Reading Monday: Right and Wrong

It was in Grade 8 that I read my first Sherlock Holmes story. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" was in my English Reader, and I wolfed it down the very day I acquired my brand new pile of school books.

Holmes's style of detection was gripping, and the prose flowed gently - I should have enjoyed the story, but I didn't.

The note on which the story ended stuck in my gullet-
"Get out!" said he [Holmes].
"What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!" [Criminal]
"No more words. Get out!" [Holmes]
And no more words were needed.

I was fourteen then. A young and righteous fourteen. A fourteen who believed that crime was wrong, and that criminals had to be punished. A fourteen who had an inflated sense of justice. A fourteen who could not understand how a detective could allow a criminal to walk free.

Something was wrong with the world if criminals were allowed to go free, after a confession was wrung out of them. I asked my mother to explain, but either she couldn't, or she chose not to. I harboured a growing resentment against Arthur Conan Doyle, as I waited for the story to be taken up in class. Even before the English teacher could start the discussion, I put up my hand, and asked how a detective could allow a criminal to walk free. She fumbled, and fidgeted and finally came up with an answer so unsatisfactory, I realised I had to either find the answer myself or remain discontented forever.

For two weeks, I tried to convince myself that Sherlock Holmes was actually in nexus with the criminals, and I even picked up a book of his short stories to find proof to further that claim. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the book, and as I read those stories, the portrait of Sherlock Holmes started taking shape. Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant detective who lived by his own code of right and wrong. Sherlock Holmes, the man who was firmly on the side of Justice, even if it sometimes put him at odds with the Law.

That one book taught me that Right and Wrong are not absolutes. That sometimes it is Right to give a man who has truly repented his crime a second chance; to subject him to Law would only make a criminal out of him. The other stories in the book taught me that sometimes you have to bend the law in order to serve Justice

That has been a lesson that has stayed with me through life, and had guided me in taking most of the paths that I have taken. Had I never read that story, I may never have become the person that I now am. That is the power of the written word. Can anything else ever match up?
_____
Image credit:
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective
Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes

Drabble Dare # 11 : "December" Theme

December!!!

The month means different things to different people. Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer in the Southern. Countdown to Christmas; conspicuous consumerism and family fun-times. The last month of the year; looking back and leaping forward. Winter wonderland. The prime of life. Holidays.

In December, we at the Burrow will be hosting an interactive feature to celebrate the month. Modifying the concept of the Advent Calendar, we will count down to the New Year by revealing a drabble a day, every day during the month of December.

And you can be a part of it too.

All you have to do is to write a drabble in exactly 100 words based on any (or all) of these photographs, and mail it to us at 'theburrow360 at gmail dot com' on or before November 26, 2010. The winning entries for each of the images will be featured in the December feature.

Image # 1 - Pole Star

Image # 2 - ice sculptures

Image # 3 - Poinsettias

Image # 4 - Colourful beads

To summarise -

- Write a drabble (a story in exactly 100 words) inspired by any (or all) of the photographs above

- Check that the drabble contains exactly 100 words - word count tool here

- Choose a name for the photograph, if you wish

- Mail the drabble to 'theburrow360 at gmail dot com', mention your pen name (if any), the name you would like to call the image (if different from the descriptive name we have given), and any other information you may want to provide us BY MIDNIGHT NOVEMBER 26, 2010

- Pick the next image to write a drabble to and start the process again

Happy Drabbling!

_____

Image # 1 & 2 - Wiki-Commons

The Tart, Dis-robed

(yeah. That was unexpected. YOU! No eye rolling!)

I’m not sure I am best placed for the first ‘Who am I?’ Friday blog topic here at Burrowers, Books & Balderdash. I have been blogging about it for over a year now, and at least a significant number of you have a pretty good idea. I’m the nut. Among my fellow Burrowers, I am at no shortage for co-conspirators in silliness, but I’m pretty sure I’m the most obnoxious. And I just sort of… do that… you know... get naked and end up with more attention than I really ought to merit.

