Sallie's Book Reviews and More: Interview with Ronald Fischman, Author of 3 Through History: Love in the Time of Republicans

Sallie's Book Reviews and More: Interview with Ronald Fischman, Author of 3 Through History: Love in the Time of Republicans

Writing Blogs Made Dead Simple

Ever want to know what is behind those AOL/Google/Yahoo headlines, like, “7 Ways to Better Sex tonight!” or “101 Techniques to Raising a Healthy Teen,” or “Crazy New Weight-Loss Bean?” There is a science to this, and Nick Thacker wants you to know how to use it. If you are blogging for a job, Thacker can help you get more sales. If you want to penetrate the blogosphere without selling a product, even better. Finally, and I will revisit this later, you can follow Thacker’s suggestion to build up a community that will help you sell books and help other writers. Let me put this in my opening paragraph: http://www.nickthacker.com or http://www.livehacked.com. The books are also available on Amazon.

Thacker chose for the first book in the Dead Simple Guide to address the topic of headlines. I don’t care if your goal is to sell toothpaste, you will fare poorly if you use a headline that folks will blow past when they search to find you – or your competitor. When I’m searching, if I think an article will not help, I’ll leave it unread – and move on, seeking a more likely-looking answer. Don’t you? Shouldn’t you invest some time making sure that you would click on your article, advertisement, or blog post if you were doing the searching? In The Dead Simple Guide to Amazing Headlines, Thacker helps you think through this, and provides shortcuts if you choose to use them.

Now you have your headline, or at least, you can conceive of a headline that would sell your next blog post. Now what? You can make your site awesome, make your content brilliant, and still attract nobody. I know. That’s me. In the second book, The Dead Simple Guide to Guest Posts, Thacker walks you through the process of creating community, which causes people to  link to you, host your guest posts, and cross-promote your blog. What is missing here is how to create the code on your site to do what you want. For example, I don’t know how to sell my own book (on Smashwords.com) on my own Blogger page. Hmmm.

The third book in the trilogy, The Dead Simple Guide to Pillar Content, shows that Thacker is really a novelist at heart. “Creating Pillar Content.” Ever heard of it? I hadn’t, either. Pillar content is why your blog exists. You need to make something stand out to let people know who you are and why they should care.  Thacker explains why you, a novelist, should write about your philosophy of writing, how you develop your characters, where your plot ideas come from, essentially who you are as a writer. Thacker explains that, whether you are writing a blog on fishing or on writing, that you make the “pillars” of your blog out of content that will draw readers.

Is this collection a real hack, meaning an elegant and quick solution to an intractable problem, to your marketing and blogging issues? If, like me, you don’t know much about the bits and bytes of what to do to achieve your blog goals, maybe not. But for anyone with web design assets, or even a few hundred bucks to handle the tech stuff, Thacker’s trilogy will set you on the right path.

Don’t forget to buy my book 3 Through History: Love in the Time of Republicans, at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/239509. Thanks for reading!

The Submission, by Amy Waldman

Where were you when JFK was shot? Martin Luther King? Bobby Kennedy? Where were you when Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man?” When Nixon resigned? When the Soviet Union imploded For two generations, these essential “Where were you?” questions were eclipsed by, “Where were you at 9 AM on September 11, 2001?” For Amy Waldman, author of The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) , she was building up the journalistic skills of a major reporter and the writing chops of the author that she becomes within these pages. As a bureau chief of the South Asia office for the New York Times, she found herself embedded in the conflicting cultures that led the story of  the memorial design competition that led up to the tenth year anniversary. Waldman is enough of a New Yorker that she could capture the view through the eyes of demagogues, widows, and Muslims. The demagogues live behind pen and microphone. The widows have the conscience suit covered deep, and the Muslims? Both the winning designer and an unlikely spokeswoman arise from the American Muslim community, with the twist that this Muslim is also a 9/11 widow.

