Work From Home, Is It Possible?

Work From Home, Is It Possible?

Everyone asks this question, and for those of you with this goal, you prob’ly find yourself asking it more than most people.

Yes, it is, and not really that hard to start either, though most find it hard to keep going. First you have to ask yourself, what is it you want to do?

The most successful work at home jobs are the ones you created yourself…my uncle started working at home in the 1960’s building clay bricks, and building houses for people out of them…today he owns a multi-million corperation that not only builds houses but also building brick churches, but he still runs the buseness out of his home, and he works longer and harder than the average non-home worker.

My mom worked at home too, she was a professional seamstress, sewing fancy dresses for little girls, christening gowns, and cloth dolls. At one point she bought her own brick and mortar store (the house next door to us) and was selling to summer tourists (in Old Orchard Beach we see an average of 2 million tourists each month), but the shop proved to be a bigger home business than my mother had expected. She had no time to sew the crafts anymore, which was her passion, so after 3 years, she shut it down and sold her items to other shops on consignment instead. Now she is hoping to build a web site and move her opperation online by next year.

My dad, he worked at home too, he was a rought driver for the local newspaper, delivering the Portland Press Herald, the Sunday Telegram, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times to over 1000 customers 7 days a week 365 days a year, with not one single day off for the past 21 years… his annual gas costs are over $5,000 each year, and he goes through 3 to 4 cars a year, his annual income was under $12,000 a year.

Another uncle of mine works at home, as a real estate agent. He at one point cliamed to own a multi million dollar alpaca farm in Astrailia. (I can’t verify that as I have never been to Austailia, so never saw the farm myself). Last I heard he had given up on the real estate business in favor of yet another work at home business he had set out to create. Don’t know the details on that, or if it succeeded or flopped.

And yet another uncle works at home, buying juck from yard sales and reselling it at flea markets. His income is average of $10,000 a year, but he does this as a side-line hobby. If he set out to do this full time instead of part-time in his spare time, he could easily triple that figure.

I work at home: I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I own a small press publishing house which I built myself from the ground up.

So in answer to your question, does work at home exist?

Yes, it does, but it is not a get-rich-quick-scam-artist-work-at-home; that type of work at home well banckrupt you quicker than you can blink. REAL work at home is when you take a skill and use it to help those around you. If you are hired by a business, they pay you for your product/service. If you start your own business, you get paid when your customers pay you. It may look like a private or small business to the world, but it is in fact you working out of your home and thus working at home. However, it is hard work, long hours, no vacation, you get dirty, you get tired, and in the long run, not working at home would have been much less stressful and much easier.

In short working at home is not a get rich quick scheme. Working at home IS NOT getting paid to take survies. Working at home is not, clicking on ads on Google. Working at home is you getting a business lisnce and settingup shop, either online or brick&mortar, and selling your product or services to your customers. Most people are not cut out for the hard labor and long hours of working at home, but for those of you who are, it’s the best thing you could ever do..

Remember:

Employers ask you to fill out a job application, and will ask for past job referances, your SSN, and your criminal records history.

If you did not fill out an application, you did not apply for a real job.

If you filled out an application, but paid for the application form, you got scammed!

and if you can’t find a business to work for: start the business you want to work for an be your own boss in your own home.

We know this, saddly from experiance.

Back in the early 1980’s my mom saw just such an ad in a magazine. BIG promises of lots of money. She sent the money in, for not one ad but 2 differant ones. The first promised big bucks for sewing baby bibs, the second for making beaded earrings. Both ads were pretty much the same: send in a certain amount of money and they’d send you the supplies, you make the items and send them back to them, they sell them. Simple, sounded great, my mom had at one time been a seamstress, she thought she could sew up a storm of baby bibs for a legit company to sell them. That’s what we all thought, we should have read the fine print…or rather, we should have taken a notice that there was no fine print to read! Or maybe that it was a P.O.Box and not an actual address that was listed in the ad, that should have tipped us off.

Well, the supplies came, most of it cheap junk that we could have gotten cheaper and better quality at a dollar store, my mom haveing been a profesional seamstress thought that useing this absolute crap to make these items seemed pretty stupid and unprofessional but, that’s the items the company used so that’s what they sent…alarm bells should have gone off than…we should have realized that no REAL manufacturer, is gonna use such poor quality supplies to make their goods.

