Coffee heat rising

writing

School’s Out! (briefly…)

by

Yay! It’s spring break! One of the little blandishments of teaching that I’d forgotten about, it having disappeared in a fog of 9-to-5 overwork quite some time ago.

Mountain Laurel in bloom

Remembering it, however, after Departmental Chair kindly gave me three sections to plan for this semester, I set things up so that no student papers would sit on my desk and demand to be read over this lovely 70-degree week. The last raft came in on Wednesday, and I finished reading them and posting grades around 10:30 Thursday night. So…we’re looking at a whole week with no work!

The weather’s incredible and a mountain of household, yard, and computer chores have backed up and demand to be done. So there’ll be plenty to keep me busy over the next seven days. The question, however, is how idleness will play out not now but over the summer, when the community college hires no adjuncts (the plummy summer jobs go to full-timers) and even if they did, Social Security prohibits me from earning any more than a few classes in the spring and fall will pay.

Even though we didn’t work much around the editorial office during the summer, we were employed and I did have to traipse out to the campus several times a week. A lot of that traipsing amounted to time-wasting, but it did at least occupy time, if fruitlessly. Before I took on the administrative job, I always used to teach during the summer. Full-time faculty members earn a percentage of their salary for each summer course, amounting to a nice slab of cash—far more than adjuncts are paid for the same work. It was enough to fund a vacation, if I wanted to travel somewhere, or (more to the point) to cover some new improvement or purchase for the house. That’s where the dollars came from, for example, to buy things like the gorgeous sidebar from Crate & Barrel and the leather sofa and chair in the living room.

Next year, when I can earn as much as anyone will pay me, I may ask for a section or two at the West campus, which pays almost a thousand dollars more than the junior colleges pay. Probably to no avail: the university is hemorrhaging students as it raises tuition and fees while cutting services. The community colleges’ summer enrollment, we were recently told, jumped 17 percent over last year’s, which itself showed a significant rise. Thus it’s unlikely the university will have any summer sections to farm out to adjunct faculty…particularly since the Board of Regents just announced that, as a sop to students and parents enraged by the latest 20 percent (!!) tuition hike, they’re cutting university employees’ salaries by 2.75 percent. To make up for it, everyone will be trying to teach a summer section, and of course there will be far fewer sections to go around.

Mwa ha ha! How glad am I that I’m not working there anymore? Let me count the gladnesses…

At any rate, back on topic after that digression: What to do this summer? I’ve never had an entire summer break with nothing to do—even as a student, I went to summer school. Adding to the problem is that summer weather here is as oppressive as an Upper Peninsula winter. Instead of getting snowbound, though, people get heat-bound: it’s so excruciatingly hot you just don’t want to stick your nose out of the refrigerated cube that is your house.

I’ve thought about shutting the place down and going somewhere else over the summer. In 118-degree heat, it costs so much to run the air-conditioning and water that the cost of decamping to Yarnell probably wouldn’t be that much more than staying here. The problem is, though, that when you have a pool and a bunch of trees and plants, you can’t just shut the place down and walk away. In the summertime, when monsoon winds fill the chlorinated puddle with debris from the devil-pod tree and from every palm tree for miles around, you have to be here to clean the damn thing every day. And anything in a pot that’s not watered first thing each morning is fried by noon.

Back in the day when I was married to the globe-trotting lawyer, never once did we leave town but what we came home to some baroque new mess, crisis, or catastrophe. Yea verily, even before we owned a house with a pool, going out of town simply dictated that some fiasco would happen when we were gone. Dead cats, fires, thieving house-sitters, house-sitter killing himself and three young women in a drunken car crash, painter painting the black cat white, father doing battle with house-sitter’s wannabe burglar boyfriend, dogs retrieved from the kennel sick, ohhhhh god. I got to the point where I just. did. not. want. to. leave. town.

So. My enthusiasm for batting around the countryside all summer is about nil. Some things are worse than being hot.

This leaves: what to do next summer?