I think mostly I’ve been framed… Troublemakers in a room (or forum) spot me and can see I can’t resist, so they dangle some nefarious activity temptingly in front of me, and there I go… you know… the FOMS…

What? You’ve never heard of FOMS? Maybe then, THAT is where we should start… FOMS is Fear of Missing Something. I was born with it. First to the party, last to leave, because Digression forbid something HAPPENED when I wasn’t there to be at the CENTER of it!

And before you think it’s all about me… well okay… so it’s all about me… you see… I’m an only child. And both parents worked when I was young, leaving me a latch-key kid. [did you know that the original definition of DORK was a poor kid whose parents both worked so he had a DOORKey? Yeah... I was a Dork. /digression]  I was under-stimulated as a child--too much TV and not enough interaction, and I’ve got some making up to do. (are you buying this? anybody?)

Maybe a little psychoanalysis would help…

Me mum… is very hard-working. And she was brilliantly supportive that I could do ANYTHING I set my mind to. And what she used to SAY to me was, “If you got your dad’s smarts, and my ability to work hard, there is nothing that can stop you.”

Did you see that sleight of hand? No… well no, because you only have half the information… Here’s some more…

My DAD… was a great big KID. He was loud, obnoxious, playful… he drank too much… (and you may think this is sounding familiar, but...) and he never really DID apply himself, so in spite of being smart, he didn’t get very far.

But I could SEE that this hard-working mum was not having ANY FUN AT ALL (I’m not really convinced she knows HOW to have fun… badly over-developed sense of responsibility). And this no-achievement dad was never going to make anything of himself.

The trick my mother applied was in KNOWING I didn’t want to be like her (hard working but not having any fun), so she added in my dad’s quality… the smarts… so I APPLIED my mother’s quote… and then I twisted it… like my dad would have done...

I would be as smart as dad, and work as hard as mom… but being as smart as dad meant PLAYING as hard as dad—because isn’t it actually SMART to have a lot of fun? So the result is a work hard/play hard approach…

To BEST play hard, one needs PLAYMATES. And while I don’t object to a lot of men in very few clothes and bunny ears, I really like people to laugh with… THAT would be the motivation behind me… and why I do what I do... to draw y'all into my web of madness so we can have just a little more fun than we otherwise might...

So there.

[picture taken by Paul... my classmate]
[Future Tart topics:  Ann Arbor, where reality never comes; Moscow, Idaho, home of the warped mind; Hart Writes, a little more personal step by step on my writing journey]

Delusional & Random Thursday: Loopiness

Delusion- a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also : the abnormal state marked by such beliefs (Webster Dictionary).

I often thinking of my pedagogy as a bit delusional. I have the idealistic notion that all of my students will succeed regardless of socioeconomic status, race, disability and any other macrosociological issues. I know that each and everyone of them has the potential to become productive and efficient members of society. Do they all really succeed? No. The reality is that my school and most urban high schools have difficulty obtaining high graduation rates. Our kids are having a really hard time earning credits and passing state assessments. I don't want to generalize but here in New York City, it's become ever-increasingly difficult to graduate with a high school diploma. So am I delusional in going to work everyday, planning great interactive lessons and knowing that they are all going to be somebody and do something great one day. Perhaps? But if I didn't have these delusional beliefs then what am I working for?

So I hear about everyone joining the NanoWriMo. I wish you all good luck and may there be many, many novels waiting to be written and published. I unfortunately am staying out of it this year. I've been a little bummed about my writing lately. I feel like I've lost my way and can't find my way back. The easiest solution would be to just do it and write. But with a family, full time job, sick parents and a desire to go to back to school, I simply have not made time for my writing.

What do you do when there isn't enough time for everything that needs to get done? I don't really know either as time management has been my enemy. I generally use "To Do" lists. I cross off two things from the list and then add about five more. Insane, yes. However, I suppose that's just life. Not really sure if many of you find yourselves with a similar dilemma, but I would greatly appreciate any suggestions you may have. Perhaps it is really delusional of me to want it all.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Abstract_tree.jpg

(Re-)Writing Wednesday

It's November, and we all know what that means. Yep - NaNoWriMo is here again, with its frenzy of word-spillage and absolute orgies of page count.

