Today’s offerings are an eclectic assortment of articles: posts on time management, being more creative, avoiding scams and scare tactics, and how to hang onto your writing dreams.
Grab your cup of coffee or Diet Coke and read on!
“Get Creative on Demand” says “you have to be able to turn on your creativity like it’s a faucet. Why? Because most of us have other responsibilities in our lives that often interfere with our writing time. This means we must make the most of every minute we can steal away to do our writing.”
“How to Effectively Create More Time to Write” is something most of us need training in. “With an already packed schedule of work, family/social obligations, and that pesky to-do list that never seems to get any shorter, making time to write is not only difficult, but sometimes feels like an impossibility.” Where does your time go? You may be surprised.
“LendInk, Author Activism, and the Need for Critical Thinking” from Writer Beware highlights a recent Internet mess that we need to be aware of. “Ignorance and lack of investigation are also what lead writers into the arms of scammers.” ALSO read the whole post. The last half deals with another related subject that you need to take to heart. Her final paragraph says: “We live in highly polarized times. That’s as true in publishing as it is in politics–and, I think, as reflective of the fear of a future that, as much as we would like it to be clear and certain, offers no assurances but the certainty of upheaval. In such a situation, it’s more essential than ever to think critically, investigate carefully, and act deliberately. And to be wary of received wisdom, or anything masquerading as such.” [And that includes anything I say!]
“Are You Really Meant to Be a Writer?” gives some very practical ideas on how to hang onto your dreams during the wannabe-published years.
“Mette Ivie Harrison on How to Find Time to Write” will blow you away, so I saved this one till last. Read it and be inspired!
Lucky me! My books are eligible for an award! And it will only cost $75 to $95 each to enter each book.
The email I got begins:
"Character Building Counts (CBC) Book Awards honors books that deliver a character-building message. No matter what genre your books is in (children's, YA, adult fiction, or adult nonfiction), it may well embody character-building lessons that society can benefit from. Prizes include radio time, book seals, press releases, Internet presence, and more.
Energize your writing career by becoming a CBC award-winning author. Get the attention and acclaim your work deserves."
I think it's telling that the email has a lot of pesky grammatical errors. And when you check out the website, what do you find? Lots and lots of self-published books.
Any time I get anything like this I google some key words as well as the word "scam."
The Today Show looked at a program touted as having the ability to teach children as young as three months to read. However, it's not really reading - it's memorizing the shape of the word.
The Saipan Tribune gives a sketchy report about a lawsuit recently filed:
where: the 9th Circuit (this is a court of limited jurisdiction and you can't usually initiate cases there)
Plaintiff: National Chamorro Association of the Mariana Islands/president Glenn H. Manglona. This organization is so well known that no one has heard of it until today's newspaper article came out. (Well, maybe in Rota?)
Represented by/Attorneys/Co Plaintiffs: Robin Hood International Human Rights Legal Defense Fund and Paul Risenhoover. OMG! One federal judge said Paul Risenhoover is "a fraudulent opportunist."
Judge Batts made clear she viewed Mr. Risenhoover, an Oklahoma native who is about 30, as an unsavory character. She described him as a fervent anti-Communist who was deemed to be so unreliable by the Government that it ultimately stopped its dealings with him, fearing he would become a liability at trial....
[S]he said in her opinion that Mr. Risenhoover, who speaks Mandarin Chinese, English and Hebrew and claims to be a law school graduate who has not passed the bar, may have also been involved in other illegal activities, including other illegal organ sales and a fraud scheme on the Internet.
And if all that isn't enough, the lawsuit itself sounds ridiculous. The Trib says the complaint is 200 pages! That's long by any legal standard.
And some highlights to emphasize just how ludicrous this is:
They're also filing in international court on behalf of native Chamorros, Carolinians and Formosans???
The 9th circuit lawsuit apparently challenges whether the US Congress had the authority to enter into the Covenant. (Please read the US Constitution and the power bestowed on Congress regarding foreign affairs, territories, and commerce)
5th and 14th amendment claims for takings violations without compensation /impairment of contracts. (Is there any foreign worker here with a contract under CNMI law that was in effect on 11/28/2009 for a period that would last beyond 11/27/2011? I doubt it. Most CNMI contracts were for one year, some for two. But longer?)
And the lawsuit claims we have a right to cheap foreign labor under CNMI control because otherwise we may not be able to live--the CNRA constitutes a deprivation of the right to life!
What nonsense.
(Of course,
Wendy beat me to this, and she has the pleadings available for review. I especially like that they have highlighted portions in yellow, and green, and red, and blue...OMG!)
Just got a call from a phone number that read "unavailable" and a guy whose Indian accent was almost impossible to understand.
