Paying It Forward…

as per Ophelia…

I plagiarized a poet; I
Recycled someone’s rhyme;
I composed collaborations,
Never thinking it a crime

It’s the form of my expression;
It’s the narrative I choose;
It’s the sharing of ideas—
Does it really matter whose?

Hey, a sonnet is a sonnet,
Make the topic what you will—
With a rhyming dictionary
There’s no function left to skill!

In the world of modern poetry,
Your sentences are free—
You could play the Prince of Denmark…
To be, or not to… something…

Plagiarism as a new art form? I must have scores of verses that are pastiches on this or that… (I won’t link one, lest I link a dozen, and that’s not fair). It seems to me that pretty much all parties know (which is very different from all parties admitting) when party B has used party A’s stuff. Some of it is protected; some of it is being a bastard. I have tried, myself, to only use protected bits of other people’s writing… if you see something you think is otherwise, please let me know!

Ophelia notes that being pointed to other people’s writing is a good thing, a feature, not a bug…I agree.

And if you plagiarize me… remember, my sister used to be a lawyer.

Now she’s a judge.

Well, That Was Unexpected!

Apparently, I’m in OpenLab 2013. I did not even know I had been nominated!

It’s for this verse, here, and I couldn’t be happier. You see, it’s an example of my very own verse form (for more on that form, read this… and if you happen to be Stephen Fry, or a close friend of his, I would dearly love an answer), and was inspired by a Doctor Who episode… really, what more could you ask for?

I’ve been in OpenLab before–it’s always an honor, and I am always humbled by reading the other entries, which never fail to impress me more than my own do.

Check it out.

Ink!

Ink

Checked my mail, and there it was!

Ink!

It’s the latest in technology, delivered to your door
Like the internet, but portable—why, who could ask for more?
All that Cuttlefishy goodness, but in one convenient book
What a marvelous invention; don’t you want to take a look?

You can take it to the mountains; you can take it to the park;
With a flashlight or a candle, you can read it in the dark!
It’s much lighter than a laptop, so transporting it’s a breeze
There’s no silicon or plastic—nope, it’s all recycled trees!

It’s an omnibus edition! It’s the Cuttlefish, condensed;
If your dog is acting funny, it’s because he must have sensed!
So you’d better buy an extra, when you’re buying one for you,
Cos the animals all know, it’s all the verse that’s fit to chew!

You could buy one for your Mother; you could buy one for your Pop
You could buy one for your Pastor just to hear him holler “stop!”
You could buy a bunch, and swap out all the hymnals in a church
So they never find “Amazing Grace” no matter where they search!

You could pull one on the Gideons, and place them in hotels
You could slip one to a Wiccan while she’s murmuring her spells
It’s the perfect gift for enemies—the perfect gift for friends!
It’s the gift that keeps on giving—oh, the messages it sends!

You can take one on an airplane; you can take one to the beach;
You could buy them by the dozen, so there’s always one in reach
It’s a conversation starter, if you bring it on a date,
And you’ll know if you’re compatible before it gets too late!

Be the first one on your block to place your order—click today,
And the elf and fairy printers will get on it right away!
As the product of a Cuttlefish, of course you’d call it “Ink”
Really, what more could you ask for?… Well, just one more thing… the link.

Oh, and the link to the preview.

Ink

So I (think I) finished all the various little “jump through this hoop!” tasks involved in publishing. I see now why publishers exist–that’s a lot of crap to wade through. But since no publisher came begging…

I just ordered the very first copy of “Ink”, to see if it is worth offering to the rest of you. (I’m also working on an E-edition, but strangely, right now the cover art is what’s getting in the way. I expect progress soon… within this lifetime.)

In 5-15 days, I’ll get that copy, and if all is well with it (hell, if all is even remotely close to well), it will be made available to both of you all of you.

It’s really strange–I swing back and forth from being incredibly proud of these verses, to being utterly ashamed of them; from delight that I wrote this or that turn of phrase, to guilt that I would dare expect anyone to pay for this tripe. I wonder if such feelings are shared by people who have publishing companies behind them.