But what happens after those wild, untrammeled, get-'em-any-way-you-can words have been corralled and counted?

The dreaded rewrite.

Makes my blood run cold just to think about it. "Edit" really is a four-letter word in more than just the obvious way, isn't it? And like many other necessary skills (how to put up with people I don't like, for example...), it's one I didn't learn properly in school.

A bit of personal history: I was one of those annoying kids who BSed their way through everything, cutting classes I felt I already knew the material for, never studying, and scribbling down homework due in 3rd period while pretending to take notes in 2nd (made possible by the fact that I am old enough to have served my sentence before typing everything became a requirement). On one memorable occasion, I quite literally wrote a poem for a creative writing class on a spare piece of notebook paper held against my friend's back while we rode the (very slow) elevator to our classroom; the teacher, of whom I don't have a very high opinion despite the fact that she thought everything I wrote was brilliant (which is mostly why I don't have a very high opinion of her), praised the hell out of it in front of the whole class, most of whom had witnessed its hasty composition.

By now I'm sure you see where I'm going with this - I never took the time (nor felt much need) to edit anything, and never really got the point of it. To my school-age self, editing was simply double-checking to make sure there weren't any spelling errors (no, not typos, I wasn't typing! ;-) ) or grammatical missteps lurking among the lines. Sometimes I might swap out a word or two if I thought of a better one, or toss in a bit of topical toadying, but the whole crossing-out-and-changing-and-reshaping bit? Clearly, that was for lesser mortals.

Okay, fast-forward. I wrote a whole freakin' book! (Yes, in 30 days - you knew I had to work back 'round to the whole NaNo thing...) I thought it was great, and was inordinately pleased with myself. Who says everybody's 30-day novels are crap? (well, Chris Baty, actually, but...) Mine was darn good, actually, and - let me just sit back and read it and enjoy. Hey, what the - damn, I forgot to reintroduce that package, where did I... Oh, wait, who's this - whoops, wrong name, and... This part is boring, what the hell was I thinking, who wants to read about ghost griffins, why don't I... Crap. This thing needs editing. Big time.

And not my usual add-comma, correct-hyphen, fix-tense-error kind of editing, but some serious rewriting. Which is when I discovered that I really needed to separate the two kinds of clean-up or I was never going to get anything done. It's a macro vs. micro issue, I suppose, but for whatever reason I can nitpick grammar and police punctuation all day, but when it comes to actual replotting or inserting missing information or deleting large swathes of useless drivel - I think I'd rather bathe my cat (the one who doesn't like water).

Five years after so-called "completion", I've managed to tidy up 9 chapters of that thing. Haven't touched it in over a year. Meanwhile, that crazy Tart just keeps cranking out tale after tale and manages to clean 'em up! (No, my eyes are usually this green, at least around the outside...) I'm starting to wonder if there's a window to learn skills like studying and editing, and I've missed it and that's why I'm so lousy at it.

Or maybe I'm just lazy. And no, I didn't edit this post. ;-)
_______________

Image: Royalty-free

Topical Tuesday: Beware of Strangers Bearing Awards

Apparently, our blog has been singled out to receive an award for being informative, helpful, and "great in content".

Emphasis on "apparently".

This is the email we received a few days ago, offering said award (portions are censored to protect the devious from undeserved publicity):

Dear The Burrow,

Congratulations! Jen here, and your blog, Burrowers, Books, & Balderdash, is a Master Fiction Writing Blog!

We've scoured the web looking for amazing blogs that not only are great in content, but informative and helpful when needed. And we've determined your blog to be such! We like to call it a Master of its category!

You can see your blog and others at:
yyy.dubious_site.net/top-blogs/top-writing-fiction/

As a winner, we honor you by presenting you with an awards badge. You can get your badge here:
yyy.dubious_site.net/top-blogs/top-writing-fiction/#badge.

