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Category Archives: Writing

I Think I May Have Touched a Nerve

So, being the desperate writer that I am, I’m frequently scouring the web for potential work that could help me to better myself and boost my career. That is unfortunately easier said than done, as it has become very difficult to sort out the few truly legitimate opportunities that lurk amidst the scammer lures. When a chance comes along that seems too good to be true, that’s usually the case, and so I have grown very tentative about anything that I find. Case in point: Amnet Systems.

Amnet contacted me when I responded to a craigslist post that claimed to be seeking freelance editors. They sent me an email asking that I complete two editing tests which would prove my proficiency as an editor. As I worked my way through the two pieces they had emailed me for editing, I couldn’t shake a feeling that something wasn’t quite right, so I began to do a little research into the company. Most of what I found was quite promising as far as legitimacy of the company itself, though the fact was undeniable that Amnet focuses on enabling the outsourcing and/or offshoring of many jobs, and promotes this practice to its clients. I find it a little bit difficult to support a company that outsources jobs when it’s become so difficult to find a good job in today’s economy. There was also this little gem of a review of their editing test process that made me even more concerned. I make no claims as to the value of such a review, but it certainly piqued my interest. To that end, I decided there was nothing else for it but to contact Amnet Systems directly, via an address they had provided.

The exchange is as follows:

“To Whom it May Concern,

I recently was contacted regarding an editing test with Amnet Systems. Now, I am eager for a job as an editor, I truly am. However, when I did a little bit of research on the company, I was surprised to discover that you seem to specialize in outsourcing to India. This, naturally, piqued my curiosity. Why, I thought, would a company that specializes in outsourcing have need of freelance editors, particularly editors from all over the US when they’re actively sending potential American jobs overseas? This puzzled me to no end, and raised further concerns over the legitimacy of this position. Then, I found this. http://www.ripoffreport.com/book-publishers/amnet-systems/amnet-systems-amnet-publishing-20078.htm

Now, I think that it is more than fair for me to question the nature of the freelance editor position you claim to have available. If you would like to respond, please feel free to email me. Thank you, and have a wonderful day.

Sincerely,

Philip Krogmeier”

“Mr. Krogmeier,

Our application review team flagged your email for my attention and I would like to personally respond to your note. First, thank you for flagging the website in question. I intend today to formally file a response to the false claims this individual made regarding our company.

Amnet Systems is an international company with headquarters based out of Chennai, India. We provide services to most of the major publishers you’ve heard of, and it is true that a great deal of typesetting, eBook conversion, and data related services work is performed by the team in India. The India division also provides editorial services but primarily not for markets outside the US.

The US division of Amnet is a standalone company based in mid-state Illinois. Our US team provides editorial services for a number of US clients, using US-based staff of several top-notch editors, and they in turn work with a pool of about 150 excellent US-based freelance editors. Our clients include a range of academic and trade publishers, as well as servicing several of the self-publishing companies here in the US.

It is true that our Chennai team helps our smaller US team in processing freelance applications. Many hundreds of applications are received monthly, far more than our staff in Illinois could process in an efficient manner. So we have a small team in Chennai which helps our US team in doing some pre-grading tasks for the tests, verifying accuracy of responses in the test against a number of metrics. Applicants who do not pass the pre-screening round are politely notified in a timely manner by Amnet staff that their application will not be moving forward. For those applicants who do pass the pre-screening round, their same completed tests are then forwarded on to our US office where that smaller subset gets an full intensive grading review by US staff editors.

You may be interested to learn that roughly 95% of editor applicants do not pass these editorial testing reviews. This may seem surprising but in fact it aligns with what we know from our experience in the publishing industry; there are simply a great number of people who think they have what it takes to be a copy editor but in reality do not possess the skill set.

I would encourage you to revisit the person’s post you referenced in your email and count the number of spelling errors alone in his brief post. I’ll leave it to you to determine if this individual would be up to caliber of a professional copy editor. We believe the poster must be a disgruntled failed applicant; you can draw your own conclusions. His claims regarding Amnet are false. We do not use live work from our clients ever for applicant testing: that would be unethical to say the least. The same tests (one fiction, one nonfiction) are administered to all applicants. We do not pay applicants to take the test, and this is also a standard practice in the publishing industry. Rest assured we are making no profit off our freelancer testing process…it is a cost to our company we accrue in order to arrive at a team of skilled copy editors appropriate to our clients’ needs.