Claire Burwell holds the lone seat on the memorial selection jury reserved for families of the victims. An Ivy-educated woman of independent means, her husband was very wealthy from his work at Cantor Fitzgerald. The jury added her because she was presumed to serve as a barrier between the artistic taste of the jury and the raw emotion of the other survivors. At the  other end of the spectrum is Sean Gallagher, a handyman living in the basement of his mother’s house in Brooklyn. Sean’s brother Patrick was a firefighter pulverized under the collapsing South Tower. Sean had build a small career being Patrick’s voice from beyond the grave. Mohammed (Mo) Khan, a prominent architect and a secular Muslim, won the anonymous competition with a garden that emerged geometrically from the irrigation canals up to the metal trees made from 9/11 rubble. When a grasping, aggressive journalist from a notorious tabloid discloses the religion of the competition winner, the city falls under another attack, this time from within.

Would the memorial garden ever be built at all?  Gallagher plays his status as the brother of a fallen hero into a speaking career with minor celebrity status, all in the name of preventing a Musilm architect from building an “Islamic garden: as a “martyr’s paradise.” Claire struggles to balance her own integrity with the raging voices of the other families. Mo fights everyone’s attempts to vilify the design by attacking the designer, or more specifically, the religious heritage of the designer. At a crucial moment, Asma, an undocumented Bangladeshi Muslim widow of the attacks, risks all she has to speak her truth at an angry gathering of the families of victims.

Ten years and two wars later, Waldman’s novel, The Submission, tells the story of a nation struggling to affirm the principles that extremists love to hate. The Submission speaks to the morals of a people whose pluralism, tolerance, and understanding were pushed to the brink of collapse by attackers whose main objective was to make the country whose ideology they hate destroy itself from within.

Change

my palms feel the power of
your breath expanding the sea of
your hips, exhale rippling
your skin like a flying carpet
I cannot feel
your hear in this prayer circle -
does it flex freely
pulsing in harmonics
of breath frequency?
does it radiate,
a healing sun within you?
does it sit in you, neutral,
the waves of breath opening, closing
like sound and light, little changed by
an obstacle in a reflecting pool?
or like mine, does it weigh deeply
in the field of your breath,
absorbing, deadening,
a heat sink wicking away spirit?
bring with me the void
the abscess of dark energy that
burdens us both

this is my prayer

Let me breathe every moment of my pain.
For breath is Godding, and God
Flows even in black holes.

Help me to distinguish between
My ebullient breath,
The diffracting stones,
The absorbing wounds.

Give me wisdom to feel joy
Coursing through me as breath-spirit
And to find suffering's
Event horizon.

May I grow to share breath through our touch.
May I become strong in being Godded,
That, with time, the power of abnegation will change.

the power of abnegation

the power of

abnegation

power

Eloha

this too is breath

Shabbat Tryptich 3

The people knew I would offer my sweet voice

sending our prayers above the currents

wafting heavenward faster than airl

those chosen would grind on, voiced

wobbling in leaden braces, bearing the liturgy like sackcloth.

cain, you got a bad rap.

Would that I could stride in like a doctor, lawyer, or banker

with first fruits of lucre, smoke rising straight heavenward.

Cain offered the strength of his own sinews,

the sacrifice found no favor

I the grace of my own voice

the sacrifice found no favor

God sent an enormous mantis,

wings chartreuse, silky in the spotlight.

swirling in my music, she spun to me

alighted on my cheek.

the offering found favor

I must remember to pray before insects

Shabbat Tryptich 2

I offered the only offering that I have to bring

I offered my voice,not

as a timely man, his-is-good-as-any-man's voice,

a not as good as a woman's voice

but a voice

which

brings tears to lovers at the huppah,

turns hearts inward in due season

upward just on rime

which

cut through steel to carry messages,

cut steel hearts to carry pain

a voice that honors the words it shapes

but the offer was not accepted

but the offering was not accepted

Cain, you got a bad rap

your offering was not accepted,

though you brought your best,

but though you offered the fattest lambs

you sacrifice was not accepted.

Our sacrifice was not accepted

Shabbat Tryptich I

I advanced into the silence

to commune with God.

I did not see God I saw Iris.

Or better, spire of iris, violet on cream satin.

Rise spire of violet, seeds of plum

carry my mute soul to these plum eyes,

when gazed upon, by yours, fulfilled.