If you choose to accept or decline to be recognized, please let me know.

Please do not hesitate to call or email if you have any questions. Again, Congratulations, and keep up the awesome work!

The URL goes to a page that lists several dozen fiction-writing blogs, and I begin to feel a little less special. Curious, I decided to visit yyy.dubioussite.net, which claimed to offer online degree programs. Dubious_site.net's home page is topped with this gem:

Ah, nothing like a few big-name logos, carefully reduced according to legal department recommendations! Let's declare mutual topicality and thus imply some measure of legitimacy and/or downright endorsement. I think that's a good plan for our blog. What do you think? Should our header include something like this?

Scrolling down... Dubious_site.net is a list of online universities, which (they claim) have been "vetted by our team of experts across over 500 factors". Holy cow, five hundred? Not a smart claim. If Sir Francis the privateer sailed into an English port and swore on a stack of bibles that he'd "sunk over 500 Spanish Galleons", then it wouldn't take an eight-year-old very long to realize that Francis couldn't have sank 500 ships, and conclude that it's a bit of trickery justified by the fact that Sir Francis dropped 500 one-galleon Spanish coins into his bathtub.

I imagine Dubious_site.net's list of "factors" looks something like this:

1) Does the school offer a course in A____?
2) Does the school accept financial aid for A_____?
3) Does the school offer a course in B____?
4) Does the school accept financial aid for B_____?
5) Has the school been convicted of war crimes?
6) Do their course materials use vowels?
etc.

Okay, enough speculation. I decide to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes by actually clicking on one of their online university listings. Unsurprisingly, there is no evaluation data, no review, and no rating (but their experts have vetted it, right?). Also, the link does not go directly to the listed university. In fact, every single link that I checked went to the same site.

Let's call that "Site#2". The rabbit hole goes deeper.

Site#2

You can arrive at one of several pages on Site#2, but they're all pretty much the same. Each page incorporates the referral source (Dubious_site), and includes a form with which you can request information from the online school in question. Looks like a revenue portal. It's also a secure page (https), which (I'm sure) uses an RSA public key exchange to avoid counting repeat visitors twice. Smells like a revenue portal.

I crawl back to the home page of Site#2, and it quickly becomes obvious that I was right all along:

[Site#2].com is an Internet media company that acquires and develops high-quality Web sites in the online education vertical. We combine our proprietary technology, processes and high quality content to create sites that are both highly profitable and highly valuable to visitors....
We are now accepting new affiliates! [Site#2].com affiliate program features industry leading payouts and support.

Their seven-member staff combines for an adequate résumé of web development, finance, business management, and marketing. They have no expertise in education (online or otherwise), and no staff to actually evaluate any online schools.


Putting it Together (in case you already hadn't)

Online education has become a lucrative, for-profit business, thanks to the massive funds available through government financial aid to students. One can grab a few pages from Wikipedia, copy some older textbooks, and put together an online course that operates at very little cost, leaving the bulk of resources to be invested in advertising and accreditation.

Site#2 is in the "online education vertical" business, which means they earn money by driving referrals to those online schools. Thanks to automation and per-referral payment schedules, Site#2 and the various universities don't have to know jack about each other, do not require exclusive or committment-laden contracts, and don't even have to like each other.

And because Site#2 is good with their web technology (specifically, the ability to verify unique referrals) they can make more money by opening the door to "affiliates", which is anybody with a useful domain name and/or marketing strategy-- like our original Dubious_site.net. Again, the two parties don't require exclusive contracts, commitments, or mutual knowledge, thanks to the automated per-referral payment system. It's a lot like "ads by google", except they put up a non-advertisement façade.


Now about that "Award"

I did a few creative searches for the text in the email we received. Again, no surprise: It's a form letter that's been sent out dozens, probably thousands, of other bloggers.

I also examined the home page of Dubious_site.net. There is no link to their blog awards.

I examined what appeared to be the main awards page, yyy.dubious_site.net/top-blogs/. There were about 45 categories listed & linked, but writing fiction was not included.

