If you don't want your picture on the news...

There is a simple rule that everyone should know. Repeat after me: "If you don't want your picture on the news, don't break the law." It is a simple rule, and obvivously someone has either forgotten it, or never learned it in the first place. My father taught me this rule, along with keeping your mouth shut about your "knuckle dragging" connections and never get a tattoo ("permanent identifaction mark") if you plan on doing something that the law frowns upon. He never taught me about DNA, and I had to teach myself about the IRS (not to flib on my taxes, just to fill out the paperwork properly--"Is a scholarship taxable income or not?").

As I said it is obvivous that someone either doesn't know this or forgotten it. As proof, I present:

Call girl's (Ashley Alexandra Dupre "Kristen") lawyer blasts media for using photos

Now, I am not sure if it is Dupre, or her lawyer, who decided that she is not a public figure. But obvivously, they are from other planet. You don't decide if you are a public figure. The public, or their Cthulhutic informer does. The instance I found out that New York Governor (now ex-governor) Eliot Spitzer was caught with his hand in someone else's underwear drawer, my "inquiring mind" wanted to know what she looked like.

Ok, she is not much to look at; or at least, not bodicious enourgh to risk losing one's political career over. And how good of a personality could an aspiring twenty-two year old musician have? Obvivously, Spitzer throw away his career for nothing.

Wait.

I shouldn't say things like this---she is not a public figure. Or so, her lawyer claims. I know better, you know better, and I bet her lawyer knows that he is talking with the tongue of a toad.

The lawyer, who is nameless at this time (probably not a public figure yet), is saying that the media is wrong for talking about Dupre and showing her pictures. He says that the media is using her likeness without her consent. And that we shouldn't be talking about her.

Newsflash, as a writer, I know something that this lawyer does not. The instant you break the law, or are an accessory to a crime, or do something else that more than a hundred people know who you are---you are a public figure. And most of your rights to a private life has gone out of the window.

Let's face it, if I write about you, you are either obscure (no one has ever heard of you) OR you are a public figure (the whole United States knows who you are, or wants to). Gee, Dupre, what category are you in? I know what the latest 7Eleven robber looks like, and his lawyer is not screaming that he is not a public figure; so what makes you any less than one?

Ethics of book reviewing

Well, I know that someone reads my book reviews. They may not be happy about what I wrote...but I do know that they read them. It was a review of an Enochian Chess book that I did a couple months ago. Or at least, I think it was my review that the comment was aimed at.

I could be wrong about that. After all, I seriously doubt that I am the only person that reviews Golden Dawn books. Nevertheless, one of the author's comments (yes, it is the author that commented on the review) will get a response from me on my Golden Dawn blog.

But that comment is not what I want to talk about here. Today, I want to talk about the ethics of reviewing books.

There are some authors who believe that any critic or book reviewer that does not give their work a favorable review is a fraud. Alexander Pope wrote an entire essay on it--you might be familiar with a lifted line from it, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." (Though to be fair to Pope, his work is about more than just bad book reviews--he was talking about the tendency of those who can't accomplish great works belittling the accomplishments of others.)

Now, I understand the urge to call people who give you bad reviews--frauds, imposters, idiots, etc. I also suffer from that urge. It also shows up with college instructors who do not think that my work is the height of sheer brilliance. But just because someone thinks that you failed in your task, and fall short of inspiring them, does not make them a fraud.

Ask yourself this after you recieve your next bad review, bad grade, or rejection slip (after you calm down enough to stop stabbing the poppet of the person in question), "What if they are right?" I know it hard, but occasionally I must admit that my critics are right.

In my case, not only do I recieve bad reviews, I write them also. I ask myself what would I tell my best friend about the book (work) that I am reviewing. Would I actually recommend it, or tell them to save their money. And that is what gets the authors I review upset--I tell the truth.

With this particular review, I must admit that I had an ethical dilemma. I know the author, or at least as much as you can know someone from just contact on the internet. I wished that I could have given him a better review. But in the end, I didn't because I had to think about who I was writing the review for.

Do the reviewers serve the authors, or do they serve the readers? That is the big question that hangs over book reviewers. In my case, I believe that I am serving the readers.

Now, I do know that there are some outlets that only publish favorable reviews. They are serving not the authors, or the readers, but rather their own bottom line. They get paid to write favorable reviews.

The catch of doing so is that the readers eventually get stung, and cease to trust that source for their book reviews. A reviewer's reputation depends upon telling the truth. If you write nothing but glowing book reviews in pursuit of the happy buck, sooner or later your readers will figure it out. And there is already enough advertising blogs and sites on the internet already; I do not need to add to that pile, nor do you.

Swing and a miss

Professional writers are professional gamblers.

It is not something that we admit to. But when you examine the chances that we take, you have to admit that we are. We write articles and stories that we think people want to read; and that we, hopefully, can get someone to pay us for. We toil away in dark offices, being anti-social, trying to create something that will pay the bills.

Occasionally, we succeed; more often we fail. Even professionals who do it full time have eighty to ninety percent rejection rate. The full time writers make up for the low level of acceptances and bad paying articles, just like baseball players; we go up to bat a lot. Essentially, as the old economics joke goes, "We make it up in volume."

I get my fair share of rejection slips; if you don't recieve rejection slips, you are not trying. I also write my fair share of articles that turn out to be non-earning dogs.