You are most welcome to apply for freelance editorial position and take our testing; the address for this purpose isusapplications@amnet-systems.com. Most applicants find the tests take about 4-6 hours to complete, and if your work is of a level that is deemed acceptable for our editorial clients, we would connect with you to explore work opportunities.

Thanks for your interest, and for flagging this website’s incorrect claims about Amnet which I intend to respond to directly today. We wish you the best and look forward to hearing from you if you have interest in applying for editorial work.

Warm regards,

Ted Young

U.S. General Manager

Amnet Systems

tyoung@amnet-systems.com”

In short, Mr. Young defended the practices of his company and denied all claims of wrongdoing. Standard deny everything response? Maybe. Truth? Also maybe. Point being, I think I may have touched a nerve.

Has anyone else had dealings with similar issues? Does vehement denial really mean truth? The world may never know.

March Writing Challenge: What Price Happiness?

Well, another month has come and gone, and that means that it’s time to post another writing challenge entry for Sonia M’s monthly challenges. I missed last month’s, due to my travels and being cut off from the internet for a while, but I’m back. Our topic this time around was “Make a Wish.” With that in mind, I decided to write this for you. I hope you enjoy it. Here’s “What Price Happiness?”

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Did it really count as a wish? Maybe so. I always thought of it as more of a foolish kid’s dream, but hey, what else do kids do? We dream, and we make wishes. We hope against hope that things will turn out better for us. We don’t think about consequences when we’re young, and some of us don’t think about them even when we get older. And if the joy we wanted turns out to only come at the cost of misery for those we love? If we’re lucky, maybe we stop depending on wishes, and start trying to make changes for ourselves. Sadly, all too frequently I have found that I have been scrambling to undo the damage that I felt I had caused.

Does trying to fix things count as learning a lesson? I don’t really know. I’m still trying to figure out when this went all “Monkey’s Paw” on me. I’ve lived my life trying to avoid regrets, ever since the day that I met her. Even now, years later, her words still echo in my head. “I said I knew that it was a mistake. I never said I was sorry I made it.”

Am I happy now? Honestly? No, I’m not. I should’ve known I wasn’t going to be the one paying the price for a wish that I never even intended to make. I guess it’s too late now, the words are probably meaningless, but I can at least say that I’m sorry.

The Sun Also Rises

I’m rereading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises today, and I blame Woody Allen. Actually, I blame Corey Stoll and his incredible performance as Ernest Hemingway in Allen’s latest film, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Stoll’s performance was only one of the many constant bright points in the film, but it was this moment that really won me over. I knew then that I was going to have to return to one of my favorite books of all time. It’s quite the change of pace from the other story that I’ve been reading lately, and it’s always good to return to familiar territory.

When I was in college, I read Hemingway for the first time. I had read his work before, when I was in high school, but that was before I truly read Hemingway. Now I feel as though I am reading some of my favorite works for the first time, and so it is that The Sun Also Rises has made its way back into my hands. It feels right to be reading classic literature. I’m not trying to be a book snob or anything, because I’ll read pretty much anything and give any author a chance at least once, but it’s good to come back to perennial favorites. There is something almost indescribable about Hemingway’s storytelling that pulls you in. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you do so. He’s really not that intimidating of an author. Personally, I feel that he’s the easiest of the Lost Generation to really understand.

On the other side of the reading coin, there is the Lovecraft collection that I’ve been borrowing from a friend. Now, I own a copy of the Necronomicon, quite possibly the most thorough (and best titled) collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s work ever published, but it’s sadly hidden away in a storage unit for now. Despite the presence of perhaps only a third of the more well-known titles that exist within the pages of the Necronomicon, this collection does a phenomenal job of presenting some of the best work (albeit the shorter pieces) that he ever wrote, including “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” within its pages. I read the former story while on an airplane over the Pacific Ocean, and I think that the only better way to experience it would be to read it on a ship in the Atlantic. You can’t beat reading a story where it takes place. This reminds me, I’m working on a piece at the moment that is set in a building not unlike my hometown library, with a few creative twists. I’ve never been in a building that is more suited for a horror story. I’m drawing on influences of Poe, Lovecraft, and King, masters of the genre, and injecting just a little bit of truth. We’ll see how it turns out.