Finally, I went to the specific award page, which looked something like this:

You see those little arrows and the blue text? That's what I call a load of B.S. The text is style-coded to look like a link, but, in fact, it is not. If someone links to your site, and you link back to theirs, it's called a "reciprocal link", and it doesn't help your search engine rankings nearly as much as a one-way link pointing at you.

Nice, huh? Dubious_site.net "selects" your blog for an award, but instead of posting a link to your blog, they expect you to post an advertisement link to them.

"What a prick!"

And that's the whole point of their deceptive campaign. They want to spawn ads and jack up their search engine rankings. So if you've been the lucky recipient of such an award, I don't recommend following their instructions. If you really want to keep the badge, you can stop rewarding deception by changing the link in the badge code provided. The last line looks like this:

<a style="border-bottom:none;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:550;color:#9999cc; "href="htpp://yyy.dubious_site.net">Online Masters Degree Programs</a>

Change those "a" tags to "p" tags and remove everything between href and the last quotation mark... OR you can simply change the URL to your own blog or a dummy URL (the badge will still show up).

Cheerio,
Jason

Reading Leads To...

Reading is not all about reading, you know. *nods firmly* Reading can lead to a lot of things, not least inspiring you to write your own stories. One of the best things that reading has led me to in the past, I'd almost forgotten about. In my usual panic of thinking of something to blog about, fellow Burrower Rayna gave me a couple of ideas, all of which I'm sure I'll use one day, but one of which I knew I had to use for today's post.


A few years ago, I ended up playing judge at a trial. Not a real trial, you understand, but a trial all the same. It was a few months after Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince had been released, and I was knee-deep in the forums of HPANA. At the time I was involved heavily in a topic about Lily Evans (the mother of Harry), and we were discussing her unproved (at the time) relationship with Severus Snape, the ambiguous potions master of Hogwarts. Of course, we digressed a fair bit and ended up discussing Snape's involvement in the death of Albus Dumbledore. A fellow HPANAer came up with a suggestion that he should be put on trial, simply because we were undecided whether his character was mostly good, or mostly bad.

Of course, me being me, I ran away with it. Soon there was a shiny new thread called 'The People vs. Severus Snape', and we began recruiting members for the prosecution, the defence, and the all important jury. Looking back, I'm amazed at what actually happened after that. There was a surprisingly large amount of people who wanted to take part, and though I was of the opinion that most people thought Snape was 'bad', both teams were fairly even in numbers. The prosecution and the defence created their own threads to begin gathering their evidence, while the jury opened their own place to deliberate.

The trial attracted a high number of followers, and I happen to know that a few people joined the site specifically to take part in the discussions. The number of views that the thread amassed was extraordinary, and I seem to remember that another website even stole our idea (including the title itself).

Reading these books not only led to me finding a bunch of new friends, but also allowed me to participate in one of the most interesting debates I've ever come across. The character of Snape is a delicious one, and his intentions were never quite obvious until we neared the end of the series. We speculated, of course, but we never knew for sure. The Harry Potter series, for all its flaws (because as much as I love the books, they do have flaws) captured the imagination of so many people, enough to make quite a few of these people devote hours of their time to gathering and filing evidence, and writing rebuttals and whatnot.

What followed was several months of reading pages of evidence, mediating between the two (often bickering) teams, calming the ruffled feathers of almost everyone, and being amazed at the sheer amount of hard work that both the prosecution and the defence put into their evidence posts. We were tired, we were grumpy. We had to deal with homework, snooty co-workers, homesickness, and snivelly-nosed kids. But we all pulled together and soldiered on because we were determined to see things through to the end.

The character of Snape inspired loyalty from his supporters, and fierce opposition from his, er, opposition. How many characters from a novel can you name that would do that? It's not unique by a long shot, but neither is it an everyday occurrence. The power of the written word can inspire many things.

So yes, reading is not always about the reading. It's about what can happen afterwards. What will your story inspire people to do?

Picture of Alan Rickman depicting Severus Snape, courtesy of Wikipedia.