I don't always mean to write non-earners. Occasionally, I do. After all, I am opinionated and think that getting certain information out there is important--even if it generates no earning.

But often like most writers I end up writing something that I think is going to do well, like articles for revenue sharing sites such as Helium, and the articles bomb. At those moments, my face turns red, and all I can do is swear under my breath as I ready the bat for another swing.

My latest missed swing was an article on the stock market, "How Many Stocks Are Necessary to Be Properly Diversified?" I thought that it would be a good money maker, but I can see already that I guessed wrong.

That is the name of the game, guessing, writing, and hoping that it is a hit that goes over the wall (netting a reasonable profit). Perhaps on another site, it would work better. Or perhaps if I was an economics major. Or whatever. It doesn't really matter. All that matters is that I keep swinging at the ball, aka writing and submitting.

It is not glamourour or fulfilling, but it is the nature of the profession that I chose.

Changed my Lulu Storefront

Decided to change the layout and colors of my Lulu storefront today.

The biggest change was that I removed my Lulu blog off of it. I seldom updated it, and honestly I post better entries here and on my Golden Dawn blog. It wasn't exactly the type of thing that put my best foot forward.

I have a couple of items, research papers, from last semester that I plan on putting up there. So I figured that today was as good as a day to change things up as any.

Advice from Laurell K. Hamilton

In the April 2008 issue of Writer’s Digest, there is an interview with Laurell K. Hamilton, creator of the Anita Blake, vampire slayer series. It is a quite interesting interview; I didn’t realize that she had been in a writing program and was kicked out for being a bad influence (basically she was writing genre fiction and her class mates started to follow her lead, rather than writing the stuff that the dean of the program thought should be written).

Laurell K. Hamilton, near the end of the interview (done by Maria Scheider) said something that I found to be very meaningful.

“Writers write. Put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis. Ray Bradbury said, ‘The muse cannot resist a working writer.’ I start off by writing why I can’t write. Type every reason you can’t write. Complain, bitch, whatever. Half a page to a page in, the muse says, ‘Well, if you’re going to be writing anyway, you can do better than this.’ Also, if you don’t protect your time, no one will. I wrote my first book two pages a day, five days a week.”

I think that it is good advice. I could be wrong. It may just look like useful advice because she mentions the muse. And that automatically gets my attention lately, considering that I am reading both (the) Iliad and Paradise Lost. Both Homer and John Milton mentioned the muse(s), having prayers to them. Their mention of the muses has started me researching a possible lecture on them for Bast Temple (Golden Dawn in Denver, Colorado).

Helium mentioned in an article

Helium got mentioned in an article on Slate: The Wisdom of the Chaperones---Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy. The article is talking about the effect that a small and very active number of members can have on a user-created web site. The two top heavy examples that he (Chris Wilson) talks about are Wikipedia and Digg, For example on Digg last year, the top one hundred users submitted forty-four percent of the top stories.

On page two of the article, he uses Helium as an example of a more stable model. "Requiring someone to write before he or she rates creates a more stable system: Rather than create a caste of creators and a caste of peons, Helium encourages everyone to do everything."

Considering that I am one of the people who writes and rates on Helium, I found it interesting.

Helium Writing Stars

Today, one of the article titles on the Helium home page was about "Earning Writing Stars on Helium." It is a hot topic. When I logged in, five writers had already wrote to it. At this point, eleven articles, including one by me, are in the stack.

The reason the title is so hot is that there are a lot of people interested in gaining a writing star, thanks to the current promotion going on over at Helium. Between the beginning of the year and April 14th, Helium will pay you a dollar for every article written provided that you have at least one writing star and three rating stars at midnight April 15th.

As I said before, I am not going to hold my breath that I am going to have a writing star come the magical hour. My plan for the first part of the year is to get another fifty decent articles written before the start of summer semester. And not just any articles, I want to write articles that earn me at least a dollar a year--anything less is not worth my time.

I am not about to change my plan because of the promotion. I have never had good luck with the promotions and contests there--basically I have the same luck as a writer as I do in other areas of my life. Short run, I can't win; long term, I can't lose. Therefore, it is best that I just continue doing what I was originally planning on doing and ignore the promotion.

Other writers on Helium, especially the newer ones, are flocking all over this promotion--quick money in their eyes. So they are writing a lot of articles quickly. I have a hard enough time hanging onto my writing star as it is--writing to a lot of titles that I don't care about will only create a lot of trash that would drag my star down (if I still have one--it flickers off and on). Besides I wonder if they have figured out the opportunity costs of what they are hacking out.

Let's say that they can hack out eight articles in the space of a day compared to my one lonely article (we are talking an eight hour day here). Looking at some of the stuff being written, and having studied the earnings of my first year's worth of articles, most of them do not look like money makers.

There is a chance that they will not make more than a penny over the course of a year on some of these articles. I know because some of my articles last year did not make more than a penny; I no longer write to these channels. So the bonus money may be all that they make from their work. So a potential of eight dollars if they are focused solely on the bonus program.

On the other hand, a writer like myself doing just one article a day that has the potential to make a dollar or more a year, and estimating a shelf life of ten years, can make ten dollars. Plus, I can recycle most of my stuff on other sites like Associated Content.

(Yes, I am ignoring inflation here. I am assuming that as inflation goes up, advertising costs will go up and so will my earnings.)

So who is smarter? I am not sure. But I am hoping that my plan makes more business sense than theirs does.