Britain's Schindler Dies at 106

I know a few of my SharingwithWriters subscribers and visitors are aware of some of my creative writing as well as my how-to books for writers and those who are probably know it often touches on the theme of tolerance. I was raised with intolerance all around me, a child torn between two families, neither one more accepting than the other. So I was touched anew when I learned that Nicholas Winton died at the age of 106 after a lifetime of doing for children what he thought was right at the risk of his own safety and reputation.

I first heard of him a couple years ago on CBS’s 60 Minutes. He saved 669 children from the holocaust. He was said to be “Britain’s Schindler.” Of Jewish heritage, he was raised a Christian. By dint of pure willpower and his own money, he convinced many British families to accept children in danger into their homes; each were paid 50 pounds for the expenses to return to their homes in Czechoslovakia for most were certain the placement would be only temporary. Toward the end of the program to save children, he lost 250 of them who were waylaid and never made it to Britain.

I try not to get too serious or political in this blog, but as writers we are all in a unique position to speak out about what is right. Political correctness is popular right now. In fact, it can be carried so far it becomes a deterrent to clear writing. But the greatest good is not working at trying not to offend but at acting when we see an injustice. Winton was an unsung hero most of his life. Though eventually knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, it was not accolades but a sense of Justice that moved and motivated him. He took action at a time when few believed him or trusted him and many still held long established prejudices against the people he was determined to save. He was so firm in his belief that he broke many laws to carry out his plan.

He will be missed, but writers can carry his torch for doing what is right. 

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 Carolyn Howard-Johnson's new book of poetry, Imperfect Echoes: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital tLetters, lie and oppression with small, will soon be published. She is author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The multi award-winning second edition of The Frugal Editor; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

Carolyn and Book 'Em Writers Conference Welcome New Writers to the World

Dear New Baby Huneycutt and Others Born in 2012:

If you can possibly arrange it, become a writer.

You are the ones who can save our race from prejudice, poorly written tech manuals, screenplays that bore and play to the lowest common denominator, and about anything else that plagues mankind today.

Moreover, the world is spiraling so fast around the sun and traveling so quickly as the universe moves toward its eventual demise, that dark matter, wormholes, and other scary entities will have been conquered. I visualize a publishing world devoid of the problems we have today. That means writing will be full of the same joys (maybe others, too!) as those we have in 2012, but it will have few, if any, of the problems. These are my predictions:

• Writers, publishers, agents—even educators—will have moved beyond petty bigotries like judging books by their covers or the presses (or lack of them) that books are published on.
• E-readers of all kinds will have put aside petty competitive differences and begun to operate on one system. That means what you publish—whatever it is—need only be published once with one format. Your choice. Easily chosen with a click. Maybe not a click, but a nod of your head or merely a wish.
• Hackers will have disappeared. They will have come to understand that a cooperative world is a better one. Instead they will put their skills to work helping those who can't afford their talents.
• That disease that plagues writers called "block" will have disappeared because everyone will have read Chapter One in The Frugal Book Promoter (http://budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo) that includes ideas to defeat worries about plagiarism, swiping others' work, being sued, worries about success, rejection, or the idea that you, young writer, are not enough. Oh, yes. You'll also overcome the fear of marketing. See the next bullet.
• Young people will have been raised and educated to have the confidence necessary to market their own work without fear of ridicule for doing so. Words like "shameless" will never be seen paired with "promotion" or "marketing" because there will be no reason to do so. They'll see that selling is not a dirty word but the process of matching those who will benefit from what we do to the product we offer.
• The Web (or something else!) will be so viral that we writers will easily be able to reach all those who will benefit from our books, including that delightful benefit—entertainment. Again. One click. Or merely a wish.
• Illiteracy will have been overcome. Instead of reading less, people will read more. Our education processes will be so perfected that no one will consider it desirable to pretend they don't understand or appreciate anything from poetry to philosophy to quantum mechanics.
• Our computers (or other writing tools) will have perfected methods for spelling, grammar, and formatting. Tools that always work. Having said that, no writer will lack the knowledge necessary to spot a mistake on the rare occasion the computers make a booboo.
• And writers (well, OK, maybe others, too!) will live an additional generation to allow us time to fully develop skills in at least three genres. That way we can explore, perfect, and draw from each to apply to the next.

Oh, the passion. Oh, the joy!

~Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a multi award-winning fiction writer and poet. She also is the author of the bestselling series of HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers, http://howtodoitfrugally.com.

~This blog is part of a celebration of the birth of a new baby and the existence of a book fair that is but a beginning of all the possibilities for the future of publishing. Visit other celebration messages today, September 8, at www.bookemnc.blogspot.com and follow the links to contributing authors' blogs (the more the merrier!). Leave comments on others' blogs with bits of advice or words of wisdom for the new parents of Little Baby Huneycutt or the next generations of writers.

Afterward, p. m. terrell will put all the blogs and comments into a book for Katie, her husband James, and their new baby to enjoy for years to come. (Katie is one of the powers behind the Book 'Em Writers Conference in North Carolina.)

