No Apology

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The Book

Political TV ads can be fun. And annoying.

Debates can be fun. And maddening.

You can indeed learn things about the candidates from watching the ads and debates. But fifteen and thirty second snippets of information really don’t give you the full picture. And sometimes they actually hide the facts, producing nothing more than informational smog.

Recently, I decided I wanted to really know what Mitt Romney thought.  What he was about.  What he hopes to accomplish if he wins the presidency. If Mitt was someone in my neighborhood, I’d go visit the man, and we’d have a chat.

I’d ask him about his ideas and past. I’d ask him to give me examples. Because of the nature of the issues at stake and the number of them, I imagine our chat would probably last a few hours.  It might stretch over a number of evenings.

Of course, I’d want time to consider our chat and determine where I did and didn’t agree with him. I’d want to hear what others thought. And I’d want to look into his history, his successes and failures.

But the first step would be to go to the man himself and hear him out.

I hate it when people put words in my mouth. I’m sure Romney, or anyone else running, hates that same thing. If I were running, I’d would hope folks would take the time to hear me out. They may ultimately disagree with me on many or a few things. But I’d hope, as they are gathering information, that they would take the time to actually go to the source and listen to what I myself had to say.

Unfortunately, I can’t walk around the corner and knock on Mitt’s door. But he did write a book that was published in 2010, and it’s probably the next best thing to talking to Romney at his kitchen table. The book is called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

I’ll admit I thought it was going to be a dry guide book explaining his position on every hot political issue. It’s not a guide book.  In fact, he leaves a number of topics out. Nor was it dry.

I also suspected it might be a scathing attack piece on the Obama administration. It’s not that either.  Not even close. He does criticize some things where he and Obama differ, but he also commends him on a few things. Either way, Obama is a very small part of the book.

So what IS this book?

Romney states its purpose in the introduction: it’s “about what I believe should be our primary national objective: to keep America strong and to preserve its place as the world’s leading nation” and “the course I believe we must take to strengthen the nation in order to remain prosperous, secure, and free” (2). It’s about his ideas on how to make sure America does not falter as so many nations have, but remains wealthy, happy, and productive.

I finished the book yesterday. I found it interesting, personable, sometimes surprising, and insightful.

I found Mitt Romney to be a man self-deprecating humor.  He’s also a thinking man, one who likes to look at data to see what it shows. It’s clear he’s a man who does NOT think he knows everything or has a monopoly on every good idea, but he’s also a man who demands evidence.  I also saw a man who is kind.  He doesn’t talk much about his 14 years of service as a lay minister in his church in this book, but you can see how those years changed him as he discusses helping the unemployed, out-of-wedlock births, and single-parent families.  Finally, I saw a man who loves, LOVES, America and is convinced she can remain the hope of the earth, but only if we do things that foster our strength.

This book outlines what he thinks those things are.

The book is written in a conversational and easy style with many examples from his personal experience, studies, and history. Romney’s record of accomplishments demonstrates his skills and hard work ethic. This book explains to what end he would apply that skill and work.

If you’re planning on voting this November for the president of the United States, I think you’ll find this book very useful.  You may end up agreeing with many things he says. You may end up disagreeing with him on many points. But before you can do either, you need to understand what Romney’s position actually is.  And the first step in doing so is to fully hear the man out, in his own words, from his own lips.

As a result, whether you end up deciding he’s your candidate or not, you WILL come away with important insights into the issues discussed.

What’s Next

I want you to know that I do not worship George, Ben, Tom, Adam or any of the other guys who formed our constitution and started this nation.

They put their lives and fortunes on the line for what they believed in. And I am immensely grateful for what they did.  I enjoy tremendous freedoms because of their courage, determination, and sacrifice. Those guys, by-and-large, rock!

But I do NOT believe that their words are scripture nor that their ideas are sacrosanct—merely to be accepted and not to be considered and questioned and disagreed with.

