Rev. Eugene (Jeep) Green is dead

I remember Rev. Green vividly from my high school days in Ottawa. He was the Anglican priest who led the ecumenical services, known as Prayers at my school, most mornings. We shared him with a boys' school a few blocks away.

His wife worked in the office at the school and his daughter was in junior school when I was a senior.

When I was in university, my friend's kid brother (who went to the boys' school) was grumbling about how no one ever showed up to cheer them on at their curling matches. My friend and I started going to them, and then it became a habit ... made all the more pleasant because Rev. Green was the coach. I asked him how he got the nickname Jeep. He told me that, when he was a kid, there was a cartoon called 'Eugene the Jeep'. His first name was Eugene, so he got tagged as Jeep.

Fast forward to middle age (mine) ... I was taking music composition lessons from a friend. She wouldn't accept any money for it, but I wasn't comfortable taking something for nothing. She was the organist and choir director for All Saints Westboro Anglican Church on Richmond Road, and mentioned that she could use another Second Soprano. So, I started going to that church and was delighted to discover that Rev. and Mrs. Green were living in the parish! It felt so good to see them each Sunday, as the choir processed and recessed.

When my father died in 2003, I turned to Rev. Green to perform the funeral service. I couldn't imagine asking anyone else, and I couldn't have asked for a kinder, more thoughtful person. Rev. Green may not have recalled my father from my high school days, but he didn't say so. It was a lovely service.

Jeep Green will be deeply missed and, given how many of my friends are asking for details about his funeral, I'm not the only one who will miss him.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/ottawacitizen/obituary.aspx?n=eugene-green&pid=155706663

So frustrating!

How I love chatting with my friend in Sydney (Australia, not Nova Scotia). But, why is it that Facebook seems to act up the most when we are IMing?

It can't have anything to do with online piracy. I'm not egotistical enough to think that someone is absolutely fascinated by my FB posts and comments, but we were on for about an hour when I got dropped and can't get back on.

Maybe I should be doing housework instead of IMing ... nah. I should, however, be tweaking the first hundred pages of my novel to get it ready to hand in to my teacher in March.

Kim Dotcom

Well, it really was only a matter of time.

While I don't believe a whole lot of what the FBI spouts, I believe nothing at all that I read in the Toronto Sun. This means that I can read what passes for news in that tabloid ... and shake my head in disbelief.

Take, for example, the article from January 22 of this year. Apparently, the FBI were involved in apprehending Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, in New Zealand, for his alleged ownership of Megaupload.com -- a site that was actively involved in selling pirated items.

The article claimed that this site had generated $175 million from subscriptions and advertising. It also quoted the FBI as saying that Schmitz had garnered $42 million personally in 2010.

First, the last time I checked, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not allowed to operate outside the U.S.A., just like the Central Intelligence Agengy is not allowed to operate within the U.S. Agencies in the United States seem to be very jealous of their jurisdictions / territories. I just can't see the FBI operating in New Zealand. The CIA, maybe.

Second, I think these figures may be on the conservative side. $175 million? How many years has it been in operation? And Kim Dotcom / Schmitz received a quarter of that in one year alone? Something's funny here. Of course, that could be bad reporting.

Kim is being hailed as a hero of the little guy, a kind of modern day Robin Hood, if you will. But, given the size of the mansion he was living in (picture in paper, and my scanner not working) and the fleet of about 20 cars -- including, if we are to believe the report, a pink Cadillac and a Rolls Royce Phantom Coupe.

I would have a whole lot more respect for him if he had given the bulk of his money to charity. As it is, I think he's just as greedy as the big movie studios -- and no different.

Reflections on SOPA

Now that it's dead in the water, I think it's time to consider what the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was trying to achieve.

I know that there are a lot of people who think they should have access to other people's work for free, but it seems unfair to deny a living to the people who did the work in the first place.

For example, I have just finished my first novel. If I can sell it to a publishing house, and they actually print and distribute it, I will receive about 10% of the cover price for each book sold. So, if a book is $8, I should receive about 80 cents for each copy that gets sold.

It took me two months to write the book, but the idea had been running around in the back of my mind for years, so it wasn't really starting from scratch. I have a friend proofreading it for me. He's been at it for almost a month, and it's a heavy slog because Word didn't catch most of the errors. By the time I finish this, it will be the beginning of June -- seven months after I started -- and that's just my time, not my proofreader's time. Add the proofreader, and that makes it eight months of almost all my time to write this book and whip it into a decent shape.

During that eight months, I will have held down a part-time job to help stave off my creditors. If I actually sell it (and I'm not holding my breath, here), a big seller in Canada is about 50,000 copies, or so I've been told. Well, that's not likely to happen with a first novel, especially in genre fiction. So, say it sells 20,000 copies in Canada -- a nice round figure. Multiply that by 80 cents, and that's $16,000. Sounds like a lot, but it's under the poverty line, and I still have to pay the proofreader, and income tax and, by this point, I'll need an agent. That's another cut out of the $16k -- anywhere from 10-15%.

Okay, say that I keep churning out a book a year that my editor wants to publish. It's difficult, but not impossible. Gradually, my readership increases and I have a Canadian bestseller on my hands! That would bring in about $40,000. Let's face it. I'll never get rich doing this -- but that's okay because I love doing it.

Now, say that someone buys one of my later books in the first week that it's out. They take the time to scan it and put it up on the internet. They might put it out there for free, or they sell it. Either way, I'm not getting anything for it. Some of my readers might decide to read it online because they think books are too expensive and, hey, the author is rich anyway, right? All of a sudden, fewer of my books sell. And if it happens a couple of times in a row, I may not be able to sell the next book to my editor, because my sales are 'way down. The publishing house will get the impression that people don't want to read my stuff anymore.