Well, we (my mom, my dad, and me) set out to sewing baby bibs and beaded earings. Comes time to send the items back and low and behold, the P.O.Box had been cancled, the “company” turned out to never have existed, and we were stuck with a bunch of stuff we couln’t use or sell.

We learned a lesson. It wasn’t a very big investment, less than $100, but it was not money well spent…or maybe it was, because it taught us to look at these scams with open eyes and questioning minds.

We learned a lot of things:

We learned to read ads more closely.
We learned to question “companies” with ONLY a P.O.Box.
We learned to ask the company for a job application form.
We learned to ask for a history of the company.
We learned to do a background check on the company.
We learned to never pay money to get a job.
We learned to REAL manufatures don’t put ads in magazine classified.
We learned to that most manufactures only hire local residants, so that the employee has to bring the items right in to the factory to be inspected, before the company well accept and pay you.
We learned that REAL jobs assembling items for manufactures, are rare and few and far between, and that you could be on a waiting list for years before they need enough help to get all the way down to your name on their list.

Now we have the internet, and it seems that with it came millions more ways to scam people out of their hard earned money. Every day thousands of new Work-At-Home, Get-Big-Bucks websites are added to the net. A Google search will bring up millions upon millions of them.

When I look at these sites, with their promises of BIG MONEY. I laugh. You see I own more than 200 web sites, 12 fanlistings, and 13 private message boards. I know how to build a website, quite well, maybe not to proffessional standards, but pretty darned close, and than I see these scam sites: many of them are made useing Geo-Cities, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and countless other “free home pages”. Right off the bat that fact alone should set off a RED WARNING ALARM in any person, but it seems that many people do not even notice this fact, and send their money in.

A REAL company would not be useing a “free home page”…a small craft shop run by the sweet little old lady next door, might use a free home page to sell her knitting and cloth dolls, but she wouldn’t be asking you to send money to make money…no she’d show you a picture of her dolls with a price for each one. The Goth girl down the road might use a free site to peddel her homemade velvet capes, while the Wiccan next door lists home made soap on her MySpace. These are people like me and you who are working at home and selling what they make. These people are legit, and you’ll notice they never ask you to pay for a membership before they allow you to buy their products. These people are small business owners working from home.

The free sites that ask you to spend money to make money… those are the ones you got to watch out for. Those are the scams.

If you see a site made by a free home page site, and offering you lots of money for doing next to nothing, run for the hills, because there is no company that is going to use a free web host to seek out workers. Not a single one.

My hope in writing all of this is that it well help you to weed out the scams from the real work at home jobs.

To all: Good luck on your goal.

~~EK

See more progress on: work because I like to, not because I have to

National TV-Turnoff Week, April 23-29

Today is the first day of  National TV-Turn Off Week, April 23-29

I have decided to write a list of 101 things for you to do during this week of no TV, should you decide to take on the challange.