Even so, these guys were gutsy and brilliant. They attempted something everyone thought would fail.  Something that HAD failed every time it had been attempted in their recorded history. But they pulled it off and changed the world.

These guys believed in the common man. They believed that the educated common man was the best person to hold the reins of government. Thomas Jefferson thought up a rhyme to make the idea easy to remember.  He said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

I can’t argue with that.

Of course, we’re not going to become experts on every policy issue. But we certainly can become informed on the broad principles and issues. And we can certainly become informed about the candidates.

Because I found No Apology so useful, over the next few days I’m going to summarize Romney’s main points, chapter by chapter, here. I’ll also point out interesting ideas and facts he shares as well as share any questions, quibbles, or disagreements I have.

I hope you find it useful. More importantly, I hope you read the book and join in the conversation.

YA Books Ratings and Publisher Arrogance (shh, it’s about the $$)

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I’m a bit irked.

I wish I could talk to a publisher about this. I should talk to a Barnes & Noble corporate book buyer. But since I don’t have one handy, I’ll discuss it with you folks. Maybe I’m up in the night? You tell me.

Here’s the deal. My wife is 7th and 8th grade language arts teacher. My wife is also a mom who loves books and wants her girls to read until their eyes bong out of their heads.

So we go to find books for her students and for our girls and, jeez, wouldn’t you know it, but this YA book features masturbation and that one features lots of fine words like F*** and S*** and this one is about giving the guys a blow job (tee, hee, hee).

Yeah, I know about YA saves. This isn’t about banning this or that content.

It’s about the fact that I’m a parent. And, geez, I have a certain way I want to raise my kids. My wife is a teacher who needs to provide books to her students that aren’t going to piss some parent off. Why? Because she’s providing a service to that parent. Because she wants to keep her job. And because it’s her job to help parents improve their kid’s reading ability not tell them how to raise a family.

So why in the Sam Hill can’t publishers rate their books?

There are millions of their customers who would find this useful.

Well, here’s one answer I was given by a writer friend I respect.

Everyone in the industry is really pushing back against the idea of a rating system. Let me see if I can explain why.

A friend of mine, ZZ [name removed], is the nicest person in the world. Volunteered for years at a prison to help people learn to express themselves by writing. Her older brother was a closeted homosexual for years, contracted AIDS, died too young. She wrote a book recently called [title removed], about a family in the restaurant business (as hers was) who have a “late” baby and the problems it causes for the older teens, one of whom is coming out as gay. It’s a soft, quite, sad, moving book. And it would be part of the “rating” system and banned from a bunch of schools. ZZ also wrote a book a few years ago about teenage pregnancy. Also beautifully written, kind, compassionate. But it would get tagged by schools as “inappropriate.” ZZ feels strongly that there are kids out there who need books, kids in your wife’s school system who need to be told they are not alone.

I don’t see any way to have a system that distinguishes between books that I see as anchors to kids who need help and those books which I see as genuinely offensive and encouraging bad teen behavior by glorifying it. The only system I know is me recommending the best books I see. And I’d much rather see librarians and school teachers go through books on a case by case basis, deciding whether they personally think it fits the values in their community than to have someone else not attached to the community do the same thing.

Uh huh.

If this is accurate, it shows the industry’s stunning lack of creativity AND arrogance. Because if publishers really were listening to parents, they could come up with a solution.

No, really. They could.

Why, there’s already one out there. They don’t even have to expend even one creative molecule to find it.  

Look at the Kids-in-Mind rating system: http://www.kidsinmind.com/. It rates movies 1-10 on sex, violence, and profanity (SVP).

There’s no age stipulation in their ratings.

Unlike other rating systems, there’s no “children under 13 not admitted.” No “appropriate for teens.” No recommended range for this or that group or this book is good and that one’s bad.

It just rates the content and gives it a number. You, as the user, determine what level you’re comfortable with and then find the movies that fit.

I’m a 4-10-4 on sex, violence, and profanity. You might be a 5-2-9. That’s not good or bad. It’s just what it is. More importantly, the rating allows me as a consumer to EASILY FIND AND PURCHASE THE PRODUCT I WANT.