According to him, my computer was slow and had been automatically generating messages about how it was slow. And he could help me!
Sounds like a scam you say? You are absolutely right. Judging by the Internet, it's a scam that got its start in Australia. But what bothers me is that he knew my name and my unlisted number.
Wanting to get published is like wanting to lose weight. Plenty of people are willing to take your money and tell you they’ll help you.
Here’s an example about a guy the state of Florida has filed a lawsuit against: "Through a constantly changing spider web of defunct corporations in Florida, Nevada and Wyoming, as well as websites, and unregistered businesses, Fletcher has created a business which generates hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from prospective authors relying on the unfair and deceptive advertising," according to the lawsuit.
In an effort to scare off folks who publicize what he does, this guy is threatening to file lawsuits against his detractors. Yeah. Just the kind of guy you want to do business with.
Read more about this scam here.
Want some tips on “agents” to avoid, as well as information on securing your copyright, writing contests, and more? Then click here.
Long ago, after this blog had barely come into being (Spring 2006), I wrote an essay titled “Living in Sin.” It was about the origin of the word sin. Such abstract categories as sin, shame, and guilt develop from thinking about situations in which people realize that they have done something wrong or covered themselves with disgrace, and every now and then the inner form of the words coined for such purposes is transparent. The idea of sin in its Christian sense was alien to the Germanic peoples before the conversion, and in Gothic, a language mainly known to us from a 4th-century translation of the New Testament, the word for “sin” is frawaurhts, literally “misdeed” (fra- is a prefix of “destructive semantics,” as in Engl. forgo “relinquish,” and -waurhts is akin to Engl. wrought). Nor does transgression, from Old French, ultimately from Latin, pose any problems: it means overstepping what is allowed. But sin is a short word, and how it came to mean what it does is unclear, the more so because the speakers of Old English had forwyrht, an exact cognate of the Gothic noun. Apparently, sin (at that time, syn or synn) and forwyrht referred to different things. Those who are interested in knowing some conjectures on sin are welcome to read my old post. Shame and guilt are no less opaque than sin; shame is especially hard.
Native English words with sh- once began with sk-, and, indeed, the Old English for shame is scamu. The last sound (u) was an ending, while m could be a suffix because sca-m-u had a close synonym sca-nd-u. Scandu and its cognates have continued into modern languages; Germans still say Scham und Schande to express their disgust. Modern English lacks its reflex (if we disregard the archaic participle shent “ruined, disgraced”), but, by way of compensation, in the United States scam appeared in the sixties of the 20th century, as if from nowhere. All dictionaries dismiss it demurely as being “of obscure origin.” If we are unable to trace such a recent coinage to its source, how good is the chance of success in dealing with an ancient word? The chance is probably not very good, but sometimes the remoter the period, the easier it is to advance hypotheses. For example, if scam had emerged in Middle English, there would have been no doubt that it was a borrowing from Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish have skam “shame”), and the meanings could have been aligned without much difficulty (“scam is a shameful thing”). 17th-century scam would have been more problematic since the best period for absorbing Scandinavian words was the Middle Ages. Present day Engl. scam leaves us stranded: it is definitely not a continuation of a word from the language of the Vikings! Hence the unanimous verdict “of unknown/uncertain origin.” Even sham, originally “trick, fraud,” which is clearly English (it begins with sh-), baffles researchers. Although it sounds like shame, it may have nothing to do with it. Despite all such hurdles there is no harm in trying to guess how shame acquired its meaning.
Since shame refers to the diminution of honor, it has been compared with the Old English adjective scam “short” (what an etymon for our scam!), from whose Old Norse cognate skamt English has scant. However, a much more popular hypothesis looks for a different root. In the old Indo-European languages, the prefix s- existed. It was an evasive entity. Roots existed with and without it, and its presence did not affect the word’s meaning. The same almost parasitic s (called s-mobile “movable s”) has been recorded in modem English dialects: some people say climb, others say sclimb. The main sound change that separates all the Germanic languages from its other Indo-European neighbors is the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin pater, tres, and quod (that is, kwod) versus Engl. father, three, and what (from hw-). The quod/hwat pair shows that Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k. But in the group sk the consonant k was not affected by the shift. For instance, Latin had scabere “scratch,” and its Gothic cognate was skaban “shear.” As a result, some words going back to different languages sound nearly alike: scabies is from Latin, scab is from Scandinavian (Germanic), and their English siblings are shabby and shave. This digression was necessary to show that if a Germanic word begins with sk-, it may have variants with initial k- (the same root minus s-mobile), while its non-Germanic cognates may begin with h- (k regularly shifted) and sk- (in which k avoided the shift). This is why prefixed words like Old Engl. -hama “covering” and Gothic -hamon “get dressed” have been suggested as cognates of scamu “shame.” The idea was that the Germanic word for shame expressed the embarrassment of being naked.