 

Getting My Groove Back

The biggest downside to returning from a vacation is trying to get back into your everyday rhythm. Case in point: starting to blog again after nearly two weeks without writing anything other than my travelogue aboard the Stennis. I kept a journal during the entirety of the trip, logging my experiences as my father and I traveled across the country together, but now I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing things for you. Fifty plus pages of journal about a ride across the ocean on an aircraft carrier? Totally doable. Five hundred words about what’s going on in my life and the literary world this week? That’s a little bit trickier. Nevertheless, I’m here to try.

Let’s see. I want these, first of all. Something about being surrounded by officers in their dress uniforms just makes military fashion seem right, even if the Nintendo version is a little silly.  Second, there’s this thing right here, one of many places I’m going to be submitting a short story. Got a microfiction piece that’s n0t been published elsewhere? Send it in. They’d be happy to see it. V tipped me off about it a few weeks ago, and I am quite grateful. On a related note, has anyone ever heard of The Rag? I’d not, at least until recently. It’s worth a shot, I suppose.

One of the things that I did miss while I was gone: Sonia M’s February challenge. I intend to make up for that with the March challenge, which seems far more targeted toward writers like me than the February challenge did. It’s the first one I’ve missed since I started doing them, and I’m a little sad that I didn’t get an entry written, but there has been a lot of progress elsewhere that more than makes up for it, at least as far as I’m concerned.

So, yeah, my writing projects continue. One of the best things about my recent trip was the opportunity to have a LOT of time to myself, for my writing. See, Arsus and Rime have been pretty quiet lately, so the progress on my working title, “Swords of the Ancients” has been stalled. As such, I have been venturing into the darker side of my imagination, contrary to the advice I got from my father last week. Dad told me that I should write a wholesome story, and be more of a Tolkien than a Stieg Larsson, for example. That’s all fine and dandy from the outside perspective, and I really do appreciate his concern for my writing, but if you pretend that the shadows never exist, you’ll never see what hides in them. The things that hide in the shadows of my own mind are what I find fascinating. Human nature isn’t as clear cut and good as we would like it to be, for whatever reason, but those bits of darkness are so compelling… Just imagine the stories we might learn from the things that go unseen in our world.

I dunno. Maybe it’s just the stories of the great writers of the past, but I feel like there’s got to be something more than just heartwarming tales of puppies and stuff to write about. Even Tolkien had to embrace a little of the darkness to create the depth of the villains in Middle Earth. I guess I’m just talking about not just a casual embrace, but making passionate love to the darkness and getting into a committed relationship with it, and maybe even moving in together, and getting a joint bank account, or at least a two-seater bicycle. Yeah. It’s exactly like that.

Repetition

Do you ever fear that, as a blogger or a writer, you’re repeating what you, or worse, what others have said? I do, and unlike other things, I consider this to be a perfectly rational fear. Do you ever fear that, as a blogger or a writer, you’re repeating what you, or worse, what others have said? I do, and unlike other things, I consider this to be a perfectly rational fear. Wait… Anyway, the point is that mindless repetition can be a terrible thing. According to Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, hell is repetition. Imagine the worst thing that you can fear happening to you, and it happens to you over and over again, for eternity. That’s hell. That’s part of why we mix things up at my job, switching everyone from one duty-station to another every hour. For one thing, it means that everyone has to be pretty good at everything. For another, it means that we don’t get bored to death and decide that we have to go medieval on the next patron who asks for the location of the very clearly labeled return desk.

We take your questions very, VERY seriously.

When I’m not considering acting out D&D-based fantasies, I just worry that I’m going to run out of things to say on this blog, and my few readers will leave me, and I’ll be left talking to myself. After all, there’s not really a whole lot of structure to what I write about, other than that it’s sometimes writing and other times stories of library work. Honestly, though, I can’t really expect my blog to maintain any sort of rhyme or reason to topics when I can’t keep focused myself. Other times, I think that maybe going crazy would be the best thing that could happen to me. Repetition could be a form of writer’s block, I suppose. Maybe you can’t come up with any new ideas, and so you end up rehashing something that you wrote months  or years ago.

Don't worry, Stephen. I still love you.

I guess my biggest fear as far as repetition goes is that I want to write novels, and as my good friends at a favorite weekly webcomic like to say, “Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop calling them ‘novels.'” Are all the good ideas taken? Yes. No, seriously. They are. Every story is a retelling of an ancient story, when you get right down to it. The difficult task of crafting originality is based in the presentation. It’s the same with food, really. I mean, you can have ramen noodles every meal for a month, to the point where seeing them would make you physically ill (and likely violently so), but if someone hands you a silver platter with an ornate ceramic bowl filled with ramen that’s been topped with a slice or two of pork, some green onions, and whatnot, and you’re probably going to say “Hey, that looks delicious!” Moreso if you’re hungry. The point is, we’re stuck with repetition, whether we like it or not. The question is how we’re going to handle it.

