Noticed in the Los Angeles Times that California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has authorized a divorce ban initiative to gather signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot.  California is often regarded as the social laboratory for the rest of the country: movie star governors, the anti-tax revolt, a dysfunctional state government with a budget process teetering on bankruptcy,  pro- and anti-[insert hot button social issue here], and whatever else that can qualify for the ballot.   If California got something going, the rest of country will get it too like a bad case of swine flu.

Marriage used to be considered a serious commitment that wasn't to be taken lightly since dissolving the marriage happened under three common scenarios: legally invalid (i.e., underage without parental consent), adultery, or death of a spouse.  If you made a bad decision when you got married, you had to live with the consequences of your actions.  Short of murder, faking your own death, or joining the French Foreign Legion, you were so out of luck.

Then the divorce laws were liberalized to include "no fault" or "irreconcilable differences," and the divorce rate shoot up so that nearly half of all marriages ended up in divorce.  What used to be a shameful secret in society is now widely accepted. Celebrities getting married and divorced—sometimes in less than a day—is routine coverage for the paparazzi crowd.  The Republicans nominees had more divorces than the Democrats nominees in the 2008 presidential campaign.  With prenuptial agreements, you can even plan for a divorce if that should ever happen.

Now there is an initiative in California to change it back to the way it used to be.  Maybe this will be the initiative to force a change in the initative process.  Or maybe the status quo won't change at all.

What's even more interesting that no one else in the media had picked up on the story.  Probably because the initiative is in the signature gathering stage, and not all initiatives qualify for the ballot.   No sense for the media to focus on an initiative that might go nowhere.  But I'm fascinated by all the questions if the divorce ban is enacted into law and survives a constitutional court challenge.

Will people rush to get a divorce before the amendment was enacted the same way people declared bankruptcy before the new bankruptcy law in 2005 went into effect?

Will the legal profession try to challenge the constitutional amendment to protect their divorce and child support practices?

Will social and religious conservatives find themselves dancing around the issue because divorce rates are higher among the "family values" crowd?

Will the divorce ban apply to gay marriages (once all the legal challenges are cleared)?

Will the homicide rate among spouses increase dramatically?

Will Las Vegas become the key destination to get married and divorced?

Will people leave California to move to a state with liberal divorce laws?

Will the other states enact their own divorce bans?

Will this be the beginning of the end of an uncivil society?

Personally, I might put my signature down and even vote for this initiative.  Not because I have a strong position against divorce, either legally or morally.   But, like an anarchist holding Molotov cocktail at a store front, I want to see the impact of this initiative on society.  California can't get any more screwed up than it is now—or can it?

FTC Disclosure: My parents were married for 47 years until breast cancer took my mother in 2004, although I might have benefited if their attempt for a divorce in the late 1970's had actually succeeded.  I have no financial connections with the backers of this ballot initiative, and, beyond a possible signature and a vote, have no intention of actively supporting them otherwise.

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The MacGuffin (Fall 2009) Contributor Copies

This week I received two contributor copies for my short story, "The World's Greatest Coffee," that appears in The MacGuffin (Fall 2009 / 25th Anniversary Issue).  This is my second published short story but the first one I have seen in print.   (My first published short story, "The Uninvited Spook," appeared in The Storyteller that paid a 1/4-cent per word and no contributor copy.)  I mailed one copy to my Dad since the idea of me being a writer has always been an intangible concept to him and my family.

When we got together for my birthday in August, and my brother asked what I do to keep myself occupied since being laid off in February, my Dad said "ceramics" before I could say anything.  Ceramics is something my family could immediately grasp, and, at the time, I was working on a big pot.  When I mentioned that I had finished writing the rough draft of a 700-page novel a few months earlier, the room was silent since they couldn't grasp what I said.

Writing to them is intangible until it appears in print in the local bookstores, on the New York Times best seller list, and lavished with praise by the Oprah Book Club on TV.  Even when I gave my Dad a copy of my short story collection in a binder, he was more interested in keeping the binder and tossing out the pages.  Maybe the new issue of The MacGuffin with my story (pages 68-70) and bio (pages 158-159) will convince him that I'm serious about being a writer.

Then again, maybe not.