1. Go for a walk on the beach.
2. Read a book.
3. Write a book in 7 days.
4. Volunteer at the local  animal shelter.
5. Do a crossword puzzle.
6. Dress up like a pirate.
7. Buy a camera and use it.
8. Play an hours-long game of Monopoly.
9. Grow a crystal garden.
10. Catalog your book collection useing the Dewey Decimal System.
11. Plan a family budget.
12. Go on a camping trip.
13. Plant a vegetable garden.
14. Watch the stars.
15. Sew, knit, or crochet a blanket for a cause (Snuggles, Linus Foundation, etc.)
16. Raise a family of sea monkeys.
17. Answer all those unread emails.
18. Pay your bills.
19. Start a petition.
20. Take your family out to a fancy resturant.
21. Look for BigFoot.
22. Take in a foster pet.
23. Spend a few hours browsing in your local library.
24. Donate pet food to a local shelter.
25. Take a walk around the block.
26. Have a chat with your mom or dad.
27. Go fishing.
28. Organize your DVD collection.
29. Build a personal website.
30. Write a short story for a fiction magazine.
31. Volunteer at the local  soup kitchen.
32. Go sight-seeing.
33. Put the pictures into the photo albums.
34. Throw a “Just-As-You-Are” party.
35. Attempt to prove aliens are real.
36. Visit a local museum.
37. Take your family to an all you can eat buffet.
38. Invent something new.
39. Start to tackle the list of projects that has been getting longer.
40. Head to an amusment park.
41. Take a cruise.
42. Sew a new dress.
43. Get a family photo taken.
44. Take a child to the zoo.
45. Write a letter to someone you haven’t seen in a while.
46. Attend an art show.
47. Vacuum the car.
48. Refinish an old piece of furniture.
49. Write an article for a non-fiction magazine.
50. Go boating.
51. Start a blog.
52. Attend a book reading.
53. Solve a mystery: play a game of Clue.
54. Visit with someone in a nursing home.
55. Go to the circus.
56. Head to your local swamp to pick fiddleheads.
57. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper.
58. Take a hike in the woods.
59. Visit an art gallery.
60. Open an online store (Zazzle, CafePress, etc.).
61. Take swimming lessons.
62. Quit smoking.
63. Plant a tree.
64. Cook a gourmet dinner.
65. Help your child with his/her homework.
66. Play a game of basketball.
67. Go birdwatching.
68. Wash the windows.
69. Get a makeover.
70. See a play.
71. Repaint your living room.
72. Read a story to a child.
73. Paint a masterpiece.
74. Go on a picnic.
75. Read a comic book.
76. Start a new career.
77. Organize a family reunion.
78. Study up on your family history.
79. Go on a diet.
80. Sing a song.
81. Write a poem.
82. Bake a cake.
83. Go horseback riding.
84. Set up an aquarium.
85. Write a letter to a prisoner.
86. Take up a new hobby, such as stamp collecting.
87. Spend the week looking for UFO’s.
88. Go rock climbing.
89. Dye your hair blue.
90. Wax your car.
91. Redecorate your bedroom.
92. Play video games with your child.
93. Write a business plan for your dream job.
94. Take dance lessons.
95. See a ballet.
96. Buy a box of crayons and draw.
97. Design your dream-house.
98. Make home-made ice-cream.
99. Dress-up and go to the opera.
100. Take you family out to a movie.
101. Visit a haunted house.
102. Write a list of a 101 things you can do.

Quote: “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” —Groucho Marx 

New Book Projects, Job Searches, & Seventh Sanctum

You may have noticed that the past couple of days, I have not been posting as often as I was; from 4 or 5 posts a day to about one every other day. There is a reason, quite simple. I got an idea for a new book, and spent the last few days researching it. As ever, one thing lead to another and now I’ve got ideas for three new books and have been working on them all at once. Of course, me writing longhand means I wasn’t online, meaning I was not here to blog. Sorry.

Other reason, is I’m still out searching for a job type job, but have yet to find one. As usual I am told that businesses just won’t hire someone who had never been to school, or someone my age who has never had a job before. (Apperantly, 7 years as a door to door salesman for Avon, doesn’t count as a job, nor does 27 years of writing… or so I’m told by interviewers.) It is getting quite depressing, as I have been seeking a job since May of 2006 and now May 2007 is just around the corner and still all of my endless applications and interviews have turned up nothing. I’m now having a hard time finding places that I have not yet applied to. I feel like I’ve run up against a brick wall, cause I’m still intent on finding a job, yet I can not find any place that I have not already been turned down.

Well, after a day of searching classified ads and online job searches, I have given it a rest for the night and am back here to say hi to you all and let you know what I’d been doing and thinking. Columbo is on TV right now, so I’m gonna go watch that now, after which I’ll be heading to Seventh Sanctum in search of some ideas for my 3 new book projects. Seventh Sanctum is such a great site, I get loads of ideas from them. If you haven’t checked them out yet, be sure to do so.

~~EK

What Does “Non-Genre” Mean?