One possibility is to try to wring a book out of Funny about Money. I think there’s more than enough copy to pull together something coherent. If I finish off the “Financial Freedom” series before the semester ends, that can be the core of the thing. Anything that’s vaguely related can serve as support material, and a few entertaining irrelevancies can be thrown in as frills and flounces.

The question remains, though, whether I can sell something that’s already been done. Too many PF bloggers have already taken their (somewhat hackneyed) advice to press. Who is gunna buy a FaM book and how much are they gunna pay up front? I suppose I could go back to William Morrow. But both my agent and my editor there are long gone. No one at that house knows me anymore. And my inclination to seek out another literary agent is about as lively as my inclination to pack up and leave town for the summer.

The ancient book published through Columbia is still selling, though weakly…I might be able to persuade someone there to buy a FaM spin-off. It’s not very academic, though. On the other hand, in these times university presses need to stock their lists with at least a few items that will sell. The recession could work in my favor there.

Another possibility is to try to write a detective novel and peddle it to my favorite client, Poisoned Pen Press. These things are such a hoot! And I know I can write the stuff. I’ve done two novels, neither of which I’ve tried to publish. Though they are unpublishable, they did provide plenty of practice building characters, plots, and scenes. One of them, IMHO, is pretty damned good—certainly better written than some of the stuff I’m seeing.

PPP’s advances are very low: from what I understand, only about $1,000. The way you make money off the things is to get out there and peddle them yourself. Obviously, if I’m teaching classes every day I’m not going to have time to junket around the country signing books and schmoozing with bookstore buyers.

Still, in a Bumhood setting, where we see that we really don’t need extravagant amounts of cash to live quite comfortably, a thousand bucks of money happening is, well—not unacceptable.

Speaking of PPP, just now I’m reading a wonderful thing by a writer named Judy Clemens, The Grim Reaper’s Dance. It’s due out in August. This is an amazing piece of writing! In the first place, Clemens is a fluent and graceful stylist—the astonishing characterization and plotline aside, her prose is a joy to read. And then we have the fantastic magical-realist story…what a tour de force! The conceit that takes this mystery novel way above the level of genre writing is the protagonist’s companion: Death.

Yes. That would be him: the Grim Reaper himself. Our heroine Casey is shadowed by the very Personification, who, materialized in the form of an amusingly creepy eccentric, follows her around and generally watches out for her. Along the way, he collects this and that soul. Visible only to Casey, who herself is pretty postmodern, Death may or may not be a hallucination. That very ambiguity makes the story strangely credible and highly entertaining. It’s a great piece of summer reading—highly recommended!

A third possibility is to volunteer to commit some good works. Trouble is, most everything around here closes during the summer, and so there won’t be much to do. Nor, really, am I fond of working for nothing. I’ve never been much of a joiner, alas.

And finally, there’s the possibility of actually learning something. La Maya is always engaged in one painting class or another; she says her teachers are open to taking on rank amateurs. These cost rather more than I can afford, however.

One of my students teaches piano. Once she’s out of my class, no conflict would be entailed in hiring her to teach me to plunk away. That would be useful for choir: I do need to how to read music a great deal better than I can now.

Or I could take yoga or dancing classes at the community colleges. Tuition is amazingly low for several weeks of entertainment. Who knows? Maybe I could take piano at the college.

Speaking of doing something, it is, I’m afraid, time to get up from the computer and go kill some of the exuberant weeds that are trying to take over the front yard. Onward!

Thank You, Mrs. Micah!

by

Again!

This afternoon Mrs. Micah spent half her day migrating The Copyeditor’s Desk from WordPress.com, whose proprietors had noticed that, yea verily, it’s a commercial site in violation of their ToS and so taken it off the air, over to Bluehost, present home of Funny about Money.

She accomplished this in a few hours, in contrast to the horrific project presented by the migration of FaM, a two-year-old site with endless graphics and more than daily postings and bastardizations of code from iLife, Word, and WordPress.

Even though the new Copyeditor’s Desk site uses WordPress’s White as Milk blogging template, it’s set up to mimic a business website. Click on the “Articles on Editing and Publishing” link at the bottom of the front page and you’ll access what really are posts of general interest to writers and editors.

