Sick of the Polls

The so called 'news' on TV these days, with all the debates and poll results are so tiresome.  No one talks about the statistical validity of their polls.  The average person who makes political decisions based on what they see on TV likely would neither listen nor comprehend how polls are conducted.  What is the universe of the data?  What demographic was polled?  How large was the sample?  What is the margin of error?  Is the result cumulative, the mean, the mode, or the median?

To get current worldly news, you must go to an alternative source like the BBC, or other international sources

I realize that this appears to be erudite ranting, but I don't have the confidence that people who go to the election polls really understand the process.  A couple of points to keep in mind when you go to vote:

• In the primaries, you might think you are voting for the candidate, when in reality you are voting for the delegate that will vote for the candidate at the parties convention.
  
• At the convention, many delegates are committed to their candidate only on the first ballot, or for a limited number of ballots.  Then they can change their vote to support someone who you might have opposed in the primaries. Or the delegates can place the name of a 'favorite son' from their state who didn't even participate in the primaries. The party conventions are a Political carnival.  And understand that not only the Democrats and Republican are convening, so are the Green party, The Libertarians, and other obscure political interests.  And their names might well be on the ballot come November
  
• Even after the party's nominee is chosen at the convention and runs in the general election in November, the ultimate choice of a President is in the hands of the Electoral College.  So it is possible for a candidate to get a majority of the popular vote and still lose the election.

I'm no expert.  Your neighborhood Political Science professor can explain the process much better than I am able.  All I am saying is, 'Do your homework, Americans'  Understand and participate in the process.  Go to the polls and vote according to your values and not based on what you hear in the media.   You can make a difference. 

Random Notes on Human Commitment

Trying to establish some sense of order to my messy (yet creative) work space, some old notes  on commitment surfaced.
Commitment is another of those weird words in our weird language.  It can mean anything from being bound emotionally or intellectually to an ideal, passion, or course of action, to being sent to prison or a mental institution. Be cautious to establish a core context before plopping 'commitment' into your writing.  Use of the word can make a subjective piece even more subjective.

Commitment to what is right or what is necessary?  Commitment to what is expected or what is acceptable?   Commitment to strong held, internalized personal standards might well label you as a radical.  And an opportunist's commitment to what you can get away with in a competitive society might label you as a success.

So it becomes quite difficult to establish a sense of strong human commitment in today's world when:

• Wealth is achieved by finding the loopholes in tax laws.
• Corporations spend more on ads and P.R. than on employee benefits
• We choose presidents in the farcical world of polls, primaries and the carnival of political conventions where the votes of the people are given to delegates to cast (or barter). And then the 'Electoral College' does the final picking.
• More money is spent on cosmetics and pet food than on eliminating poverty, pollution and disease.
• Where Athletes earn more than scientists, comedians more than teachers, and rockers and rappers more than social workers.
• Morality is preached and the exploitation of immorality is profitable.
• The government pays farmers not to farm and workers not to work, but ostracizes pacifists who won't fight, or free thinkers who won't conform..
• Kids spend more time with tablets and phones than with parents.
• Synthetic has replaced aesthetic and function has replaced beauty.

So, commitment is tough, but not impossible.  Don't stop believing.

FAR

Anachronism vis a vis Misappropriation

Some chatter lately on the Historical Fiction Face Book page about concerns of 'avoiding anachronisms'.  Should writers avoid anachronisms?  Having spent a great deal of my career in organizational consulting, I would respond in a typical consultant response:  "It all depends."

What are you writing, and who are you writing for?  Are you writing a screen play for 'Back to the Future", or are you Mark Twain writing about a 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'?  Then by all means go for the anachronism, it is the crux of the story.

If you are writing a well researched historical novel, and you want to be respectful to the period and the culture of the story, a misplaced object or phrase of dialog that is inappropriate to the time, will likely lose the readership of a serious reader of historical fiction.  And if the anachronism is foisted on an actual historical figure, then the 'insult' is doubled as a misappropriated piece of information.  Many historical fiction writers stay true to the history they have researched by introducing fiction about  characters that lived and wee impacted during the time of the story.  Even then, for the benefit of the reader, the story is told in modern terms with perhaps an occasional dialog phrase in the idiom of the period.

This has been a particular challenge in my current WIP book at several levels.  First, it deals with historical events that have not been broadly documented. (Irish slaves in the Caribbean in the 17th century, and the political turmoil during the English Civil War and the rise of the Roundheads, and how that spilled over to Barbados)  Second, the clash of culture and language during the European colonialism in the Americas. (Irish, English, Spanish, Dutch, French Huguenots, African, and Choctaw, Creek and Seminole).  Then there is the evolving technology, politics and economics of the times. (The very meaning of the word 'plantation' before it came to mean a 'place'.  In the 1600's it was a political and economic strategy  where investors in the war effort were rewarded with confiscated land and that land was 'planted' with foreigners to do the labor of making it profitable to the 'adventurer' [a term for the investor].  Also, the changing money crops in the Caribbean:  from indigo to cotton to sugar, all involving slaves.)  Also, I had written of mules pulling the wagons on the plantations, but learning through drilling into research that mules were not introduced until the next century.  So all my mules were replaced with Dutch draft horses.