Many publications say they only accept “Non-Genre Fiction”. A common question writers ask is: “What is Non-Genre Fiction? Doesn’t all fiction have a genre?” I had just read this post and noticed a debate over what is the meaning of Genre Fiction VS Non-Genre Fiction had begun on it’s comments.  Being an editor, I think I can be of help here. So, here is my answer to that question. I hope that some of you find it helpful when submitting your future stories to publishers.When a publication says, “they’re non-genre focused”, they mean that they only want literary fiction and will automatically refuse all stories that a genre driven. A genre driven story is one that falls under the following:

Romance

Fantasy

Sci-fi

Horror

(and the many other such genres out there)

Genre driven stories are focused largely on promotion of their genre and the story focuses totally on that genre. I.e., a romance focuses on a girl’s romantic infatuation; a fantasy will focus on the life of elves wizards and he-men type characters fighting evil in a epic quest; sci-fi focuses on alien life forms traveling from one planet to the next and other such sci-fi type things; horror focuses on scaring the pants off the reader

When a publisher say “they’re non-genre focused” they want to see a slice-of-life story about the day (or week or year) in the life of so-and-so… this is what is known as non-genre or literary fiction. The story focuses on real-life type characters in real life type situations; stories that real like they could be the life of the guy next door or the girl down the road. Non-genre stories tell a story that is not dependant on a fantasy quest or the eloquent narration describing the alien landscape or the steamy sex-scenes. They simply tell a story about life and thus have no genre.

Well, that’s what I see it to mean. Feel free to comment on your own veiws as to the meaning of “non-genre”.

~~EK

A Writer’s Emotions

Writing is a very sacred thing for a writer, it is deeply personal and deeply emotional, because we pour our very heart and soul into what we write, and when someone rejects our words, they in a way reject our very soul as well. While writing we are thrown through every possible emotion, both the good and the bad. Writing can been very relaxing when we do it, because we feel that our words well hold a warm meaning to our readers, but than it become stressful and we are filled with the fear that what we wrote well not be well recieved by our readers.

Writing is prob’ly the most emotional, exhilerating, and stressful act anyone can ever do.

~EK

Submission Guidelines for Moonsnails

 

Basic Submissions Guidlines:

This is a quick overview of our basic guidelines. See our fully detailed guidelines for each seperate genre on our Submission Guidelines website.

Status:
Moonsnails is currently accepting submissions

Title:

Moonsnails Magazine

Magazine Format:(projected)

Quarterly: 6″ x 9″, 96 – 132 pages per issue;
60 lb bright white paper, B&W text; 10pt glossy laminated perfect bound full color cover

Circulation:

world-wide though print on demand

Contact Info:

Wendy C. Allen, editor-in-chief, twighlightmanor@yahoo.com

Submission Format:

Send in body of email, 12pt Courier or Times New Roman or Send at attachment .RTF 12pt Courier or Times New Roman.

Payment:

copies only at this time; buys one time rights, (the right to print story in one issue; author retains copyright)

responce time: 2 – 6 months

Needs:

Short stories up to 13,000 words.

Literary Genre fiction. Cross-gen OK.

Rarely uses poetry. Poetry used only if it can be considered a full-fledged story, complete with characters and plot. Never accepts free-verse.

Genres Accepted:

Sci-fi, Fantasy, Gothic Romance, and “mild” Horror

Sub-Genres and Cross-Genres Accepted:

Action, Adventure, Alien Invasion, Alien Realms, Alternative Histories, Amateur Detective, Americana, Ancient Civilizations, Animal Stories, Biographical Fiction, Christmas, Classic Literature, Colonial America, Cryptozology, Dark Fantasy, Dragon Tales, Easter, Ethnic Fiction, Espionage, Faerie Realms, Fairy Tales, Family Sagas, Fantasy, Folklore, Frontier Sagas, Furries, Futuristic, Ghost Stories, Gothic Romance, Halloween, Hard Science Fiction, Haunted Houses, High Fantasy, High Seas Adventure, Historical, Horror, Humor, Inspirational, Kung Fu, Literary, Mad Scientist Sci-Fi, Mermaid Tales, Military, Mystery, Murder Mystery, Paranormal, Pirate Tales, Psychological Thiller/Terror, Regional: Maine, Regional: Quebec, Romance, Science Fiction, Serials, Short-Shorts, Slueths, Space Fantasy, Space Travel, Spiritual, Sword & Sorcery, Supernatural, Suspence, Thiller, Time Travel, Twilight Zone style, UFO stories, Unicorn Tales, Utopian Realms, Victorian, War, Western, Wizard Tales, Young Adult.