I know some folks have never heard of it, but consumer choice is a really cool thing.

And if I hear about a movie that’s amazingly good, but I see it doesn’t match my normal levels, then I can make an informed choice to watch or not watch. The King’s Speech, for example, is a bit above my normal profanity setting. But this didn’t prevent me from watching the film (it was a fabulous movie, btw). SVP just gave me a couple of pieces of simple data I find useful as I make my choices. Data I’m already looking for.

If publishers were to use a similar rating system, every librarian could peg the levels they wanted in their school and be done with it. As well as consider special cases. Teachers could peg the level for their classroom. Parents could search and find and buy. And they could guide their kids in their purchases as well.  

Make it easy for them to go case-by-case. And don’t imagine librarians and teachers and parents are going to read every YA book published to find those that fit with their values. They don’t, can’t, do that now. They won’t in some utopian future. If you give them SVP ratings, it will help them spend their time, case-by-case, on books that they’re likely to buy. Which probably means they’ll buy more.

Write about homosexuality, rape, whatever. But make it easy on the consumer to see if it’s the kind of product they want to buy.

Some might say, but themes of homosexuality and rape and child abuse etc. etc. are important and would be automatically excluded!

No, they won’t.

You can write a story about those themes that scores low on SVP. You can write about those themes and score high. Themes are outside the SVP scale.

Some parents, librarians, and teachers may want to avoid some themes. Others would seek them out.

So, good golly, here’s an idea only a rocket scientist could come up with. OR someone who took the issue a tiny bit seriously and wanted to serve their customer. How about a little box under the SVP rating that contained “sensitive” themes.

They don’t have to do what Scholastic does with its school catalogs and label them “mature” themes, which might suggest “mature audiences only.” They’re not “mature” themes. They’re not “bad” themes. They’re not “good” themes. They’re just sensitive themes.

SVP and Sensitive Themes: four little pieces of data consumers would find oh so incredibly helpful.

But no. The industry can’t be bothered with that. And, consequently, reveals its arrogance and total lack of respect for a HUGE portion of their customers.

I guess they think librarians are mindless idiots. Never in a million years, if a librarian is tuned into the needs of her community and thinks a book on homosexuality would be important, would she search on that sensitive theme and her SVP ratings. And parents would never do that for sure (do you know how many gun-clinging troglodyte parents there are out there!?)

I guess the industry thinks because it sits in an office in NY City that it knows everything about raising kids. It knows so much it must dictate to parents how to do it right.

Yeah.

Or maybe what this really shows is that the publishers have got a book they want to sell. They want to make a buck. And, dang it, this might hurt sales. Because then people wouldn’t buy things they didn’t want.

They really don’t seem to care about what many of their customers want. Because if they did, and they realio trulio cared about these sensitive topics and saving the world, then they’d publish books high on the SVP because they’re just sooooo goooood, but they’d also publish books on those topics that are equally as goooood with SVP ratings that the majority of parents and school districts would be comfortable with.

And they’d let the customer choose what they wanted to purchase.

Customer choice. Customer service.

Wow, what revolutionary concepts.

They even might find that if you delight the customer, they’ll come back for more.

I know, I know. I’m living in fantasy land; delighted customers coming back for more . . . as if.

Question is: will the publishers listen?

We’ll see. I truly hope I’m wrong about their arrogance and disregard towards huge swaths of their customer base. In the meantime, you might want to think about talking to the manager of your favorite book store about this. Strangely enough, books stores have a lot of pull with publishers.

You also might want to look at Kids-in-Mind. It seems to make a lot in advertising. Looks like there’s money to be made in a review site like that for YA books. I know a lot of people who have said they wished they could just read books for a living. Anyone feeling entrepreneurial? Anyone?

EDIT

Two more points.

First, what’s sensitive for one person may not be for another. But that’s the beauty of this. This only identifies subjects that would be sensitive for reasonable sections of the market. For someone with your reading tastes, you’d say, eh, homosexuality, big deal. That’s not a sensitive subject. For others, they’d say, hum, have to think about it.