No matter how I cut it, I'll never be able to make a great living as a Canadian writer, even without online piracy. With it, I might as well give up now.

*

The link below was posted by a film director a few days ago during the big SOPA protest. I know nothing about making films, so found his comments about how indie films are financed to be interesting.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/james-kerwin/on-this-day-of-internet-blackouts/10151170939155277

What I learned from NaNoWriMo in 2011

I learned several things about myself this past autumn, including:

- I will not accomplish anything without a deadline.

- an outline is useful, but is not cast in stone. I can even change the outline if something is not right for the characters. (In fact, I did have to introduce some extra secondary characters.)

- when I am on a roll and typing in the dialogue that I am 'hearing', I can write as much as 700 wds / hour. If I have to stop and figure out what comes next, I am down to about 400 wds / hour.

- my best places to write are 1) in the meeting room of the local public library and 2) a local coffee shop that is not a chain. The library is cheaper.

Most important of all, I learned that I could write a rough draft of a book in 45 days (not counting the couple of weeks for outline, so ... maybe I should include it in my estimate and say ~60 days). It may not be a great book, but it's done. Editing is the easy part -- well, relatively speaking.

I will definitely enter it again this year.

Meanwhile, there is the Script Frenzy in April. It is put on by the same organisation as does the National Novel Writing Month. I've never written a script before ... have no idea how to go about it. Hi-ho! It looks like a trip to the library for me.

I did it!

Last year, I made a New Year's Resolution to finish a novel.

I thought, at first, that I was going to finish the historical I had started (many) years before. In fact, I ended up polishing the existing sections for several months and wrote very little that was actually new.

Frustrated, I looked around for some inspiration, and on September 1, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. 1,667 words per day.

It scared me because, even though I had written books and articles before, I had no idea how many words they were. I simply wrote until it was done. Of course, that was non-fiction. Okay, they were technical manuals. This was the first time I had a deadline for my fiction -- other than the assignments for class.

The rules were fairly simple.

- it must be a work of fiction -- that's the whole point of this.

- we can have an outline, background on the characters, etc., but we cannot start writing until12:00:01 a.m. on November 1.

- it's on the honour system. As they say on the NaNo site: "since the only real prize of NaNoWriMo is the self-satisfaction that comes with pulling off such a great, creative feat, we don’t really worry too much about people cheating. Those who upload 50,000 words they copied from Wikipedia.org just to see their name on the Winner’s page are pitiful indeed."

- winners are determined by the online validation process on the NaNo website. The 50k word count must be validated by midnight on November 30 in order to be a winner.

So, the beginning of September saw me feverishly pounding away at an outline. I finished it in a couple of weeks and thought "well, that was fun, but what am I going to do between now and the beginning of November?" In order to maintain my excitement about the project, I decided to work up two more outlines so that, when the time came, I'd be able to choose whichever story appealed to me the most that particular day.

November 30, I had 54k+ words, but wasn't finished the story. Realising that a lack of deadlines were what had kept me from succeeding in finishing my fiction before, I went onto facebook and announced that I was going to finish the story by December 15.

Then I got my first paid editing contract in 4 years ... of course.

I still finished the rough draft -- at 11:40 p.m. on December 15. Then I went back and dealt with the questions I had entered as footnotes (so I could keep on writing). The first draft (that I would let anyone else see) was finished at 5 a.m. on December 24. Just in time to give it to a few close friends for Christmas.

The result was a novel that was 70k+ words. 245 pages, double spaced, Times 12.

So, I'm going to do it again this year.

More info can be found at http://www.nanowrimo.org

On my way ...

... for the first holiday I've had in almost ten years.

Had quite the telephone argument with an anonymous bureaucrat who insisted that I must know what hotel I would be staying at. He refused to accept that, because I'll be arriving at 10 in the morning, I will be driving until I decide to stop for the day; wherever that may be.

Have fun, people, and don't wait up for me!

Bucket List Item

I used to call it the "Things I want to do before I die list", then I saw the movie. Now I call mine a bucket list, too.

If I can get the time off work, I'm going to take advantage of some seat sales and fly to Miami in the last week of January and come back the first week of February. While there, I'll rent a car and drive through the Keys, along the causeway.

Hey, it's warmer than England right now!

Maybe Italy next year ...

Health and job

Well, I've had the xrays done. It's no longer bursitis in my knees that's bothering me. It's arthritis now.

My doctor suggested that I try to find a new job; one where I'm not having to keep getting down on my knees to dig into the backs of cupboards, and one where I'm not on my feet for seven or eight hours at a stretch. I have some ideas and have been getting some good feedback from customers about what companies are good to work for in this area.

Have been occupied with FB

I've been ignoring my blog in preference for Facebook. It seems to be an excellent way to stay in touch with many of the people I care about, all in one place.

So, I haven't written here for a while, but I learned huge amounts from the course I was in this fall -- Writing the Novel: An Introduction.

The prologue for my historical novel (set in 1582) has been cut from seven pages down to one and a bit. The first chapter has been tightened up considerably, as well. Altogether the two sections dropped from 31 pages to 20 -- and it's much better now.

The last assignment was actually the hardest. We had to do a five minute report on one of the books on a list -- and the only ones on it that I'd heard of, I'd had to read in high school. Apparently, several other people in the class weren't too thrilled with the list, either.

The teacher finally gave us the opportunity to select any book we wanted. I chose Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. I went through it and studied how he handled some of the problems I was facing in my work, like vocabulary that would be known in the period (or, in his case, place) but might be unfamiliar to the average reader.

Learned a lot from Pratchett ... now the hard part: to implement what I've learned.