But having just spent a couple of hours reading my own verses aloud (and enjoying it immensely), I am currently eager to see what the actual physical book looks like. And, assuming that I can figure out the problem, the E-book version should be out about the time I get (and, I hope, approve of) the dead tree version. (right now, the e-version is clipping about a fifth of my sigil off of the cover–I have no idea why.)

Funny. At one point, I thought I’d have a book out last year at this time. Silly me. But it really looks like there will be one this year. In just a week or so.

I hope.

See, This Is Why You Pay Professionals

…cos when you try to do it yourself, you get stuck.

I’m actually happy with my cover (don’t judge me!). But I can’t, yet, export it in 300 dpi so I can use it at Lulu.

It’s ok–this is only day two and a half of knowing of GIMP’s existence. I’m just frustrated that something that I know my nephew could do in his sleep is taking me so long. Screen shot 2013-11-04 at 9.57.58 PM
It will be done. In time for the cephalopodmas shopping rush.

I hope.

(yes, there is a back cover, too, with the cuttlefish sigil in black, facing the other direction, at the top of the page–there is room for a blurb or author’s description or whatever at the bottom, along with the required barcode. Oh, and “ink” was the working title until I found a better one. So if you have a better one, speak up.)

(I love the fact that it is a visual illusion–“The Digital Cuttlefish” looks like it is in a lighter gray than “ink”, but that’s all because the background is different. Yes, I’m a bit of a geek.)

Make It Stop!

It was such a simple project,
But I had no way of knowing
Cos it should have been a simple piece of cake
Once you give them some attention
Little projects get to growing
And they multiply the messes that they make
And they only gain momentum
So it shows no signs of slowing
And I’ll have to hit a tree if I can’t brake

So, yeah, the book. Looks like it might be in final form, ready to send off, but of course I have said that before. And it has grown since then. I really need to trim it down, cos it is currently at 403 pages. And that is without simply dumping everything into it–I was trying to be selective!

Anyway, I need help. Yes, that kind, too, but mostly I am looking for a graphics program to do the cover art. I have the elements I need, and it’s a really simple design, but I haven’t had a graphics program on my computer since SuperPaint, some two decades ago. Advice? Is there something simple online? Something inexpensive I can and should buy?

(It occurs to me that I did the cover layout for the last book, and I have absolutely no recollection of how I did it. Might even have done it in Word, for all that.)

Worth Every Penny…

A confluence of things, today. You may or may not know this, but we here at FtB are testing a new paid-subscription, ad-free version for your reading pleasure. Apparently, the place looks much nicer without ads. Ads never bothered me, though, aside from the few places around where, say, my verses have been copied without my permission and show up on a page with multiple pop-up ads that can’t be easily dismissed. That, yeah, bothers me.

Which leads to the next thing–a New York Times opinion piece with the remarkable notion that writers, artists, photographers and the like ought to be paid for what they do. Even *gasp* on the internet!

Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge. I now contribute to some of the most prestigious online publications in the English-speaking world, for which I am paid the same amount as, if not less than, I was paid by my local alternative weekly when I sold my first piece of writing for print in 1989. More recently, I had the essay equivalent of a hit single — endlessly linked to, forwarded and reposted. A friend of mine joked, wistfully, “If you had a dime for every time someone posted that …” Calculating the theoretical sum of those dimes, it didn’t seem all that funny.

Reading through some of the comments on that piece, I realize I have it better than most. With my readership here, I am making big bucks–approximately one dollar per post. And I hope to have my second big collection of verses out in time for Cephalopodmas shopping, and that should sell, with luck, a few dozen copies. And that honestly puts me ahead of a lot of the commenters’ stories.

I don’t know if it will be approved, but I left the following comment myself (from a few years ago):

I’d shill for a shilling
But no one is willing
To pay for the things that I write.
I’d rant and I’d holler
For minimum dollar
But no one is offering, quite.
A couple of euros
To stuff in my bureau’s
Sufficient for verses like these;
Though some call it whoring,
I’m begging–imploring–
Come, sully my principles, please!
If someone would shell out,
I’d promise to sell out–
My standards, I’ll keep in my purse–
For now, though, I’m sighing
Cos no one is buying…
And all I can write is Free Verse.