This week has also been good for revising the 125,000-word rough draft of my first novel, a coming of age ghost story.  I started frequenting the Editors Unleashed forum, posted a question, and a suggestion was made that I split my novel into two volumes.  The ideal length for a first time novel should be about 80,000 to 100,000 words.  Anything longer or shorter may be a difficult sell.  From revising about 1/3 of my novel over the last month, it became obvious that keeping the manuscript under 100,000 words was going to be a difficult task even after I cut out 35,000 words.   I still got three notebooks of ideas that never made it into the rough draft.

After careful consideration and a late night of revising the novel structure on paper, I decided to split my novel into two 80,000-word volumes.  That fixes a big problem in the rough draft where the halfway point happens at the two-third mark, something that would be painful to fix if the word count was less than 100,000 words.  The first volume is strong and complete.  The second volume is weak and underdeveloped.  The overall structure is now clearer since I have room to run with the story.

Would selling a duology (two books) be any easier than selling a single, longer book?

I'm not sure, and, to a certain extent, I really don't care while revising my work.  Something I'll worry about next year when I start shopping the first volume and polishing the second volume.  However, since my novel will fit into the Urban Fantasy market niche, a duology shouldn't be a problem.  Ultimately, I think an agent and/or an editor will have to decide how many volumes my novel should be.

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The blogging community got stirred into a tempest this week with the announcement that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will updated the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials to apply to bloggers on December 1, 2009.  If a blogger writes a book review, has a Amazon or Google paid advertising link for the book, and doesn't properly disclose the source of the product (i.e., bought at store or given free by publisher), the FTC could fine the blogger $11,000 USD for each violation.  There's a still lot of confusion about how the FTC will enforce the guidelines among the gazillion blogs out there on the Internet.  (According to this article, the guidelines don't apply to "bedroom" bloggers.)  Most bloggers—including me—see nothing but a big headache with these guidelines which haven't been updated since 1980.

You remember what 1980 was all about?  That's when the big three TV networks ruled American broadcast news, the MTV generation of cable TV didn't exist yet, newspapers were alive and well and being delivered by the neighborhood kids, the Internet was still with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and required a university account to access, the most popular home computer was an Apple II and the IBM PC haven't been introduced yet, a nuclear holocaust of from the Cold War could happen at any moment, and the peanut farmer from Georgia got voted out to be replaced with the cowboy actor from California in the White House.  Flash forward a generation, the whole world is a different place.

Based on my initial reading of the guidelines, my situation is more or less clear cut.

I'm going to remove all the paid Amazon links and advertising from my reviews and websites.  I been planning to do this for a while since I only made five bucks in the last five years from Amazon.   (Ironically, I only made $3.02 over the last four years from writing.)  With the ongoing Great Recession, I have a simple financial rule: if something costs me money, a pain in the butt, and/or, now, doesn't make me money, it has to go.  My life has been greatly simplified by this rule over the past year.  Being fined by the FTC would cost me some change and be a pain in the butt.

This isn't Amazon's fault.  I never seriously tried to make money with my websites or driven the kind of traffic that would enthusiastically click on every Amazon link I posted.  I wrote reviews because I enjoyed reading the book or watching the DVD, wanted to share my experience while honing my non-fiction writing skills, and, if someone clicked on a link and brought something, I would get a small percentage of the sale in return.  Now that I'm in the final year of establishing myself as a writer, I'm focusing on the business side of making money as a writer.  For the immediate future, it would be better for me to strip out all the advertising until I come up with a marketing plan that makes sense for me as a writer, my websites, and my ever adoring audience.

The other thing is I will have to update each individual review article and blog post with a disclosure statement that every item I had reviewed to date has been paid for out of my own money.  A blanket statement apparently won't do, which is stupid considering that I had paid for everything.  If I had gotten a book, DVD or movie ticket for free, I would have disclosured the source of the product anyway.

When I revamp my business website (which used to be my author website), I'm going to stick my post office address on the front page.   Apparently, there are some bloggers who are getting truckloads of free stuff mailed to them.  I'm definitely missing out on something here.  The only freebie I got this year was a copy of a magazine from a publisher that sat on two of my short story submissions—which, due to an oversight on my part, were both the same short story—without responding for a year while sacking the editorial staff.  I'm open to receiving any books concerning science fiction, fantasy, young adults (no hormonal vampires, please), and programming languages, DVDs, movie tickets, and any product from Apple.  No review unless a check is attached since my time is valuable and writing reviews take time.

The new FTC guidelines can be summed up in the eternal words of the penguins from Madagascar upon reaching the Antarctica: "Well, this sucks!"

