A pitch for "StopRape.com" my new book

Can a young country girl find fame as a network television broadcaster? StopRape.com is a novel set in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. A third of the population is Finnish-American and people “talk like dat dere, hey.”  This is country with snow six months of the year. The protagonist, native Yooper Kerstin Mikkola, is a TV broadcaster at KDUP with offices at an old airport terminal.  She works for Queen Annie, her mentor and widow of the original station owner. What Kerstin would like is to move up to a network job but she is unknown.

A surprise arrival at the station is Imogene Michener who, as a marine recruit, was raped by her training sergeant Carlos Wayne Sauvenier. Imogene’s traumatic case was blown off by her commander. Suffering from extreme PTSD and discharged, Imogene set up the StopRape.com web site, inviting other victims to post their stories for the world to read. As a result of the web posting, Sauvenier has been castrated by a gang of violent California Women Warrior bikers.

Interviewed on KDUP television without showing her own face, Imogene persuades Kerstin to give her a copy of the recorded but unedited interview, and places the revised pitch for her web site on You-Tube. Now Kerstin is identified, and hate mail follows. Kerstin wanted to be noticed, but not to be vilified by alleged rapists.

Identified as a friend to rape victims, Kerstin helps Heather Rasmussen, who claims she was raped by her boy friend Joe Pascoe and, with Kerstin’s advice, puts his picture up on the StopRape site. All this begins to come together, enmeshing Kerstin Mikkola as a figure in international news. As a reporter, she knows she should not be other than an observer. Out of her depth, she still hopes for network notice. 

How to Save Social Security

One benefit of being a Swedish  and a Danish pensioner is I get to see how different the income taxes are paid there and here in the USA. For instance, in Denmark the income tax includes a 5% health tax which pays for the National Health. That might be the approach we could take in the United States.

This year the Swedes have made a change in the Social Security benefit. Instead of a COLA as we Americans sometimes get, the Swedes adjust the social security pensions according to how much is paid into the system. In 2013 less was paid into the Swedish pension system than was paid out, so they are reducing the pensions by 2,7%. No deficit spending there!

Our government would be more fiscally responsible if it followed the practice of the Scandinavians: an annual health tax to fund Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare and a floating social security benefit. That could save Social Security from eventual bankruptcy.  The Cost of Living Adjustment can go both ways, you know. If the cost of living goes down, so goes the pension plan. Makes sense.

But then, since when did our government’s fiscal policies make any sense?

What about contests?

Normally I avoid literary contests. At the worst, they are a scam, like the national poetry contest that invites wannabe poets. The result of the submission is likely to be a notice that your poem is to be published (copies available for you and your family members, relatives, friends, etc, of course) for only xxx dollars per copy, and you are invited to the national meeting at a fancy hotel (expensive registration, etc.) which turned out to be a way to lure people to a meeting and cash in on he fees. This play on the egos of the gullible and, perhaps, desperate for publication is unethical.

Other contests typically charge an entry fee,  ostensibly to provide an honorarium for the judges who spend their time screening the submissions.  Some of the entry fees are pretty steep, like for the book awards, several hundred dollars. One reason for he steep fees is to weed out those who are too cheap or poor to pay, but also to limit the inevitable flood of submissions. As one reviewer pointed out, some people who are bad writers have money, so a price gate doesn't keep them out.

Publication is like a game, especially academic publishing where one collects brownie points, titles on the resume, like tokens to be used to cash in for raises or promotions. The so-called "little" magazines are like the long dead one, "Tailings,"  that had a very brief life at Michigan Technological University. Being the editor of a campus literary magazine can provide an element of prestige with the department head. Academic authors who write for such endeavors can trade, "I publish your piece and you publish mine." I did a satire of this in a short story in my collection "Misplaced Persons" where the professor, hungry for tenure but not capable of doing great writing himself, decided to edit a book of poetry, set up a contest with a fee, sold copies of the published booklet,  and was doing great until it turned out the winning poem was stolen lyrics from an obscure musical number. He got sued for plagiarism and fired.

There are also reviewers playing their own sort of game. For several years I actually did review children's books on my radio show and gave three books a plug with each broadcast. Over ten years of broadcasting, I acquired a collection of 800 delightful children's books my daughters picked out of the publishers' catalogs. Other reviewers only want books they can sell and might not review at all. Authors review each other's books, too, a variation of "I'll publish your story and you publish mine." My daughter, who used to work for Coffee House Press,won't read anything if it isn't reviewed in the NY Times. I'm not reviewed there, so it's only because I'm her dad that she'll read mine.

The upshot of all this is I don't give much credence to any contest that charges an entry fee.  I do review books I've read on my Kindle. I think if you've posted enough reviews you begin to get some notice as someone with a reliable opinion. Maybe.
.