It’s just giving data. A respect and recognition of different tastes. Not a prescription of what someone’s taste should be. Or what people should or shouldn’t feel is sensitive subject matter.

For this reason, I don’t think publishers would want to use the word “controversial” because that implies controversy. Just sensitive (or some other similar label). Or even “Potentially Sensitive Themes.” This is just giving data about content areas SOME parents might want to know about.

Second, the SVP is not going to be 100% perfect. But something is much better than nothing. And having some clear standard for rating, whatever it is, pegs things so you can figure out where you are. As long as the raters are fairly consistent, then you can tell if something is close to the type of product you’re interested in. There will be goofs. No doubt about it. Huge goofs would be probably very infrequent because a ten-point scale allows you to make gradual distinctions. But I’ll take some goofs now and again over nothing at all.

Furthermore, because it’s NOT age-based like the MPAA and prescriptive in the target audience, it’s not telling parents what to do. There is no “good for your kids” and “bad for your kids” rating. Just the level you’re comfortable with.

Finally, some people object to ratings because “how can you boil a book down to a few numbers?” I don’t think this boils a book down. It’s only a couple of pieces of data about a book. Data parents are already looking for. The cover, recommendations, word-of-mouth, flap, description, buzz–these are all pieces of data as well.

In fact, you and I exclude many books based on genre labels alone. And yet we don’t worry about a genre labels much. They’re useful pieces of information. Are they always perfect? No. But they’re by-and-large very useful. I don’t see that this is much different. Just another piece of data to help consumers find what they want.

Your input please

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Dear Readers,

I currently have two options for opening BAD PENNY, my thriller that I’ll be sending to my agent next week. I’m looking, of course, for the most interesting first page. Please imagine you’re in a book store or browsing online. Tell me which option you find most interesting and by how much (a little more, a lot more).

Thanks!! 🙂

OPTION 1

The two men had been keeping back, playing it safe, giving the woman plenty of room on the deserted interstate. It was just after five a.m., the sun still about an hour off. Hardly a soul out here. Just them and her driving in the dark, the two men waiting for her to make her mistake.

Jesus Goroza, the man with tats running over his limbs like demons, thought she was FBI.  Dan Meese, the driver, the man with the prison scar on his neck, wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t the FBI have sent backup at the first sign of trouble? Of course, maybe she’d convinced her bosses she was clear, and they’d pulled back the cavalry. If so, she hadn’t been very smart.

Up ahead the woman slowed then took the exit to a small out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Utah town called Coalville. In a big city, there would have been cars. There would have been some bustle. There would have been witnesses.

There were no witnesses here. Not on these streets.

There were hardly any homes in this town. Meese figured there were at most a few dozen, and they were all strung out along a main road that stretched for what looked like ten miles. All of them were dark. A bunch of hick farmers dreaming about cows.

A brightly lit Best Western hotel and a Texaco gas station stood on one side of the interstate. A lone Sinclair gas station stood on the other. The woman came to a stop then accelerated up and across the overpass toward the Sinclair gas station on the other side, the one that you couldn’t see well from the interstate. The one she obviously thought might give her cover.

“Bingo,” Jesus said.

In a big city, the Sinclair would have been ready for business. In this no-nothing town, it was dark and locked. The pumps, of course, were on. And the station’s sign with a green dinosaur on a white background towered above the place and shone out into the fading night.

But there was no attendant standing guard over the cash and cigarettes to observe the woman. No one to see her stop and start the pump. No one to see her go try the bathroom door around the side. No one to see the two men pull in just a few seconds later.

Meese said, “Looks like the offerings to your White Lady paid off.”

Jesus pulled the semi-automatic from the glove box.  “I told you she wanted mescal.”

Mescal offered up in a glass five days in a row along with prayer and cigarette smoke blown into the Lady’s skeleton face.

“They want her alive,” Meese said of the woman they were following.

