This mystery #author from our #Autumn issue is keeping things on the down low with laptop, cushions and a sofa. Extra points for the excellent colour matching between the natty throw and the spreadsheet…
Today in Writing History September 25, 1930: Shel Silverstein, American author, poet, illustrator, and songwriter was born (d. 1999). He is perhaps most remembered today for his amusing children’s poetry and fiction, like “The Giving Tree.” However, he also wrote many songs like "One's on the Way" and "Hey Loretta" (which were hits for Loretta Lynn), and "25 Minutes to Go," about a man on Death Row, and "A Boy Named Sue," both made famous by Johnny Cash. He also wrote "The Unicorn," which The Irish Rovers made famous. He also wrote many songs about drugs and sex, like “I Got Stoned and I Missed It,” “Quaaludes Again,” “Masochistic Baby,” and “Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball.”
@NickEast@writers@writingcommunity@writing@humour
So it's about the adventures of The Legendary Cousin's Friend? I like that. Not just like the idea, but I'll implement it. No idea how but must be done! =)
With #Autumn just around the corner, our first mystery #author is double screening it. There's an aquatic theme going on with that fish and that houseboat, and a jacket hanging on the door for a quick exit. But wait a minute… is that the roar of an engine?
"Empty shelves with absolutely no books". Students, parents question school board's library weeding process.
Books published in 2008 or earlier removed from school library amid confusion around new equity-based process in Toronto. Really? Censorship or ineptness?
Do me a favor? Help me pick out a tagline for my Mike.Sierra.Echo query letter. Lit agents ask for taglines in query letters. A tagline serves two purposes: to make a memorable, positive phrase that customers remember and helps them identify your book. I wrote all evening and came up with these. Now I need your help to pick the best one that grabs your attention.
Make sense what I'm asking? Polls only let you post 4 options so I'm posting this in the microblog - post the number of the tagline you like:
Getting to space is a lot easier than getting away from Grandma ...
From loss to joy and back again
Sometimes you have to leave Earth to find home
"The end of everything is the beginning of everything else"
"I go where you go kid. Let's look at some stars ..."
Today in Writing History September 10, 1960: Alison Bechdel, American author and illustrator was born. She is most famous for her “Dykes to Watch Out For,” comic strip. And for her “Bechdel Test,” originally intended as a joke in one of her comics, but which has since become a routine metric used by critics as an indicator for the active presence of women in a film.
Today in Labor History September 9, 1828: Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and playwright was born. He is most famous for novels like Anna Karina, and War and Peace. He chose the name for the latter after reading French anarchist Proudhon’s publication called War and Peace. Tolstoy also wrote many short stories, an autobiography and many works of nonfiction. After witnessing a public execution in 1857, he wrote: "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." In the 1870s, he experienced a profound spiritual awakening, which led him to become a Christian anarchist and pacifist, and which he wrote about in his non-fiction work Confession (1882). He also wrote about nonviolent resistance in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), which influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Wittgenstein. He was repeatedly nominated for Nobel prizes in both literature and peace.
“In the tradition of Upton Sinclair and Jack London, Michael Dunn gives us a gritty portrait of working-class life and activism during one of the most violent eras in U.S. labor history. Anywhere but Schuylkill is a social novel built out of passion and the textures of historical research. It is both a tale of 1870s labor unrest and a tale for the inequalities and injustices of the twenty-first century.”
-Russ Castronovo, author of Beautiful Democracy and Propaganda 1776.
Available on Sep 19, 2023, from all the usual online distributors, or direct from my publisher: http://wix.to/M9gMx11
I was the one (6g) who after a quick search make the error of assuming 20 guys were not hung in one big event.
I knew many were killed and wounded and thousands (?) were greatly abused by low pay and over work and not to forget the bug one, 😬health, #blacklung disease
Today in Labor History September 1, 1880: The utopian communistic Oneida Community ended after 32 years. The Community was founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. They believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, allowing them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves. The Community practiced communalism (holding all property and possessions in common). They also practiced complex marriage, where 3 or more people could enter into the same marriage, and male sexual continence, where the male’s goal was to not ejaculate during sex. They were also one of the first groups in the U.S. to practice mutual criticism, to root out bad characteristics in people, something adopted by many later cults, and even by Cesar Chavez and the UFW under his leadership.
The Oneida Community has been portrayed in numerous works of fiction such as “Silken Strands,” by Rebecca May Hope (2019). “Assassination Vacation,” by Sarah Vowell (2005) and “Pagan House,” by David Flusfeder (2007).
Today in Writing History August 31, 1908: Armenian-American writer William Saroyan was born. He won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1940 and the Academy Award for best screenplay for his story, “The Human Comedy.” Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, but spent several of his early years in an orphanage in Oakland. He was later reunited with family in Fresno. Many of his early stories were about Armenian farm workers, during the Depression, in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Today in Labor History August 30, 1948: Fred Hampton revolutionary activist and chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party was born. He founded the antiracist, anti-class Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that included Black Panthers, Young Patriots (which organized poor whites), and the Young Lords (which organized Hispanics), and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. In December 1969, the Chicago police & FBI drugged Hampton, shot him and killed him in his bed during a predawn raid. They sprayed more than 90 gunshots throughout his apartment. They also killed Black Panther Mark Clark and wounded several others. In January 1970, a jury concluded that Hampton's and Clark's deaths were justifiable homicides.
Stephen King refers to Hampton in his novel “11/22/63” (2012). In that book, a character suggests that if you could travel back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination, it could have a ripple effect that also prevented Hampton's assassination.
@MikeDunnAuthor@bookstadon Stephen King is sorely wrong about that (and that's one of the biggest issues using authors with weak racial analysis as a quoting source).
You are probably right. Kennedy wouldn't have ended racism. He certainly wouldn't have ended capitalism. Therefore Hampton would still most likely have been the same sort of activist that he was.
However, King was writing fiction, not nonfiction. It was speculative. I did not use him as a source for anything. Merely mentioned that he wrote this speculative piece.
Today in Labor History August 28, 1921: The Soviet Red Army dissolved the stateless Anarchist Free Territory, after driving the Black Army out of Ukraine. The anarchist rebel leader, Nester Makhno, barely escaped, and with serious injuries.
The Free Territory within Ukraine, also known as Makhnovia (after Nestor Makhno), lasted from 1918 to 1921. It was a stateless, anarchist society that was defended by Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army (AKA the Black Army). Roughly 7 million people lived in the area. The peasants who lived there refused to pay rent to the landowners and seized the estates and livestock of the church, state and private landowners, setting up local committees to manage them and share them among the various villages and communes of the Free State.
Michael Moorcock’s “A Nomad of the Time Streams” is a steampunk/alternative history novel where Makhno survives into the 1940s.
The hidden history of the USSR and IIRC China is their destruction of worker controlled resources, replacing them with party controlled communes, farms and factories. The popular idea today of socialism are authoritarian societies which is an oxymoron.
When there’s an autocrat or a hierarchy telling people now to organize, it’s authoritarianism. In this sense, rather than left v right, the proper eternal confrontation is authoritarianism v socialism.