Things Rejected:

Rejects all stories that contain:

abortion, animal abuse, child abuse, cutting, death glorification, depression, depressive self-pity, drinking, drugs, elder abuse, erotica, expose`, gore, hatred, hunting, politics, pornography, sex, smoking, swearing, suicide, vulgar verbology, and stories about “how my teenage years were crap”.

Stories must be family friendly and rated PG-13 or less

Poetry Needs:

We focus on short stories, thus rarely use poetry.

Sometimes accepts poetry, at best it’s only 4 poems per year, IF it tells a story and has strong characters. Same as fiction needs, seeks longer “epic length” story poems akin to Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamlin, Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven or Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham. Prefers long rhyming poems with strong characters and a strong story plot.

Poetry Rejects:

Same as fiction rejects, plus: Does not accept free-verse poetry, haiku, short poems, poems without characters, poems without plots, meaningless ramblings, odes to…, poems without rhythem, or any other type of poem that does not tell a complete story from beginning to end.

Cover Art:

Usually done “in-house”, but well consider submissions of full-color photography or paintings, covering any genre. Always seeks beach and ocean themed photos or paintings. Do not send originals. Email files as atactment. Files must be compatible with MSWorks, MSPaint, or MSPublisher 97, .jpg files prefered. Note that we can not accept .tif files, our email treats them as a virus and deletes them. See fiction for needs & rejects list. Buys one time rights.

Art & Inside Illustration:

Usually uses spot illustrations and copyright-free/public domain illustration, but well consider submissions of B&W, pen & ink, line art only … no pencil, no shading, no grey-scale, no color, our printer well not accept them. All illustrations must be 4″ x 6″ or smaller and camera ready. Do not send originals. Email files as atactment. Files must be compatible with MSWorks, MSPaint, or MSPublisher 97, .jpg files prefered.  Note that we can not accept .tif files, our email treats them as a virus and deletes them. See fiction for needs & rejects list.

Advice:

Best advise: buy a copy of Brian Froud’s Faeries. Use it as though it were our Submissions Guidelines. Treat it as your Writer’s Bible. Use it to create believable fantasy characters. Never go anywhere without it. If you want to write for us than consider Brian Froud your new best friend, read everything he ever wrote. Study every painting he ever did. Watch every film he ever created. Watch the 2 movies written by Brian Froud: Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Read the Retief series by Keith Laumer and The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. We like that kind of sci-fi best.

Watch Star Trek (the original series), Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, X-Files, and Tales From the Dark Side. Let them inspire you. If your story would make for a good episode on one of them, than we want to see it!

We like to see strong characters. Character driven stories. Well written plots. We like fantasy realms, dreamscapes, and alien planets. Creativity is always welcomed. Pirates are always good, we need more pirates. Always seeking stories about Mermaids, Sirens, Dragons, Unicorns, or other creatures of the Realm of Fay. We like to see characters that Brian Froud would have created.

Let your imagination run wild.

Twighlight Manor Press Home Page

Twighlight Manor Press Home Page

Business Plans: Moonsnails Magazine: We’re Back!

In fall of 2005 Twighlight Manor Press announced that it was planning the release of a new magazine, which at that point was untitled and it‘s genre unknown. Our original idea was to keep it local; local writers, local sales, local flavor to the stories. Market research, however showed us that that would be a very unprofitable venture that would doom our magazine to failure before it’s fifth issue. We had to rethink out plan.

Over the next several weeks we threw around ideas and finally decided that the magazine would be a fiction “literary journal”. At first we planned on “all good fiction”, but than after studying the market, realized that this was virtually a bottomless pit, that would result in more manuscript submissions than our tiny staff of four would be able to handle.

Another thing we decided early on, was that, we wanted to stand out on bookstore shelves. Looking at other magazines sold at a local bookstore, Nonesuch Books in Saco, I discovered something. Rack upon rack of magazines, where all the same: 8×11” glossy and flimsy issues, that would not stand the test of time on a bookshelf, given them a shelf life of just 3 weeks. (This short shelf life was according to a study I found online.) According to that study, only a few magazines would be shelved and saved to be read again and again for several years. These magazines had good content and a sturdy binding. I went to Nonesuch Books looking for magazines with good content and study bindings, and was amazed at how few there actually were. In the end I found only three, out of the hundreds of magazines the shop had on the racks. By the end of this stage in our study we came to one conclusion: this magazine, was NOT going to be a 8×11” glossy; instead it would read like a book, with crisp white paper and a square bound “paperback” cover.