“She’ll be alive,” Jesus said.

OPTION 2

Frank Shaw sat facing the owner of Cowboy Donut in a back office heaped with stacks of paper in yet another job interview that was starting to swirl the toilet.  Trying to get a straight job as an ex-con was a lovely experience. Kind of like being dragged behind a bus.

No matter how tidy you looked or how sharp your resume was, it all came down to two questions: “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” and “What were you in for?”

Frank knew it would be stupid to lie about either. First of all, he was trying to go straight. Second, any employer who didn’t have a carrot for a brain was going to run a background check. So there was no use trying to hide.

The sun-wrinkled owner of the Rock Springs, Wyoming doughnut establishment was one Ms. Mary Rogers. She was probably in her fifties and had two-tone hair that seemed to take its inspiration from a badger—all bleached up on top and dark underneath.

Ms. Mary had just asked the question, and Frank had dropped his bomb—voluntary manslaughter, a security job gone bad. He’d been protecting the wrong kind of noun for the wrong kind of people, which led to seven fine years in prison.

Now came the fun bus part, the Judas-Priest-there’s-a-criminal-sitting-across-the-desk-from-me part. First interviews were like first dates. And Frank had basically told this date he had an Ebola monkey virus that would make her eyes bleed—would she now like a kiss? That, of course, was yummy to women everywhere.

Ms. Mary narrowed her eyes. “What else am I going to find on your RAP sheet?”

“That’s it,” Frank said. “Just the one unfortunate incident.”

“Murder is a pretty big incident.”

“Manslaughter,” he corrected. “Not murder.”

She made a noncommittal sound and looked down to study his resume a bit more like maybe something new would pop up there.

1491, 1493, and Greek Gods

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New Revelations About America

A common idea taught about the Indians (and, yes, it appears when you can’t simply refer to their tribe, most prefer that term to “American Indian,” especially those in South and Central America) is that they lived in such harmony with the land, that they trod so lightly upon it, that the landscape showed hardly any sign of their passing. This is, after all, what we were shown in Disney’s Pocahontas and James Cameron’s more recent Avatar, isn’t it?  

Many of us were also brought up to believe that there really weren’t that many Indians around anyway.  They were subsistence societies. There certainly were no cities comparable to those in Europe at the time. And especially not in places like the Amazon or Boliva.

We were taught that the Indians traveled here by walking to America across the Bering Strait land bridge that stretched from Russia to Alaska during the ice age around 10,000 BC. When they arrived, the proceeded to eat a tremendous amount of meat, killing off all the mega fauna like mammoths.

We were taught other things. But it appears that many of these things have recently been shown to be false. Sometimes dramatically so.

For example, the Indians transformed their landscapes, tens of thousands of square miles of it, very often through burning, but also through other ingenious ways.

There were far more Indians in 1491 than most folks know. Recent research suggests that Central Mexico was the most densely populated place on earth at the time, “with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.” The total population of the Americas in 1491, by some estimates, was between 90-112 million people, meaning that MORE people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Finally, it appears that the Indians were here twenty to thirty thousand years ago. They were here when Europe north of Paris was still uninhabitable and mostly covered by glaciers!

Charles Mann describes these and a number of other fascinating findings in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. He relays the information in such an engaging style that I found myself picking the book up at every chance. When I was finished, I wanted more.

Luckily, in 1493: Uncovering The New World Columbus Created Mann continues his history lesson. Except instead of focusing on the surprising things we’ve learned about the Indians in the last two decades, he focuses on the surprising impacts, both biological and financial, of linking the Western and Eastern hemispheres together. It’s the biggest event in the world, Mann suggests, since the dinosaurs died. Mann suggests that Columbus didn’t discover a new world–his voyage created one.

The first part of the book examines the effect of the exchanges across the Atlantic (microbes  and tobacco). The next part focuses on the effect of the exchanges across the Pacific (silk, corn, and pirates). The third part shows the role of the exchange in the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions (potatoes, guano, and rubber).  The final part examines the consequences of the huge shift in populations caused by the Atlantic slave trade (Maroons, mixed-marriages, and freedom). As with 1492, the insights are both surprising and fascinating.

