and report it before criminal hackers can take advantage.

Yahoo does not do this.

I digress.

KrebsOnSecurity.com let Yahoo know about this Egyptian guy in November. ‘Course Yahoo coughed and told everyone to move along, nothing to see here.

But finally the problem has made it into the news, because the Egyptian posted a demonstration of how to actually do the hack on YouTube. Perhaps he didn’t like Yahoo pretending everything was A-OK.

Now the whole world is acting like it’s a new deal, like the hack to Yahoo just occurred this weekend.

All Things D thinks the current problem is the same as the November problem, still unsolved.

Yahoo ain’t spillin’ the beans.

But what they are doing is telling users to change their browsers. Turn off their firewalls. Clear their caches.

Please.

Pull the other one.

adam lanza

Please.

Quit saying Adam Lanza had Asperger’s. That was not his problem.

There was a child in my kids’ elementary school who reminds me of Adam Lanza. Weird. Occasional outbursts, when not totally absorbed inside himself. Wore strange outfits. Once, his family was in a procession at church and he didn’t like the way his little brother did something–and he slapped the holy hell out of him all the way down the center aisle, to the horror of the congregation. Other kids did not care to be around him, to say the least. Mom was infinitely patient. (He was just incredibly sensitive, you know.) Until he got big enough to really hurt people, and she started taking him to doctors to find out what was wrong. Surely it was an allergy to wheat or something. Finally, a doctor pinned “Asperger’s” on him. No one had heard of this, and there was an assembly to explain to the children that now they should understand his bizarre behavior and tolerate it.

Bull-effin’-shit.

Because now,15 years later, I have known several people actually and professionally diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. And they aint’ anything like this kid, or Adam Lanza. People with Asperger’s Syndrome are awkward, a little confusing or uncomfortable to talk to in certain situations, perhaps, but they have intelligence and creativity and talents and feelings and empathy, in their own way, (they must be taught social cues, where it comes naturally for non-aspies, I think,) and are REGULAR ACTUAL PEOPLE WITH INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITIES.

Not sociopathic mass-murderers. This is something completely different.

Reports are that the mother stayed home to care for Lanza, home schooling him the last few years of high school because he couldn’t get along.

Oh, and she was a gun enthusiast who owned a cache of firearms she kept in the home. Taught the kid how to handle a weapon.

WHAT?

That’s right. Lanza couldn’t buy the damn things on his own. But his mom not only gave him access to weapons, she taught him how to use them.

I. Am. Without. Speech.

When you are a parent you have to give up a lot of things. The parent of a special needs kid gives up a lot more. And I can’t even imagine what the parent of an unpredictable, mentally ill kid has to give up, but it must be done. It is the responsible path.

You have a mentally ill kid, you don’t keep semi-automatic weapons in the house. I don’t care if you love guns with a passion that knows no bounds, you don’t get to indulge that hobby anymore.

Take up knitting.

dragging revisions

Oh, I am the easily amused type.

I will play with the snow on WordPress All. Day Long. Move my cursor back and forth to watch the flake flow change as if buffeted by breezes unseen.

That’s enough alliteration for one day.

I love the annual WordPress Snowfall so much I changed by background to a dark spacey thing to make it show better. Sure, it takes forever to load, but it’s just until January. HUMOR ME.

I am still in the revising doldrums, very soon done. And that’s my testimony about revising today:

DON’T HURRY THE ENDING.

I’ve been three chapters away from finishing this revision for about, oh, six chapters now. How does this happen? Am I futzing around, going in circles because I don’t know how to end the dang book?

Am I fooling around because I have a fear of finishing?

 

Here’s what has happened: layers.

I’ve discovered several more layers to my main character, which twisted the plot a bit. Which is ramping up the tension as I near the end, and of course, will make the climax sing like an opera.

I admit I’m a little impatient to be finished with this draft so I can be on to something else while it simmers a bit, then start fresh on the third draft. (I do love my own work. *cough*) But I’ve read an awful lot of books with hurried endings. It’s an easy trap to fall into, assuming the reader is as ready to be done with the story as you are.

HOWEVER.

You may have been working on your novel for a year by the time you get to the end, but your reader has been working on reading it a considerably shorter time.

You’ve got to maintain the same enthusiasm for the story you want the reader to have.