Article: "3 Common Pitfalls in Memoir Queries" by Jane Friedman

Read about these 3 common pitfalls in memoir queries, by Jane Friedman.

About Jane
Her blog is here.

She says, "I report on the book publishing industry and help authors understand the business.

I’ve been working in book publishing since the 1990s, but my views are not from the 1990s. Amidst rapid change in the industry, writers need honest and unbiased guidance to make the best decisions for their careers. I hope to offer you a signal amidst the noise."

41 Writing Contests in July - no fees

Thanks again Erica Verrillo and her Publishing and Other Forms of Insanity blog, for compiling such useful information that saves writers time... writing time!

Here are 41 writing contests in July - and no entry fees.

105 Writing Markets for July, paying

They want content, and they pay:
105 Calls for Submissions in July 2022 - Paying markets are here

Thanks to Erica Verrillo who researches calls, contests, job postings for writers in her blog Publishing and Other Forms of Insanity

When the going got tough, this guy REALLY got going

Jarrett is a real person, and his story is real. I've never met him, but I know a family member of his in the real world—that place all of us used to go out for coffee in before the confinement of the Covid Times.

Back in 2002 Jarrett had already overcome a really significant life challenge and was on a positive trajectory forward in life. Then, in 2017, he had a horrendous work accident in Toronto falling three storeys off a building.

His feet were smashed, literally, into pieces. He spent months in hospital recovering then getting physiotherapy and physical rehabilitation. Doctors told him he would not walk. But Jarrett didn’t listen to them and today he can and does walk—with the support of a pair of double-arm crutches.

In his early forties, Jarrett’s been told that in the future some time, he will probably be in a wheelchair fulltime. Pretty daunting.

Unable to work now, and in significant pain most of the time, Jarrett’s getting by with a disabled person’s pension. He has a small apartment where he lives with his cat and, right now, no partner, and no family within about three thousand miles. 

After he came out of the hospital, Jarrett developed his passion for supercars—those exotic road beasts, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche, and all sorts of super expensive obscure ones I’ve never heard of—into his YouTube Channel show, SUPERCAR SPECIFICS: Disabled Supercar Vlogger.   

By transit, and on his own with no grips or assistant directors, Jarrett ventures to the tony parts of Toronto like Yorkville for supercar-spotting, filming, describing, and often famously erupting in joyous admiration at what he’s showing us.

I’m guessing that, like my son who had an extensive collection, Jarrett’s always loved cars, because he does giveaways on the show from his Hot Wheels^® collection.

As you can surmise, after his accident Jarrett also had to cope with PTSD and depression. But instead of sinking into the quicksand of those pernicious states, amazingly he instead learned how to film, use a video camera, lenses – how to store and edit the mega-hours of film he captured; how to put together his intros/extros; learned how to do the voice/over and captions in post-production, how to find, select, and lay down sound tracks, plus the numerous skills of presentation and YouTube channel posting and promotion.

All self-taught.

And let’s just say he hasn’t had top-class equipment at his service in this endeavour either (see “Like, Share & Subscribe” later).

I admire Jarrett. After his accident, after all those months of agony, physical therapy, and hard work, he got himself back on his feet and faced his tough “new normal” out of hospital.

I’ve always liked cars too, though the more everyday kinds. I subscribed to Supercar Specifics so I can find it easily, and most weeks I go there on Saturdays and see what he’s done for the week. 

Every week he inspires me with his positivity and his spirit – really making lemonade out of lemons. And his generosity in frequently promoting other peoples’ channels.
Good luck Just recently, Jarrett had good fortune when a supercar owner took him to a meet; that was good. But then they came back late and Jarrett was dropped off downtown to make his way home.

Bad luck

That would have been fine except transit had stopped running by then and he had to walk all the way home, ruining his crutches in the process. They’re not cheap, so he was stuck home for several weeks, unable to go and do the activity that fills his life. Luckily and thanks to his family, he got new crutches and was off again.