Speaking of Mrs. M’s many talents, have you read her amazing post on 2009 tax deductions at her PF blog, Finance for a Freelance Life? This is one of the best articles I’ve ever seen on a personal finance blog.

We debated whether to monetize the Copyeditor’s Desk. I didn’t want ads on the front page, and Mrs. Micah thought it would be unproductive to confine advertising to the posts. Given that my hands and Tina’s are full with trying to cobble together our respective livings from innumerable sources, we know neither of us is likely to write daily posts for CE Desk to make it operate as a full-fledged blog. So, we decided to leave it unmonetized for the time being.

At any rate, it gives us a URL to add to our e-mail signatures and business cards.

So…you’re a writer? Remember…

Every writer needs an editor!

Teaching without tools

by

So the li’l community college students have handed in their first batch of final, final, FINAL most-brilliant-thing-they-ever wrote essays. A few are surprisingly good. Most are unsurprisingly adequate, and a few evince some real challenges with language. Mercifully, so far none of them is flunking (exactly), and I’ve only got about four or five more papers to read.

Teaching students about writing has its challenging moments in an institutional world controlled by educators who are convinced that learning how language actually works does nothing to help students develop strong writing skills. Having made a living as a writer and, later, as an editor, I can testify from personal experience to the wrong-headedness of that idea. Most of my writing style has evolved specifically because I learned a lot about grammar and language in grade school, middle school, and high school. Over the years, I consciously applied knowledge of grammar and sentence structure to my own writing by way of developing a specific style, one designed to be moderately complex but not ornate. Though in my old age I often drop a letter or a word as my fingers fly over the keyboard, I rarely make a grammatical or structural error that is not a typo.

I believe that students are well served by a strong grasp of their native language’s grammar and style. But that’s something few of them learn.

After the chair of my old department at the West campus proposed and got approval for a course titled “Grammar and Style for Writers and Teachers,” the dean of the College of Education paid her a visit and said to her, “I wish you would not teach grammar to education majors.”

No joke.

So what you have, all you taxpayers out there, are teachers of English who do not know how to describe the workings of the English language. They do not know its conventions, they do not know where its conventions came from, and they have no idea how to teach your children how to form a sentence at once technically correct and graceful.

Inside the classroom, it means that you (the instructor) have no vocabulary to use in speaking with the students about issues they need to understand. There’s no way to speak easily and meaningfully with them about language and grammar (of any sort: traditional, structural, transformational, whatEVER)…because they don’t know the words to describe these things. Neither, we might add, did their previous teachers, being graduates of colleges that quite deliberately keep budding K-12 teachers in the dark.

So. Let us say I want to ask a class of bright young students to refrain from writing sentence fragments. I give them, as an example, this typical utterance:

Which is the main drawback to teenage drinking.

How do I explain that this is not a complete sentence? I’m speaking to people who may not know what a subject and a verb are, but more to the point in this case, I can’t easily explain to them that this is a fragment because it is a subordinate clause, and that we know it’s a subordinate clause because it begins with a relative pronoun.

When I asked my students why this utterance is a sentence fragment, one of them said, “Because it starts with a preposition.”

Understand: quite a few of them have been told they must never start a sentence with a preposition, but none of them seem to know what a preposition is. One reported that she had been told never to start a sentence with because, because it’s a preposition.

Because it starts with a preposition.
Because it starts with a preposition, my teacher said it is an incorrect sentence.

How do I tell them which of these is a sentence fragment and why? How do I tell them what patterns to look for when they don’t know what a preposition is, they don’t know what a subordinating conjunction is, they don’t know what a relative pronoun (or any kind of pronoun) is, they don’t know what an independent clause is, and they don’t know what a dependent clause is?

And, without using the terms “relative pronoun,” “interrogative pronoun,” and “adjective,” how do I explain which of these is a sentence fragment, and why?

Which is what I was trying to say.
Which of the puppies has the nicest personality?
Which way do we go to find the train station?

The current theory has it that somehow humans are born hard-wired with the grammatical structure of their native language, and so you don’t need to instruct them in it. That accepted as a given, obviously neither you nor your students need a vocabulary with which to discuss these matters. Instead, we’re told that the way to teach students to write is to make them write. And write. And write. The more they write, the accepted wisdom goes, the better they write.