Think back, oh writing ones. Think about your favorite influences, and what they wrote, and who or what inspired them. It’s a vicious circle, but that’s not really a bad thing. Popular stories resurface regularly. Sure, if you don’t want to work too hard, you can just jump on the bandwagon for whatever’s trendy right now. However, if you want to create at least some semblance of actual writing, you’re going to be better off to come up with something that hasn’t been done to death (hahaha, vampires) in the last ten years. Tell your own story. It might be incredibly similar to something someone else has done. Think of the poor bullfighters who tried to right autobiographies after The Sun Also Rises debuted. I’m not saying that writing The Sun Also Rises will get you anywhere now. Repetition, or at least perceived repetition, isn’t always the best thing you can have going for you. Now a modern story of a man wandering a European city and searching for meaning in his life, well, that could be something special.

Good luck, fellow writers. Off to the grand adventure that is life!

Off to a Good Start

I hit the ground running this morning, if getting out of bed at 10 AM can really count as a running start. You see, this is going to be a big week. After missing two days of work because of an amazing snow storm (and actually being snowed in for the first time in YEARS), I finally got things moving again. It seems that my repeated attempts to get a slight boost in hours at work have been noticed, and I’m getting a new schedule with more hours (okay, one more per week), and it’s enough to get me partial benefits and a work week that’s not completely insane.

Not pictured: the 45 minutes it took to dig her out.

Now that the weather has cleared up, though, and the creativity is going. And going strong. Maybe I’m just fueled by the Irish Car Bomb cake that I made the other day, but I woke up this morning after dreaming of Lovecraftian things. This means that I’ve now hit upon my next idea for a novel. Yes, the first one is still a work in progress, with around 32,000 words at present, but it’s not often that I’ve come up with ideas for something that I feel could be more than just a short story. In fact, if memory serves, this makes, well…two. So this is big. I’ve never had that feeling of “HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO GET OUT OF BED AND WRITE THIS ALL DOWN RIGHT NOW!” until this morning. It was glorious. Cue me running down the stairs, grabbing a Java Monster from the fridge, and hurling myself onto the couch to scribble out two full pages of random notes, details, and actual bits of dialogue that came out of something reminiscent of Rose Red meets Call of Cthulhu. Yeah. No more details at present. I’ve got characters to come up with soon.

So yeah, off to a good start, like I said. Jot down some notes, chug some coffee, eat some candy for breakfast, and jump on twitter to find this. That’s three major book retailers refusing flat-out to sell books published via amazon, which has been attempting to cut the middle man out of publishing in addition to book sales. This boycott started with independent booksellers, so bravo to those little guys who were brave enough to stand up to amazon in the first place. The online retailer seems to be in some danger now anyway, mostly due to rapid over-expansion. I’m intrigued to see how this plays out. Now, I’ve had it pointed out that some writers who had published through amazon would now be in trouble, but, well, “you dance with the devil…” I’m just glad that I didn’t go that route. I’m determined to stick by traditional publishing, despite the fact that it’s a long, difficult road. Maybe this whole situation just goes to prove that the easier path isn’t necessarily the best.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of tasks to accomplish about the house today, and then I’ll delve back into the madness that is building in the back of my mind. Cheers!

A Smaller Place

Today, I started my first shift as a substitute at one of the smaller branches within the library system here in town. I don’t know if it was just the change in the size of the facility, the massive amount of snow on the ground, or some combination of the two, but it’s been a wonderful change of pace. The work is also a lot more along the lines of my old job at my university’s library. Unlike my current job, I’m not one of twenty or so staff members at work. Tonight, I’m one of three. Everyone does a wider variety of tasks. It reminds me very much of the library in my hometown, which was built in a converted house. There’s something very powerful about the atmosphere of an area of such concentrated imagination and knowledge and creativity.