Worse luck (does this guy ever get a break?) Then he got internet scammed out of the money he had for his rent, food, transit, and expenses—everything he had. Fortunately, after a couple of weeks, an angel came forward and gave him a few hundred bucks so he could pay his rent.

And on he forges…….

Goals Jarrett has some definite goals, which he explains here at 2:15:

along with why he keeps asking people to Like, Share & Subscribe. It's a couple of clicks, a couple of seconds for us--but can make a real difference for him.

"Most people think when you’re a YouTuber, you’re just automatically monetized and making millions of dollars." Jarrett explains. "Well, that’s not exactly true. I’m trying to get to the point where I can monetize this channel and make it a career. I’m not looking to make a gazillion billion dollars, that’s not my goal. My goal is to make it a career so I can bring you guys the best content possible.”

What you can do A modest amount of channel revenue could help Jarrett get things like better lenses, decent microphones and, when Covid Times are over, he would be able to film car collections and travel to places and film rallies.

All he needs is for you to go here and “Like, Share, and Subscribe” to his Supercar Specifics YouTube channel. It’s that simple. Ideally you'd also forward the link to this post to a few friends or share it on social media.
~~~~
Jarrett, may your expansive spirit, your perseverance, and hard work get you to the best supercar meets and even to the Grand Prix in Monaco. --Margo Lamont ______________________________

Current show schedule: 
--Mon/Wed/Fri – “Supercar Snacks” – short 3-5 min. shows with commentary. --Saturdays – the full enchilada. Note: this will change as the season unfolds and the weather improves. Check the channel for updates.
Link to SUPERCAR SPECIFICS on YouTube here.

______________________________

Gall to Gutenberg Through the Looking Glass

I'm never quite sure what to think about articles like this 

"The difficulty is the point": teaching spoon-fed students how to really read. Reclaiming literature is crucial to understanding the times we live in -- by Tegan Bennett Daylight 

and similar discourses and even rants on the subject I've heard from college teacher friends many times.

Yes, they are right about the general level of one type of literacy and general knowledge perhaps diminishing  (e.g., I was surprised  when a 30something Ontario-born person said some years ago, when I mentioned Farley Mowat, that she'd never heard of him. But she was a software company employee and had a computer literacy I could only dream of).

When I read articles like this -- and they are legion --  I begin to wonder if there's a new type of 'literacy' unfolding that is our 21st century version of how things went when the Guttenburg age was coming into being,  and people began to read.

In fairly short order, it became books instead of bards and ballads. Silent reading alone instead of group announcements or news-giving events. A lesser need to remember & memorize news, info, and learning to be able to disseminate it.  Now you could reference info later--in a book. Didn't need any longer to keep it all in your head.

And so peoples' neuropathways changed radically from the former Oral learning age to the Visual learning age. Huge change or evolvement in human brains. Some pathways, unused, dried up. Maybe that's why Memorization remained such a big thing in schools even into the mid-last century. But meanwhile, different brain areas came on-stream, became dominant; different abilities evolving, different kinds of knowledge transfer underway for what  people would need for their survial or work, their living or their learning in their era. 

I'm sure monks, when the Guttenburg press became widely-used, were horrified that young people were setting books in type rather than copying them in callgraphy. The result then was a much wider access to knowledge and therefore presumably new or other forms of literacy.

So when I read pieces like Daylight's  or hear college and university profs lament about the undergrads and their lacks in literacy, their inability to spell or write -- while those are admirable abilities -- I wonder if those students are going to need the professorial-approved form of 'literacy' to get on, to thrive and survive as the 21st century unfolds.  

And I'm a calligrapher. But calligraphy was not much use to me in the workplace and career, as a lifeskill for survival. And yes, it's great to have the professors' form of literacy, but it's just possible that not having it may not render the students imbeciles. 

I love the olde skills of the medieval calligrapher -- writing with ox gall ink, sometimes even with feather nib dip-pens. Yet as lovely and cherished as all the micro-abilities involved in calligraphy are, the skills of writing in Uncial would not get a person very far in thriving in this era.