Well, no.

The more you write badly, the more bad copy you churn out. When you don’t understand what you’re doing, all you can do is grope around in the dark. You have no way to improve your skill because you have no tools, no knowledge with which to improve. And no, grammar is not hard-wired into the human brain. It is learned in infancy by listening to the people around you. When the people around you speak a dialect—as, believe it or not, many Southwesterners do (oh, yes, Virginia: there is a cowboy dialect!)—you learn the grammar of that dialect. If you grew up in darkest Arizona, for example, something like I never saw them two mountain lions until they were right on top of me rings true. That is your hard-wired grammar.

And if no one ever teaches you how to speak about language, you’re unlikely to learn how to express that statement in lingo appropriate to the college or the white-collar office job.

What it means for a college writing instructor is that we’re left empty-handed of any tools with which to teach our subject matter. We are effectively hamstrung. There’s no way you can help students develop their writing skills without some common language you can use to discuss those skills!

To coin a Southwesternism: it’s the stupidest damnfool thing I ever heard.

Google grabs authors’ works

by
Wrote it

The other day, what should I come across but the entire text of my book, The Essential Feature, online and available for free through Google Books.

This book is not out of copyright. Though I don’t earn much on it—just a couple hundred bucks a year—it does represent my labor and, given that I’m about to be unemployed, I do happen to need the money. Evidently Google did unto me as it has done unto untold numbers of other authors who absurdly imagine they should be paid for their product: checked the work out of a library and stole every word of it.

Google has entered into a settlement in a lawsuit over this theft. After looking into it, I decided it’s best to do nothing, rather than to agree to the settlement’s terms. If you enter into the agreement, you may (or may not) receive some pittance as a share of the profit Google reaps by selling your works. However, you lose all future rights to any further claims against Google for its future profits on or future infringement of your copyright. So it doesn’t look like an especially advantageous arrangement. Nor does it appear to be worth the sheer hassle factor involved in trying to enter a claim.

RobertSidney
Wrote it

Why bother to write? If someone can come and take your work and profit on it with no more than a polite “screw you very much,” what is the point in existing as a professional writer?

The answer to that, my friends, is “none.” Those of us who enjoy reading books and magazines written on the professional level—as opposed to self-published tomes from amateurs and hobbyists—can say goodbye to that little pleasure. And say hello to another stage in the dumbing-down of America. All you young wannabe writers: shelve that dream and get yourself an MBA.

If you went into a grocery store and stole a head of lettuce or a package of steak, you would be arrested and prosecuted. Same if you went into, say, the Boston Store and lifted a few additions to your wardrobe. Retailers don’t put up with theft. But because the product is words, apparently it’s OK to steal.

Wrote it

Peter Osnos, writing for The Atlantic, concedes that the settlement “provides payment now and procedures for the future that assure the rights of those who create material to benefit from the use of it.” But, he adds,

. . . the accord also—in the view of its critics, led by the Justice Department—gives Google far too much of a role in determining the digital fate of an enormous trove of books; in effect, an immediate virtual monopoly and too much of an advantage going forward. In the year since the agreement was announced, the image of Google as the happy face of all matters digital has turned into something less appealing: a dominant corporate enterprise that has used its collective brilliance in technology and marketing to suppress competition while it prospers as others do not.

So much for “do no harm,” eh?

Packaged it; contributed to it

Meanwhile, the legal wrangling continues. The Department of Justice recently challenged the settlement in view of its significant antitrust implications. As DOJ notes in its filing,

“First, through collective action, the Proposed Settlement appears to give book publishers the power to restrict price competition. Second, as a result of the Proposed Settlement, other digital distributors may be effectively precluded from competing with Google in the sale of digital library products and other derivative products to come.”

Contributed to it

Among other things, anyone who does not opt out of the settlement loses their right to derivative uses of their work. This is  not inconsiderable. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, for example, is a spinoff from a magazine article. Because the author of the original piece of journalism retained his copyright in the article, he shared in the profits of the enormously successful book and musical that derived from the first work.