[Disclosure: No company mentioned in this blog post has compensated me in any shape or form for mentioning or linking their services and/or product.  If the FTC doesn't like this disclosure, I'll pay the fine for each violation in 1,100,000 pennies like a good American.]

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Four years ago when I decided to become a writer after putting it off for 20 years, I wanted to become a full time writer in five years.  That was an ambitious but unrealistic goal.  Establishing myself as a writer is taking five years.  I think another five years will be need to entrenched myself into the business of being a writer before I can go full time as a writer.  Whenever an artist becomes noticeable success to the mainstream public, the artist has often been toiling away for ten years or more.  This past month was very good to me with my publication credits list doubling in size.   Now I'm changing my writing gears for the next three months to prepare for 2010 and the next five years after that.

Last month I finished up writing the first part of the rough draft for my second novel, and planned to use the last month of a three-month break between drafts of my first novel to write two short stories and take care of all the rejected short stories and poems that I expected to come in after a long summer.  The plan had a major detour that I didn't planned for.

I noticed that I had a new Twitter follower, Elemental Horror, and checked out the Elements of Horror anthology being put together by editor Clive Martyn.  While looking at the submission requirements for a horror short-short story under 500 words involving one of the four elements (air, earth, fire, and wind), a perfectly formed story came to my mind that I immediately wrote and submitted.   Within 24 hours, "Swine of The Earth," introducing Charles Goodwin of The Giggling Mongoose restaurant and his special ingredient for swine roasted in the earth, was accepted for the anthology.

With a restaurant-themed horror story, the fire and water elements were the easiest and to predictable to write.  The earth element was the second hardest, which I wrote first since I couldn't figure out how to do the air element.  After a bit of research over the next few days, I wrote and submitted "Salt of The Air" (curing meat).  If that story was accepted, I would write the stories for the two other elements.  The story was accepted on the condition that I write the other two elements.  A few days later, I wrote and submitted both "Honey of The Fire" (flambé) and "Rice of The Water" (sushi).  I had to rewrite the fire story since a surprised role reversal fell flat and broke the formula of the other three stories.  Removing the role reversal made the husband-and-wife story surprisingly kinky.  All four Charles Goodwin stories have been accepted for publication.

The good news kept rolling after that.   I got the author proofs for "The World's Greatest Coffee" that's been slated in the Fall 2009 issue instead of the Winter 2010 issue of The MacGuffin.   "The Unfaithful Camera" is still slated to appear in Transcendent Visions (January 2010).  "The Forgotten Sinner" was accepted this week to appear in Conceit Magazine (December 2009).   I have seven stories slated for publication in the next six months.  My first and only published short story, "The Uninvited Spook," appeared 16 months ago in The Storyteller.

After writing four short-short stories for 1,965 words, I wrote and submitted a 6,000-word short story about four teenagers and a killer shopping cart possessed by an angry senior citizen.  I feel like I have the Midas touch where everything I submit will automatically be accepted for publication.

However, a dozen rejection slips that came in last month made clear that I didn't have the touch at all, and a few were for submissions that I thought were certain to be accepted.   I got those returned stories back out to face a cruel world of rejections, and still have about 50 short stories and poems floating around in the slush piles.  I'm submitting my short stories to paid markets now since there is no reason to be giving away my work for contributor copies or nothing at all.   Poems are the exception since I'm still trying to establish myself and there are very few paid markets.

Writing is still business and a business needs to make money.  Something the IRS will remind me if I don't start showing a strong profit motive.  After four years of writing expenses, I can now figure out how to reduce my burn rate, determine my break even and profit points, and set financial goals to be operating in the black.  Thinking about breaking into non-fiction writing to bring in more income than I can with fiction writing.  When I prepare a business plan and yearly forecast this quarter, I expect next year to be financially successful.

With the three month break over, I'm revising the rough draft of my first novel during the week and working on short stories over the weekends.  If the next draft is done in three months, I'll take another three month break to write the second one-third of the rough draft for my second novel, more short stories, and take care of the admin tasks.  If not, I'll take a one-month break to work on short stories and admin tasks before resuming work.  I'm still on schedule to have a finished first novel, a finished rough draft of the second novel, a third novel that's ready to be written, and a finished short story collection, before I go agent hunting in July 2010.  When that happens, I will have completed my goal to become an established writer and spend the next five years to become a full time writer.