Such a development is probable. A person could not experience a greater indignity than being caught by his enemies and stripped of his clothes. The god Othin (Odin) says in a mythological poem from medieval Scandinavia: “When I saw two scarecrows in a field,/ I covered them with clothes;/ they looked like warriors when they were dressed/—who hails a naked hero?” In the Slavic languages, styd- “shame” is related to stud- “cold,” which seems to give support to the scamu—hama etymology. But if hama (to stay with Old English forms) is a cognate of scamu, could it not be expected to mean “clothes”? Yet we have a huge zigzag: from “clothes” to “unclothed” and to the disgrace caused by not having anything to wear, all of it within the narrow confines of a short root. The phonetic part (hama ~ scamu) is flawless, but the semantic leap is “scarcely credible,” as dictionaries say in such circumstances. Another possibility is to compare scam- and Gothic hamfs “maimed,” a word that has an impeccable Greek cognate, though mutilation need not presuppose shame.
The inevitable conclusion appears to be “origin uncertain/debatable,” but I cannot finish my story without one more reference. The Italian scholar Vittore Pisani pointed to the noun eskamitu in an inscription on an Inguvian table (we are dealing here with an ancient Indo-European language of Italy). It means “genitals,” and Pisani compared it with the Germanic word for “shame.” The obscure Italic word may provide a clue more reliable than any other. Shame and genitals form an indissoluble union from time immemorial (this has been, of course, what gave rise to the “dress” etymology: the horror lay in being fully exposed). We may never be able to find out why the sound complex skam- came to designate what it did, but, if eskamitu has been interpreted correctly, reconstructing the development from “private parts” to “shame” looks like our best choice.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of
Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as
An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins,
The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to
[email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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We have just finished reading this delightful fable about Shanti, a lion who is a spiritual leader to the people who live in his village in India, and indeed all those whose lives he touches. He doesn’t eat meat so as not to frighten these people and is able to speak. Far-fetched as all this sounds, it is convincing within its narrative framework and there’s enough magic emanating from the story to make my two pester me with questions as to whether it was true or not and “Does he really just eat grass?”
The quality of the illustrations adds to this too – they are pencil sketches but depicted with such a photographic eye that the appearance of Shanti amongst the people becomes unquestionable. The story is introduced as a story within a story, told by a wise old man to two children who meet him on his arrival at their village. I have to say that we became so caught up in Shanti’s and the villagers’ adventures that we forgot this, until the twist at the very end which served to add fuel to my boys’ conviction that somewhere in India there is a grass-eating lion called Shanti…
The author, Paul Sinclair told me:
“Even though the book is aimed at children aged eight plus, I’ve had parents tell me they have read it to their six-year-olds and they ask a lot of questions and a lot of explanations are necessary, but they are apparently fine with it.
One friend of mine who had read it to her children aged around six told me she had an Indian friend called Ashanti. Once Ashanti phoned and left a message on the answer phone. When the children heard Ashanti had left a message they asked their mother if that was Shanti. Not realising what the children were asking she said yes to which the children asked ‘Does he eat grass?”
So mine aren’t the only ones!
All proceeds from the sale of the book go to the Shanti Lion Children’s Trust, which is very close to Paul’s heart – and he has written a thought-provoking article about his journey to write and publish the story, which appears on the organisation’s website.
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Thank you for your kind, astute words Marjorie. Some adults I meet are convinced Shanti is real as well; at least deep down a part of them really hopes he is.
The other day I was selling Shanti’s book at a stall. Three youngsters (probably 12 or 13-year-olds) came over and one of them stared at the book’s cover intently. He wanted to know if Shanti was real or not so I smiled and told him he needed to read the book to find out and I gave them each a copy. About an hour later they returned as they had all been reading the book. They had changed expressions on their faces as Shanti’s existence had now become a pressing issue to them all. The young man who had initially shown the most interest in the book now said with the greatest sincerity and gravity, ‘Does he (Shanti) really eat grass? Because if he does that would be the coolest thing ever!’
You see, deep down many youngsters today crave role models or heroes of the heart. Sure Spiderman and Harry Potter etc. are cool, but they are heroes of the mind or more specifically the imagination. Shanti is physically big, strong and powerful, but he is also wise, gentle, loving and caring; this is his real strength as this makes him a true hero of the heart. Shanti is a role model whose unselfishness nature youngsters can not only respect and admire, but also copy.