Also at issue are the millions of so-called “orphan works” whose copyright holders no longer exercise their rights. Under the settlement, Google obtains ownership of those rights.

Patent lawyer Gene Quinn eloquently puts the point on this pencil:

To force all those who do not opt out to lose those rights, both with respect to digital distribution and with respect to derivative works is unconscionable. A settlement like this would strip rights away from copyright owners simply because they do not participate in the case or settlement. That would be an enormous taking and redistribution of property rights to a private corporation on an unprecedented level… Make no mistake, the rights are owned and they would be lost through massive redistribution to benefit Google.

Yeah. Like he said!

A$K…

by

One of the freelance writer’s (and editor’s!) mottoes is “A$k and ye shall re¢eive.” It was coined (as it were) by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the best of the few truly useful writer’s groups in existence. The gist of this bon mot is that you should not accept just any lowball offer a publisher tries to inflict on you, but instead should insist on being paid fairly for professional work.

Well, I just landed a client that pays a moderate but more or less acceptable rate. Only problem is, this company expects contractors to sign a nondisclosure agreement that contains not one, not two, but three onerous indemnity clauses. In a nutshell, the contract proposes that the penniless freelancer will pay all the legal bills for any claim even vaguely related to her or his work that is brought against this international corporation by any wretch who thinks he or she should feel aggrieved.

I’ve been going back and forth with the company’s rep for the past ten days or two weeks over this, they offering one modification or another and me repeating that I’m not signing any agreement to indemnify.

Amazingly, they sat down and rewrote their contract to delete the offending clauses! The thing arrived in the e-mail this morning. So… I guess we’re on.

This is the second time I’ve stood my ground on indemnity clauses, expected to be told to take a hike, but prevailed.

The take-home message here is that if you own a small enterprise, you should stand firm on negotiating your terms and your price, and never accept a deal that puts you at a disadvantage.

Read that contract!

by

One of our Copyeditor’s Desk clients asked us to sign a contract to cover whatever work we do for them in 2009.

Ohhh-kay. It looked fairly benign. I started to read through it and was about to fill in our names and sign it when I came across this little gem:

15. ATTORNEY’S FEES: Should Contractor not abide by the terms and conditions set forth in this Agreement and it becomes necessary for the Company to engage the services of an attorney or mediator to resolve any such dispute, Contractor agrees to pay all Company costs associated with this action, including, but not limited to, attorney, mediator, and process server fees. All legal action will be initiated in a Maricopa County, Arizona court.

Even though the dreaded word does not appear, this is an indemnity clause.

Never sign something like this. The paragraph above isn’t as drastic as many; in some contracts the language says you agree to indemnify the other party against (i.e., pay for) any action associated with your work that comes up at any time and in any place. It puts you at horrific risk.

What the paragraph above says is that if a dispute arises between you and the client, you had bloody well better knuckle under to anything the client demands or you will be paying lawyer’s and court fees. Doesn’t matter whether you’re in the right; doesn’t matter whether the client is reasonable or unreasonable: whatever comes up, you get to pay for it. And that’s not fair to you.

People will sue for anything and nothing. Years ago the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual offered as an example of this fact the story of a woman who spotted a photo published in a book showing a crowded beach scene; she decided to sue because her kids were visible and she hadn’t been asked for permission to print their images. She sued everyone—the writer, the publisher, the photographer, everyone in sight. Eventually the writer, who had had no say in what images would appear in the published volume, was let off the hook, but not before he had been forced to hire and pay for a lawyer. Lawyers cost as much as doctors.

Clauses like these often occur in publishing contracts. You’ll see them in book contracts and, even worse, in assignments for freelance magazine articles where the writer earns all of $300 for two or three weeks’ worth of work. They’re often promulgated against people who are underpaid and don’t know any better, as though you were earning the kind of money that you could afford to pay for a publisher’s lawyers.

It’s hard enough to avoid being made to foot the bill for things you shouldn’t have to pay for. Don’t agree to do so just to make a few shekels here or there.

Always, always read every contract before you sign it.
The sequel to this tale appears here.