So, if you are a serious writer of historical fiction and want to avoid anachronism and misappropriation, love your topic, do your homework, don't insult the culture, and (Avoid periods of European Colonialism!)

Ollie and Andy

    Considering the overall premise of my book as a narrative comparison of the impact of the persecution of individual members of two cultures, (Irish and Choctaw) by powerful leaders with strong military credentials, a discussion of those leaders seems inevitable.  Although these leaders occupy different times in history, the impact of the earlier tends to be the predilection of the impact of the latter.
    Neither 'Ollie' (Oliver Cromwell) the earlier, nor 'Andy' (Andrew Jackson) the latter, are characters in the book, the world conditions that flourished under their similar leadership resulted in both being documented as heroes by one segment of society and villains by another.  Both were sole surviving sons from common stock, landed, but not aristocratic.  Both were brilliant, but not academic.   
    Ollie ascribed his military victories over Royalists and Irish Catholics to 'divine intervention', while Andy was a firm believer in 'manifest destiny', God's will that the native peoples be removed so that their land be given to white invaders.
    Ollie ordered Irish Catholics to 'Hell or Connacht', which meant to move west of the Shannon River and occupy land which for generations was peopled by clans of Western Ireland.  Andy had the same mind set in ordering Eastern Woodland tribes, (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Seminole and Creek, et. al., to Oklahoma, land already occupied by  Caddo, Osage, Quapaw, Comanche, and others.
    In the 17th century, under Ollie's leadership, the Parliamentarians beheaded Charles I, then his New Model Army slaughtered or enslaved Irish fighters and Royalist officers at Drogheda and Wexford as a warning for other besieged cities to capitulate.  Andy did pretty much the same in the 19th century slaughtering Creek warriors who had sided with the British in 1812 war.  The other tribes knew his reputation when he ordered their removal.
    Both Ollie, a Puritan and Andy, a Scot-Irish Presbyterian, shared a hatred of British Anglicans.  Both men rose to high levels in their respective countries.  Ollie declared himself, not 'king', but 'Lord Protector of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  Andy, as you know, became the President of the United States.

JUST WONDERING

• Is there any other job out there where you would get paid for not being on the job because you're out looking for another  job?  Only the Congress of the U.S.A. grants that privilege to those trying to become president.
  
• Can you believe that Congress, which gets almost unlimited days off with pay would vote against giving working Americans at least one week off?
  
• Does anyone in the  Republican Congress deserve to be president when their main agenda for the past eight years has been to work hard to assure that the president fails?  And then consider that they failed at that, and they refuse to admit the successes that have been accomplished.
  
• And more locally... How many executives and managers of Dominion would be willing to move their families to Drum Point in proximity to their LNG export facility?
  
• And by the same token, would any of the Calvert County Commissioners be willing to move their families to Drum Point?
  
• And what is wrong with a country's leaders when it takes a retired comedian activist to get Congress to pay for the health problems suffered by 9/11 first responders?

JUST WONDERING...

A Bad Sign

The rhetoric of hate and fear that is filling the media is reminiscent of Germany 1938.  The fire bombing of a mosque in California and the cowardly attacks on Muslim women is shameful, and should be recognized  for what it is.  Those of us old enough to know the meaning of 'Kristallnacht' will understand.

There is a gentle, yet powerful song called 'Yellow Triangle' sung by Christie Moore.  Jews in Germany were ordered to wear the yellow triangle on their coats.  Then blue triangles for the gypsies, pink for the gays and so on.

The song warns:  first they came for the Jews, then the gypsies, then the gays, then the mentally ill and so on, until the last line:

'Then they came for me'

LISTEN CAREFULLY TO THOSE WHO WANT TO BE OUR LEADER!

The Ongoing Dilemma of Writing Historical Fiction

What's a writer to do?  There are things in history that I never learned in school.  Important things that I believe people should know about.  But they need another way to know, because these things never found their way into the history books; at least not the history books that I studied.  As a writer, I struggle and work hard to show more and tell less.  The dialog and the action show these things happening because they are salient pieces of the story.

Extensive research provides strong validation of events included in my narrative.  Fact checking and cross referencing, I work to be careful not to misappropriate information. (Covered in detail in earlier blog) And even with these extra steps and discipline, as a writer, I still am aware that there are those in the publishing world who will still declare my work as didactic or preachy despite all my efforts to not be neither.  Any historical fiction writers with any advice?  Input welcomed.

I find it interesting (and somewhat amusing) when reading advice from agents and editors about do's and don'ts of fiction. And yet, reading great fiction one often finds many examples of successful books just full of things from the "don't" list.

I was chided by agents for entering a where and when, place and date on my first page.  So I wonder if Ken Follett got the same gaff when he submitted "The Pillars of the Earth"?  And I recently read what a writer should never do at the beginning of a novel. i.e. Have the protagonist introduce themselves by name.  Gee, I guess that if Melville would have left "Call me Ishmael" out, maybe "Moby Dick" would have been a bit more successful.

So, I repeat, What's a writer to do?