All libraries and bookstores have this effect to some degree, but I’ve found that the smaller the location, the more powerful it becomes. This would account for my love of bookmobiles… I mean, honestly, a library that comes to you? Brilliant. Almost as good as fresh Guinness draught in a bottle. I suppose I could get the same impact with all the books I’ve got in a storage unit at the moment, but they’re all in boxes, so it’s not quite the same. Conversely, take the Library of Congress. I can’t imagine a more overwhelming building full of books in existence, but when I think about all of those books being condensed into a building that had enough room for just the books and none of the soaring ceilings and wide open areas, well…

I’ve planned a dream home around the presence of a personal library. While I am absolutely of the opinion that books should be shared and available to everyone who wants to read them, I’m a little bit protective when it comes to my own collection. I mean, after I discovered how mind-blowingly awesome Watchmen was (Alan Moore is a genius, if not the wizard that he claims), I went out and promptly bought a second copy so that I could lend that one out to my friends. My original copy stays on my shelf. I did the same thing with Salamandastron (still my favorite of the Redwall series) in the fifth grade after I met Brian Jacques. Despite being a mass-market paperback, it’s signed, and so it has a reserved place of honor, while my new-old hardcover (God bless used bookstores) is my reading copy. OCD? Maybe a little. I never claimed not to be. After all, I want to be able to pass many of them on to whatever children or nieces or nephews I may have. I’d like to take good care of them while they’re still in my possession. To me, a good book is worth its weight in gold.

I love me my physical books. I’m not afraid to retread old anti-eReader ground here. I can’t say it often enough. Yes, I support digitization of physical media for archival backup. If a physical copy cannot survive, then at least a digital copy will be available. Maybe then, in the future, someone could reprint a physical copy from the backup. This is just practical. Do I support a complete conversion to digital? No. Flat out. No. You cannot beat a physical book. I’ll happily listen to any defenses of digital readers. After all, I survived for ten months by convincing people of how great they are. If Barnes & Noble ever hires me, I’ll go right back to it. They’re nice, but they’re not right for me.

That much being said, I’ve got my notebook and pen handy. I’m going to write a little more before diving back into A Wizard of Earthsea.

Writing as Art

This one’s kind of a complicated subject, and was inspired by the latest Penny Arcade comic. How many of you feel that what you do as a writer actually counts as art?

I say yes. I know that some people would disagree with me.  However, I feel that a well written story or poem, regardless of the formal training  behind it, can be just as beautiful as some works of art, and far more impressive than others. I’ve read some pieces that, while incredibly well-written, strongly structured, and clearly organized, did absolutely nothing for me in terms of evoking an emotional response, and I’d consider them almost trash. Are those stories art? Much like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder (along with antimagic, disintegrate, etc., but I digress).

I know that my feelings on certain pieces change based on my age, my own life experiences, and my state of mind when I am reading it. Therefore, there are some books that I pick up on a regular basis. My love for Tolkien remains undiminished throughout the years, no matter how many times I’ve read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Other authors, I attempted to read in junior high or high school, and were totally dismissed at the time. Later on, particularly thanks to my degree, I would read them again, and I found that my tastes had changed. For example, let’s take Willa Cather. When I was a junior in high school, my English teacher taught Cather as a standard in his curriculum because she was his favorite author, and had lived where he had lived. That year, I attempted to read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I found it painful and dull, and questioned the relevance of Cather’s work.

Four years later, now a third-year English major (in part thanks to the influence of said English teacher), I read Willa Cather again, this time tackling The Professor’s House. With far more reading experience under my belt, I dove headlong into the book, and I finally found myself enjoying Cather’s prose. This time, I was fascinated by her characters, and eventually took it upon myself to revisit Death Comes for the Archbishop. Now that I was more accustomed to her writing, I realized that I really liked Cather, and was happy to add her to my list of favorite authors. I went through a nearly identical process when I first encountered Stephen King. Granted, I started with Desperation. Also granted, I was in fifth grade. Still, King’s writing style didn’t appeal to me. A couple of years later, however, I picked up The Green Mile, having seen the film version. It was, I guess, a more mild story, but it allowed me to adapt my mind to King’s writing form and characterization. Now I find myself hard-pressed to find King books that I’ve not read.

Based on my first impressions of both of these authors, I wouldn’t have called either of them artists. Skilled at their craft, yes, but neither Cather nor King would have kept my attention long enough for me to care. For whatever reason, I decided to give them another look, and that’s when I found the art. Now I feel that I’m able to see it far more often. In my own work, I’m trying to find the balance between craft and art. There’s only so far that formal training and technical approaches can take you. If you’re not putting feeling into what you’re writing, then you might as well quit now.