_________________

(c)2017 Margo Lamont

Do Angels Have Wings?

I was curious a while ago why angels are always depicted with wings. Because in the angels-saved-me accounts, you generally hear about angels *appearing* on the scene to help someone, not flapping in like great big ol’ condors.  

Even in the bible it says the angel who was dispatched to tell Mary that her baby was going to be Jesus ‘came to her’ (nothing about wings). “[He] said ‘Greetings! The Lord has blessed you and is with you.’ Mary was very startled by what the angel said and wondered what this greeting might mean.”

A thing as big as a man flapping in would be noteworthy, yet it says she was afraid of his greeting, what he said. Nothing about winged beings.

Doreen Virtue, who has done a lot of work around describing angels says the wing thing is all a misunderstanding.

“Interestingly, angels never used their wings for transportation. The angels explained that they only appeared with wings so that we would recognize them. Apparently the early Renaissance painters mistook the angels’ aura glow for wings, so they painted them that way. Ever since the angels have shape-shifted to meet our expectations. Angels transport themselves—not through wing-propelled flight, but through mental manifestation. In other words, they imagine where they want to be, and they’re instantly there.”

A site called  “A Witness to the Truth of the Bible” more or less agrees with this but blames the pagans:

“The idea of wings probably entered 'Christianity' through the ideas of Paganism. Many of the pagan 'Gods' had wing.[sic]

These inventions of man would have been given wings because in ancient times this was the only known way of flying and traveling swiftly.”

-- and gives many examples of how angels appeared to everyone to look like ordinary men:

“We can see that angels were in the form of men because often they are described and mistaken for 'men'. Consider these verses:

“And the angel of the LORD appeared unto the woman, and said unto her, Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not: but thou shalt conceive, and bear a son… And Manoah arose, and went after his wife, and came to the man, and said unto him, Art thou the man that spakest unto the woman?”  [Judges 13:3+11]

Angels may spake, but apparently they don't fly.

The reason the wings thing might make even a fig of a difference is this: people who believe in angels say that angels help us a lot and that we all have one or some guardian angels who constantly help us. And that we can ask for their assistance. 

So if we can only see angels in terms of winged beings flapping into our lives, then we could be missing the rather ordinary-looking entities who may appear at our sides trying to offer us guidance or assistance.  We may be missing something important. 

It's a bit like those people who envision Jesus arriving for the Second Coming on a cloud vs. those, like the Christian painter Stephen Sawyer, who can imagine Jesus arriving next time in blue jeans . . . or  that Jesus might manifest as a homeless person asking for some cash and see how his followers behave.

 ________________

P.S.   Doreen Virtue adds that faeries are a bit different in the wings dept.: “Fairies, in contrast, do use their wings to get round. Even though they’re much smaller than angels, fairies have denser bodies—similar to the difference between the weight of a large cloud versus a wooden pencil. So, while the fairies are brilliant manifesters, they still rely upon the physics of wings to transport themselves.”

54th Anniversry of the Tibetan Uprising 1959: rally/march/rally

The rally downtown at the art gallery.
Much of the talk was of the 108 Buddhist monks who have self-immolated since 2009, trying to bring
attention to the atrocities that continue in Tibet -- monks as young as fifteen.

Sad, so very sad.

From downtown those concerned marched over to Granville, over the Granville Bridge doing call & response chants: "What do we want?" -- "Free Tibet!" || "China lying!" -- "People dying!" etc. and rather wistfully: "Where is..? -- "The Panchen Lama!"

A fairly large police motorcycle escort all the way.  Up Granville to the Chinese Consulate at 16th and Granville and more chanting.

And then some magic. A Tibetan man took the microphone and started singing the Om Mani Padme Hung.  It was beautiful. And the sound transformed the moment as everyone joined in and for a long time serenaded whoever was in the Consulate (and the rather bemused police constables). The whole mood changed from frustration and despair--to love.

Mao's armies invaded Tibet in the
1949-1959 "Dragon Attacks" and
continues to claim Tibet as part of China.

Tibetans say Tibet is Tibet, not China.
Tibetans have lived there for millennia.
They should know, shouldn't they?