After some more market studies, we came to the conclusion that rather than focusing on fiction in general, we would instead use the same rule we use for writing: Write what you know. In our case it would translate into: Publish what you read. All four of us are sci-fi buffs. Sci-fi movies, sci-fi TV, sci-fi comics, sci-fi books… well it seemed only natural that we would thus choose sci-fi as the genre for the new magazine.

By January of 2006 we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with the magazine. On Space Dock 13 (the website) we announced that the magazine was a defiant go, and we were planning it’s release later that year.

With our genre in mind, we set out the name our new magazine. After several weeks of debate, only one thing was agreed upon: that the magazine must have a sci-fi sounding name and that it should reflect our local home base, namely that we are on the world’s most beautiful beach: Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

In April 2006 we introduced the world to two new websites. The first was the message board for writers: A Writer’s Desk. It was our hope that through here we would find new talent seeking to be published in our magazine. A message board built entirely to promote the magazine, today it stands on it’s own and has no connection to the magazine at all.

Our second Website was of course the homepage for our magazine. We had finally decided on a name, and that name was: Moonsnails. After a walk to the beach that cold April, me and my three brothers returned home with tote bags filled with Old Orchard’s most beloved seashell: the Atlantic Moonsnail. Later that day, while sorting the shells on the lawn, it hit me: Moonsnails was the perfect name for our magazine, it kept the local flavor and it sounded sci-fi. Later that week Moonsnails homepage went online.

By the end of April 2006 we were getting quotes from various printers, both local and online. Announcement went out with the news that Moonsnails would see its public release in September of 2006. We were off and running, and than came May 9, 2006 and the flood that washed away all of our plans, destroying everything we owned and bringing Twighlight Manor Press to an instant standstill. We lost everything, the building was condemned, and nothing survived. As far as the business was concerned, we were back at ground zero.

That same day, as a result of the flood, my dad went into a coma. In July of 2006, my dad awoke from the coma and returned home disabled and in my care. In September of 2006, instead of releasing Moonsnails, we found ourselves in the midst of fight to save our land from a local land shark. The result was my dad’s return to the hospital. In October of 2006, a fire swept through. What little we had that survived the flood, was destroyed in the fire and we were faced with fighting out Maine’s frigid winter in a tent, a fate that did not sick well with my disabled dad’s rapidly failing health.

In January of 2007, things took a turn once again, this time in our favor, and we found our selves with electricity, heat, and a roof over our heads, for the first time since May 9, 2006.

Reunited with my computer, I was amazed to find, that in spite of the flood, in spite of the fire, the hard drive remained intact, and with a few minor repairs, it runs as good as new. It looks like hell, a bent mangled mess, but who cares, all my files are still here! All my plans and templates, all those months of research and market studies: they had survived! With that knowledge in hand I set out to pick up the pieces, and once again, plans are underway, full speed ahead, to bring Moonsnails into production.

And that brings us to today. Nether flood, nor fire, nor cold of winter, could stop Moonsnails. Moonsnails rises once again.

~EK

testing tags

having a problem getting posts to show up… testing to see if tags are working yet

A List of POD Publishers

I found this list of Print On Demand publishers and found it quite interesting as I had only heard of a few of them before. Well, you know me, now I must go check them all out and compare them against each other. I am compelled to do nothing less. I haven’t had a chance to study up on these yet, so I can’t vouch for them, but feel free to check them out for yourselves and see what you think of them.