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Last night on the "Late Show," David Letterman told a story about finding a strange package in his car at 6:00AM three weeks ago, where someone wanted to produce a screenplay about "the terrible things" he had done in his life and would happily sell him the screenplay for $2 million USD.  After bringing his attorney and the district attorney's office into the mix, the man with the package was indicted and arrested for grand larceny.  Letterman than confessed he had sexual relations with female staffers over the years.  This was funny, sad and horrifying at the same time.   I'm somewhat familiar with the concept of being blackmailed by those who think they can take advantage of you.

Within the church I used to belong to, I had reputation that range from being "a sweet guy" to "a future California serial rapist."  The last remark came from a non-paid ministry worker—an unemployed patent attorney—who encouraged me to rape the woman who was giving me trouble so I could do everyone a favor by going to prison.  When I asked him to explain how the woman would feel about that, he said it would be a "small sacrifice on her part for the betterment of the Kingdom."  A few days after that, another unpaid ministry leader threaten to make public my emails concerning the situation.  You would think that non-paid ministry leaders would figured out that encouraging rape and trying to blackmail someone was wrong according to the Bible.  These two weren't that bright.

Unfortunately, a church culture can devolved into spiritual entrapments and witch hunts that makes this behavior perfectly acceptable.   (I was even accused of witchcraft and divination in my campus ministry days when I predicted what would happen to three jobless brothers if the brother who paid all the bills moves out of the household, and all my predictions came true when I moved out.)   Such a culture makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the paid ministry leaders to do what's right according to the Bible.  My only regret is that I never got an attorney to put the fear of God into everyone.  I had to endure four months of possibly illegal surveillance by the non-paid ministry to prove my innocence until the woman who caused me trouble was caught making a false accusation against me and formally rebuked for her behavior.

As for the emails, I threatened to post them on my website and send out the link to everyone with a note that it was the ministry leader's idea.  Who has the most to loose with the publication of these emails?  Not me.  The blackmail attempt was quickly forgotten.  When later ministry leaders hinted that were saving my emails, I again offered to publish all those emails on my website and send out a link to everyone in their name.   Their response was always the same that they had no intention of blackmailing me.  If so, why warn me you're saving my emails if you weren't trying to gain an unfair advantage over me?

When I was working at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple identity crises), there was an email list called the "chum bucket" for off color jokes and web links.  I bailed out of this email list after a few weeks when the supervisors started calling each other and everyone else who disagreed with them "douche bags" or worst.   The email list survived for several more years until there was an incident involving me that forced HR finally shut it down for fear of a lawsuit.

A co-worker sent anonymous emails to the list that were critical, negative and mean-spirited about me.  This wasn't blackmail as far I could tell but more like slander.  When the co-worker stepped forward to apologize and his supervisor talked to me about the situation, I had no clue what they were talking about.  At the time, I was a lead tester working sixty hours a week with a project ready to go out the door, attending church and teaching children ministry classes on Sundays, and taking two programming classes at San Jose City College.  Anything outside of my immediate focus I was too busy to care about.  When I later ran into the co-worker at a bus stop, he thanked me for being the only the lead tester who said anything nice about his friend, a female tester who I thought needed additional training but was let go by the company, and he admitted he was wrong about my character.  I never did find out what his motivation was against me.

I believe that a writer should stand behind everything he or she writes, whether in private and in public.  That includes the good, the bad and the ugly.  After all, if I get famous enough after I kick the bucket, someone will edit and publish a book of selected letters, emails and stupid rants that I had written.  A generation of tormented college students will write their dissertations on why neuroses represented early twenty-first century American literature.  If someone wants to pass a moral judgment on me whether I'm dead or alive, there's really nothing I can do to stop them.  If they want to use my own writing against me in sinster way, why not let the whole world judge me and my blackmailer?

Besides, all these incidents in my life are grist for my writing mill.  I'm currently revising the rough draft of my first novel that is based on my six years as a video game tester, trying very hard not to let it be a roman à clef novel since I'm not settling old scores but writing a unique story that hasn't been told.   My planned third novel will probably revolve around the church incidents above, and I had written several stories around other related incidents.   A short-short story, "The Forgotten Sinner," was accepted this week and slated for publication in Conceit Magazine (December 2009), is about an old man waiting to get right with God because his minister never called him back.

If someone wants to blackmail me, they can try.  But, like the David Letterman case, they should fear public exposure more than I would.

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