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 Dude! Where you at? |
Real life getting in the way of a good story, as usual. I miss you guys and I'm still hoping to pick up where I left off before too long  |
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| Hi all Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth and left many promises unkept. Even this comeback is a bumpy landing: I can't hit the ground running as I had hoped. Stuff happened just when I thought I had many extra hours per week to commit to some serious r & r. The upshot is, my time at home is far more limited and so is my time on the Internet away from home - for now. I have seen several friends here come and go and then come back with a vengeance, and I aim to do the same. Sorry to the few readers of my WIP who kindly e-mailed me to ask when they can read the next instalment. I am working on a new version of the story and will post the first chapters when I can. I even hope to carve out the time to participate in a review group again, as I once did, and hope I helped other writers along, in the one Tamara H used to run. To paraphrase Diana Rigg - since I discovered my story is a tray of cakes next to Game of Thrones, I realize the excuses for banning me from review groups are even more pathetic than I thought they were before. |
| Artist needed! Dang, I lost the link but I know there's one out there somewhere. Someone offered a custom drawing as an auction prize but I can't recall who or where. Does anyone spring to mind? I would like to commission an artist to draw a cartoon of Putin as a White Walker, with the caption, "Winter is coming." Any takers? |
I knew that would happen: apologies to the last two readers of my "Invalid Entry"  , or the same person who read it twice, just before I revised it  |
| I've added a new entry to my book, "Invalid Item" : "Invalid Entry" Pass: 2805 I also revised Chapters 1 and 2. Logistics! Now I know what you mystery/detective writers have to go through. |
| I've added a new entry to my book, "Invalid Item" : "Invalid Entry" What was the prologue expanded into Part One, but now I think it needs a prologue to clue readers into the big picture of what the story is about, as Chapter 1 doesn't do this. I have tried to avoid the irritating tendency of prologues to be completely irrelevant to the story until you've read several chapters and then realise what the connection is. (Despite the fact my prologue introduces a character who doesn't appear in the story until Part Two.) The pass key is 2805. Thanks again to readers for reading what I've written so far |
| I've added a new entry to my book, "Invalid Item" : "Invalid Entry" |
Thanks for the congrats!  It was a bloody piece of work though, the Argentinians a hard nut to crack for sure. Worthy winners and worthy losers. |
I've added a new entry to my book,
Pass 2805 |
| I've added two new entries to my book, "Invalid Item" : "Invalid Entry" "Invalid Entry" Pass key 2805. I only set out to write the prologue, but it's imposed itself on me and expanded into the first 5 chapters. 1000 GPs for a chapter review, 3000 if detailed. Or do you have anything that needs a second pair of eyes casting over it, and a full report? |
| Thanks to The Penguin, I delved deeper into the charge that my novel is unpublishable from the get-go by any 'respectable' publisher - and discovered the literary agents who represent Judith Levine, who are also interested in fiction I also discovered (or re-remembered) an old joke: a conservative is a liberal with a teenage daughter. While the reasons for this are obvious (who gets pregnant), if I were a woman and a true feminist, I'd be disappointed by the underlying truth of this joke - the cast-iron template it sets for continuing gender disparity. There's nothing wrong with telling our kids to "Do as I say, not as I did" precisely because we don't want them to repeat the terrible mistakes we made at their age. All the more reason, then, for an accurate perception of risks and priorities. N.B. The quotations below by Judith Levine and Liz Highleyman are aimed at the U.S. because it's the country they live in. The UK is fast catching up (as we always do) and it's the growing apartheid here, segregating adults from youth, that inspired me to write my novel. So there's no nationalistic shadenfreude (sp?) on my part in quoting this. The child welfare issue has been all but neglected in the controversy surrounding "Harmful to Minors." Today in the U.S. the poverty rate stands at over 10 percent, with children making up an increasing proportion of the poor. In the only developed nation that does not provide universal health care, some 11 million children under age 18 are uninsured. A fifth of American women get no prenatal care, and the U.S. infant mortality rate lags behind that of twenty other industrialized countries. And virtually every sex-related problem, from AIDS to incest, is correlated with poverty. It is these conditions, argues Levine -- not pedophiles or pornography -- that are truly harming young people. "Poor people aren't less moral than rich people," Levine writes. "But poverty, like sex, is a phenomenon rooted in moral priorities, a result of deliberate fiscal and social policies that obstruct the fair distribution of health, education, and wealth in a wealthy country. The result, often, is an unfair distribution of sexual health and happiness, too." From http://www.alternet.org/story/12960/what_judith_levine_is_really_saying published in 2002 |
| In the only developed nation that does not provide universal health care, some 11 million children under age 18 are uninsured. Scary thought. I'm not putting my own two cents into this, but wow. Just wow. |
| That was in 2002, don't forget, long before the Obama administration's health reforms, widely attacked for not being bold enough. But the picture might be less bleak now? |
I'm shamelessly plugging this group:
I so miss Tamara's group (now defunct) but it seems half the former active members from that one migrated to another, from which I was thrown out at the door by a doorman in a penguin outfit who called my novel illegal and destructive. ILLEGAL? Has your First Amendment been completely assassinated? Do The Satanic Verses and Lolita and Looking For Alaska still sit on the shelves of your respectable book stores and the libraries of your schools? This only makes me more appreciative of my reader-reviewers to date, i.e. people who have actually read my work which is an unpublished WIP anyway. (Hey, that's the whole point of a review group.) At least 90% of them, including a devout Christian published author, had the wisdom to realize a story which critiques the persecution of social pariahs does not amount to the advocacy of evil. Indeed, quite the reverse: the Devil, who orchestrates popular fears and hatred, is a master of disguise, and his favourite mask is self-righteousness. Didn't Jesus make this clear? |
| If the laws of the 'free world' are so repressive that they prohibit critiques of postmodern feminazi McCarthyism, the chilling effect poses a fatal threat to fundamental liberty. "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." ~Abraham Lincoln |
| Suddenly, I have an extra 10K points. No anon donation, no email alert, they just materialised! How urgently should I complain to admin about this error? |
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now that will be quite a drawing. 
but I'd better take Olivia's advice lest I tempt fate.