Happiness is...

I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes me happy.

Good books are a major factor in the happiness equation, more on that later. I'm going to meander a bit, but this does all have a point and a very important purpose. There will be multiple links embedded here. Please visit them now and for some of them I hope you will want to go back to them often. You might even see Dawno posting there if you do. There will not be a test later, I trust the one or two of you who might actually visit. Hey, comment will you?? It's kinda Twilight Zone-ish posting with no comments.

About a year and a half ago I also discovered that I really enjoyed posting on a message board connected to Wil Wheaton's blog called The Soapbox. Well the Soapbox is no more but the community that had gathered there, at least a goodly number of them (and me too, so I guess I should say 'us') are now posting happily over at TehSoapbox.net. Earlier this year one of my favorite people (Writergirl) over at TehSoapbox posted about this wild book Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea (you need to say the author's name out loud fast).

Disclaimer here, Atlanta Nights is not a good book. It is perhaps one of the, if not the, worst books ever written by professional, published writers. They did it that way on purpose. Why? To make a point about a certain publishing company that was preying on writers who were looking to get their first book into print. I have a copy of this book...if you read the site linked below you'll understand why. The reviews are priceless, btw.

Intrigued, I visited Neil Gaiman's site (the first link off of Teh'Box) which led me to yet more sites that were talking about this 'sting' operation which involved getting Atlanta Nights accepted by a publishing company, Publish America, that they were calling a scam operation. I was even more intrigued. Link again and I discover AbsoluteWrite and the AW forums with "The Neverending PublishAmerica Thread" which to date has over 300,000 views and is at 19,500+ posts.

The AW forum has become another place to read and post that makes me happy. I've started posting there in a couple of forums and there are a couple things I've discovered about what makes me happy as a result.

I like helping. If I can answer a question, look up something, index a huge thread so others can easily find things...that makes me happy.

I also like to have a good laugh and, apparently, there are others who share my sense of humor and are letting me know they're glad I'm posting. If you're reading this, thank you, you made my day when you PM'd me or sent me an e-mail.

I found out that I can help a number of really wonderful people, people who have published with Publish America and are now fighting hard to get their Publish America contracts cancelled, and get the truth about the PA publishing fraud exposed.

Now I know this site doesn't get a lot of hits and I'm not really sure how some of this internet stuff works but I figure if I link the words PublishAmerica and scam or Publish America and publishing fraud to links that uncover the scams and frauds then perhaps in my own tiny way I help that person who might Google for information on book publishers and instead of seeing the scam publisher come up as the #1 hit they'll see a site that warns them about the scam publisher.

Makes me very happy to do that.

"But what about books? You said you'd get back to that."

Yep. I've been reading since I can remember. I'm told I taught myself to read before I started kindergarten. Books are a treasure and a joy to me. Because I love books I also hold the authors of those books in high regard. Perhaps not all of them are worthy of esteem, but I don't know them personally so until I meet one who's a real shit I'm gonna continue to think highly of authors as a class.

Because I have this esteem thing going on for authors, I am appalled, righteously indignant and just plain pissed off that there are people out there who would perpetrate an insidious scam against aspiring authors.

I've had a chance to get to know some of the authors who had their books printed (yep, sadly the services of Publish America are basically those of a printer) by PublishAmerica on the AW board. I really like them and know they deserve better than they got. So we're back to one of my core motivations (come on, you're motivated by it too, so don't even try to deny it), happiness. What makes me happy? hmmm...wow, helping authors who write the books I love or could write the books I love--sounds like a winner!

This post and future posts (hey, not all of them, but more anyway) will be my small attempt to join the fight. I'll post links to things that reveal the truth about Publish America and in the extended entry (aka, "continue reading..." section below) will post the full url's so you can copy/paste and go do the same on your blog!

Thanks for reading this. Comments are welcome from all polite, rational and considerate points of view. Trolls and spammers will be deleted.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?category=0&id=30389
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05022/446283.stm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25187-2005Jan20
http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/writing/pa.html
http://www.steelypips.org/miscellany/publishamerica.html
http://lindadroberts.tripod.com/
http://sarashay.tripod.com/pafaq.html
http://www.webspawner.com/users/truthaboutpa/index.html
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/041205_cr_bookpublisher.html
http://www.wnbc.com/askasa/4124957/detail.html
http://www.sfwa.org/beware/
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2005/01/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about.asp
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/2005_01.html
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10211
http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/
http://www.critters.org/sting/
http://www.lulu.com/travis-tea

Posted by Dawno at May 4, 2005 07:14 PM