If You Give A Cuttlefish A Blue Book…

… ze’s gonna want to fill it up.

So while giving an exam the other day, I found an empty Blue Book in the classroom, left behind by a previous class. There I was, trapped for 80+ minutes in a room, with a whole 16 pages of wide-ruled notebook paper. And a dozen extra number 2 pencils.

It was too much to resist. I plan on filling the entire thing, then dropping it surreptitiously on the floor of the English Department. So far, it only has 2 verses:

I found an empty Blue Book
And I knew just what to do:
I asked it if it wanted
To explain why it was blue

“The emptiness inside me”
Said the book, “is hard to take.”
But it didn’t want a sandwich
And it didn’t want some cake

It didn’t want a candy bar
It wanted words, instead–
It said that ink tastes salty,
So I’m filling it with lead.

****

In English Departments
You’ll rarely find times
When the stuff they call poetry
Rhymes.

Cos rhyme with your meter’s
A thing of the past
(Even meter is vanishing
Fast).

Lacking form; lacking structure
We call it “Free Verse”
(It makes amateur poetry
Worse).

It’s not worth a penny
I think you’ll agree–
Maybe that’s why they’re calling it
“Free”.

Satanists Vandalize Church; Atheists Blamed

When, in Tennessee, there’s hatin’
There’s no time to waste in waitin’—
Best to blame it all on Satan
And the atheists as well

Time to blame, for this infliction
(Without thought of contradiction),
Folks who think the devil fiction
Likewise heaven; likewise hell.

The graffiti was Satanic
Which, of course, ignited panic
(Could be worse; could be Koranic):
Must be atheists to blame!

See, cos atheists are people
Who, while Christians are asleep, ‘ll
Spray-paint pictures on their steeple
To their everlasting shame

Yes, their godless souls are sinking
Or at least, so goes the thinking
Of the church, forever linking
Us, our good name to besmirch

Cos the atheists are blameless
And the Satanists still nameless—
Casting blame like this is shameless
And it’s stupid of the church.

Actually, it might not be stupid of the church at all; the report (“Tennessee Church Vandalized with Atheist Themes”), from the Western Center for Journalism (we’ve seen them before), does not quote church members as blaming atheists at all. It could just be the incredibly bad journalism practiced by the Center for Journalism.

Members indicated that two crosses were inverted in an apparent attempt to recreate a common satanist symbol; and page 666 — a number often associated with Satan — was burned out of a Bible at the location. That number was also carved into the church altar.
To remove any doubt regarding their intended message, the vandals also carved a succinct and disturbing message into the altar: “Smoke meth and hail Satan.”

Now, get out your word salad bingo cards:

As Christians across the world face persecution and even death at the hands of Islamic terrorists, the U.S. remains a nation in which believers of all faiths can gather to openly worship. We must remain dedicated to preserving that right, though, as it continually faces opposition.
While this Tennessee church experienced an outright attack, secular humanists continue to work behind the scenes to surreptitiously silence the Christian voice within America. Whether through ObamaCare mandates, anti-discrimination lawsuits, or any other desperate ploy, the left understands that the only way to continue its transformation of this nation is by maintaining a stranglehold on those fighting to preserve it.

Satanist atheist Islamic secular humanist leftist Obamacare advocates trying to strangle Christians. It must be horrible being a powerless persecuted minority.

Really, a center for journalism?

Eating The Monkey Brains

No time for anything right now, but I had to share with you a wonderful piece of writing on the shutdown. Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire, pens “The Reign Of Morons Is Here“, and it is beautiful. First, the succinct summary of the situation:

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

Then the analysis (this paragraph closing with the most appropriate metaphor I’ve seen on the topic):

This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

I’ve only highlighted 2 paragraphs–the whole thing is well worth the reading.

And now I have even less time… dammit.