If you like history, if you liked Guns, Germs, & Steel, then I think you will love these two books.

EDIT: I just ran across a fabulous Doug Fabrizio Radio West interview with Charles Mann about 1493 called  The World Columbus Created.  Listen and enjoy!

Divine Yogurt

For years eating a serving of sweetened yogurt was like eating a box of Milk Duds (20 grams of sugar) or a Milky Way candy bar (35 grams of sugar). Yes, the sweetened yogurts have that much sugar. The only way to avoid eating literally like a kid in a candy store was to purchase plain yogurt and add some fruit or a squirt of honey. And, no, I will not consider eating yogurt sweetened with Splenda or Nutrasweet.  Artificial sweeteners make me gag. As far as I’m concerned, they are abominations that ruin the taste of everything they touch.

So for many years I enjoyed my mix of plain yogurt and various add-ins. However, to my joy, I recently discovered a sweetened yogurt with only 15 grams of sugar (about as much as you find in a large banana) that tastes divine. It’s sweetened with real sugar and honey. And the mouth feel is sooooooo smooth. I’m sure this is because, unlike all the other yogurt manufacturers, these guys realized that, duh, fat actually makes things taste good and isn’t the  evil thing we’ve made it out to be. In just two bites it became my favorite sweetened yogurt. It’s called The Greek Gods Traditional Greek Yogurt. I’ve found another version—the vanilla honey—that only has 5 grams of sugar.

Be aware that despite its name, this yogurt does NOT have the high protein content of other Greek style yogurts such as Brown Cow Greek Yogurt with 23 grams. Furthermore, not all the flavors have the low sugar content. Their blueberry and strawberry flavors, for example, have 35 grams. So check the labels first, and then treat yourself to yogurt that will have you savoring every bite.

When I eat yogurt, it will still mostly be the plain Greek style with mixers. But when I want a special treat, you know I’ll be getting some from The Greek Gods.

EDIT: 9/6/12 I now feel like Jerry Seinfeld in the episode when they found out the fat free frozen yogurt really wasn’t fat free. All the other yogurts I was looking at had serving sizes of 1 cup. The Greek Gods folks thought 1/2 a cup was the right size. That means that this super amazing low sugar yogurt had 30 grams of sugar per serving! It’s like eating a Snickers! I’m so disillusioned. Alas.

First draft of Bad Penny finished

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Folks, this book was a blast to write. I feel like I did when I wrote “Loose in the Wires.” Here are my stats.

  • Pre-draft work: 135 hours
  • First draft: 252 hours
  • Total: 387 hours
  • Words: 93,131
  • Words per hour for draft: 362 (holy crap, that’s glacier speed!)
  • Chapters: 29
  • Words per chapter: ~3,100

I’m surprised at my drafting speed on this one.  I’m usually between 500-600 words per hour. Of course, there were a few spots where I ran into huge gaping holes in my invention.  For example, at the end of June I finished the climax. But I couldn’t write the last two chapters, which usually take no time at all, because I realized I knew nothing about the criminal justice system.  I knew TV generalities, but not the kind of detail I need.  Not enough to envision the last 5,000 words.  So all my writing time in July was spent researching.  There were a couple other invention stops earlier on.  So that’s my excuse.  Let’s hope the next one goes faster so I’m not totally embarassed.

If I were full time, I could have finished this in 10 weeks. As it was, I started drafting in January.  My goal is to write two books a year. I’m not going to make it at this speed.  Let’s see how book 2 goes.

Here are my next steps. I’m going to let BP sit for three to four weeks to cool.  I’ll then read it and revise.  Then it goes out to my readers. I hope to be shopping this one around by the end of September.

In the meantime, I’ve already been noodling around with the ideas for book two in this series. My goal is to finish the working outline while this one’s cooling off.