If you have any questions, contact Trish Terrell at patricia@pmterrell.com.

Thank you for helping celebrate the first Book 'Em Baby!

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

On Writing Poetry, Voice and Food as Inspiration

I am including an essay today by a guest blogger. I think I sometimes neglect posting information on the writing process in favor of offering you ways to get people to read what you write. Not fair! my inner voice cries. For what we choose and how we choose it is essential to our writing life. So today a piece on poetry, voice and the choices we make from Margaret Fieland.

Writing Poetry, Voice and Choosing the Artistic Life

By Margaret Fieland

My mother was an amateur artist who specialized in portraits. In spite of the fact that her art teacher told her she had too much talent for commercial art she said she thought she would have been happy as a commercial artist. She never pursued "serious" art, a field which is notoriously hard to break into. Instead she married my father and painted on the side. She gave most of the paintings away. As far as I know she only sold a couple of sketches. This was, I think, mostly from lack of motivation.

I decided not to become a professional musician in part because of her example; I wanted to be able to earn my living and I also wasn't convinced I wanted to devote full time to music. I *never* thought about being a writer. I ended up finally as a computer software engineer. I've been in the field for many years now.


When I started to write more poetry I went out and bought myself a couple of rhyming dictionaries. I rarely use them. I spent years developing my own algorithm for generating rhymes. One of the benefits of my method is that I can come up with slang words. In one of my poems, for example, I rhyme sleep with bleep.

I find surprising things come out in my poetry. I wrote the poem below when I was *really really* annoyed with my partner, mostly about cooking stuff and I got to the line about wanting to hit her with the soup pot. My reactions went something like:

My God, that's awful.

I can't put that in.

I *have to* put that in.

I had to put the line in because, for me anyway, poetry is about truth and that's where my truth was. I've had a number of moments like that, moments where I realize that I had something on my mind, or was worried about something, or whatever, because it came out in a poem.

It was only later that I saw the humor.

Here's the poem. It was published in the June, 2006 Humdinger.


Bitter

I don't want to hear how unhappy you are

because I didn't buy any Roast Beef at the deli

or because I made Chili from Dave's recipe

with the six tablespoons of Chili powder

and Minestrone

with the rind from the Parmesan cheese in the broth

just like Marcella does.

It was enough to make me want to hit you

with the soup pot.

And if you're ever happy with my cooking,

then please tell me.

But I'm not holding my breath.



When I was little we spent our summers in our house on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut. My sister and I were good swimmers but my parents had a fenced front yard with a locked gate and we were never, ever let anywhere near the water without an adult. When I asked my mother about this, she told me that the neighbors to the right, who had moved out when I was a baby, had been watching their own children and the daughter of a neighbor swim when the mother went up to the house to answer the phone. In the few minutes she was gone the neighbor’s daughter drowned.

This made a tremendous impression on me and I wanted to write a poem about it, but struggled with the voice. Voice is the tone of the poem, who is speaking, whether it’s in first, second or third person: who is speaking and how they are saying it. I thought about using myself, my mother, the neighbor, the drowned girl’s mother, but none of them felt right. I wanted to convey the sickening drop of my stomach when I heard this story, the sense of how in a moment things can change. Finally I decided to tell it from the point of view of a real estate agent selling the house. The result was “Lakefront Property, for sale, Cheap,” which appears in the November, 2006 issue of The Green Muse http://www.thegreenmuse.net

The essayist is Margaret Fieland. She blogs on her Web site at http://www.margaretfieland.com

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

The Tale of a Ten Year Critique Group

February was our tenth anniversary. I didn't know it. Leora Krygier showed up with three little gifts in those delicate mesh tie-bags. Each contained candles, votives in zen-like frosted cups. It was our critique group's tenth anniversary. Phyllis Gebauer, one of UCLA's renowned writers' program instructors, had put us together ten years ago. We lost Iris Fabrikant to the land of cherry trees and monuments but the test of us, Leora, JayCe Crawford and I stayed intact.

Phyllis came to our first meeting -- to get us started with correct critique procedure. No, she didn't charge us. It was value-added teaching, the UCLA Writers' Program way. (-: Then, about a year ago, Phyllis asked to be part of us. Naturally we were flattered to be considered suitable critique partners for our mentor! She had always been with us, of course.

Our mode of meeting has changed over the years but our approach to our craft has been nearly the same. Tough. Loving. Accepting. Appreciative. No punches pulled. Everyone loving it. It has only gotten better with age.

Ten years. Oh, the changes we've seen. In our careers. In our writing. In our personal lives. Such friendships are one of the many blessings that writing carries with it. Writing, as you see, can be pure magic.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author THIS IS THE PLACE; HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED; TRACINGS, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T; and THE FRUGAL EDITOR: PUT YOUR BEST BOOK FORWARD TO AVOID HUMILIATION AND ENSURE SUCCESS.
Her other blogs include TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com and AuthorsCoalition.blogspot.com, a blog that helps writers and publishers turn a ho-hum book fair booth into a sizzler.