Here’s the complete list of Publishers covered in the Guide:  

(links added by me, as the article contained no links ~~EK)

• Arbor Books Inc.
• Authorhouse
• Authors Online Ltd
• Aventine Press
• Blitzprint
• Booklocker
• Bookstand Publishing
• Booksurge
• Café Press
• Cold Tree Press
• Dog Ear Publishing
• Endeavor Printing Llc
• Equilibrium Books
• First Choice Books
• Foremost Press
• Golden Pillar Publishing
• Infinity Publishing
• Inkwater Press
• Ithaca Press
• iUniverse(not pod)
• Llumina Press
• Longdash Publishing
• Lulu
• Outskirts Press
• Page Free Publishing
• Pleasant Word Publishing
• Pod World Publishing (URL expired)
• PublishAmerica(not pod)
• Rj Communications
• Tate Publishing(not pod)
• Third Millennium Publishing
• Trafford Press(not pod)
• Twilight Times
• Virtual Bookworm
• Wasteland Press
• We Publish(URL not found)
• WheatMark(not pod)
• Wingspan(URL not found)
• Writers World
• Xlibris
• Xulon Press

For those interested in POD self-publishing, I also recomend that you first read this:

For the sake of referance, I pasted the first paragraph below:

PRINT ON DEMAND  Print on demand (POD) is the commonly-used term for the digital printing technology that allows a complete book to be printed and bound in a matter of minutes. POD technology makes it easy and cost-effective to produce books one or two at a time or in small lots, rather than in larger print runs of several hundred or several thousand.POD has a number of applications. Commercial and academic publishers use it to print advance reading copies, or when they can’t justify the expense of producing and warehousing a sizeable print run–for instance, to keep backlist books available. Some independent publishers use it as a more economical fulfillment method, trading lower startup costs against smaller per-book profits (due to economies of scale, digitally printed books have a higher unit production cost than books produced in large runs on offset presses). Last but not least, there are the POD-based publishing service providers, which offer a fee-based service that can be described, depending on one’s bias, as either vanity publishing or self-publishing…. To read the rest of the article CLICK HERE.

Except for graphics, and where specifically indicated, all Writer Beware contents copyright © 1998-2007 Victoria Strauss

Attack of the POD People! They are not evil.

Are you a self publisher? Maybe you have a manuscript you want published, but you are not sure if self-publishing is right for you? I’m a self publisher myself and I’m always looking for ways to improve, so as you can expect I spend a lot of my “blog reading time” looking for blogs that help writers in general and self-publishers esp. Well, today I came across a new blog I hadn’t found before. My search lead me to this post:

POD is not Vanity is not Self Publish

April 1st, 2007 · No Comments

POD is a technology. It’s a way to print books. It’s quite useful for printing small quantities, particularly if there is intermittent demand. LOTS of publishers who are not vanity houses or scam mills use POD technology. University presses spring to mind, as do very small limited runs of very tightly focused books. POD is not evil.

Vanity presses can use POD technology OR they can use webfeed technology. Vanity presses are essentially printers with some support staff. They’ll help you print up nice editions of whatever you want. You pay for this. It’s called vanity because they don’t acquire the book. Acquire means there is an editorial staff choosing particular books to publish. Vanity houses do not maintain lists, issue catalogs or sell books in bookstores. Vanity presses are not evil

Self publishers can use POD technology or webfeed technology. Self publishers are not vanity presses in the everyday sense of the word. They are “vanity” in the sense that there isn’t an acquisition but the two phrases are used to mean different things in publishing. Lots of people self publish for a lot of reasons. Self publishing is not evil.

POD/scam mills are companies set up to persuade you, the author, that printing your book with their company is the equivalent to having it acquired by a publisher. They charge you money. Unlike a respectable vanity press, they don’t copy edit or produce high quality products. They are out to make money on volume. They prey on author’s insecurities and lack of knowledge. POD/scam mills are the scum of the earth.

Whether a company is the scum of the earth depends on how they run their business, not how they print their books.

There are several POD companies that do not try to persuade you that you have but to print up books with them to be on your way to fame and glory. Lulu and CafePress come to mind. There are others I’m sure.

– Miss Snark, the literary agent

[via To Publish a Book]

→ No CommentsTags: Self-Publishing · Articles · Books

to the authour of this post, I say:

bravo!

*insert clapping smilie here*

every one with a manuscript should read this post, if you know someone with a manuscript pass this on to them.

~~EK

Why Do Editors Reject MSs?

I just read this:

Treat your editors like the coach from any sports team because the editor knows their audience and only rejects writing with a good reason–even if you never learn the specifics.

Seemed like good advice, though I know nothing of sports or coaches. I do know, however, that editors have no choice but to reject 90% of what they recieve. Why? Well, for every book they have the physical ability to publish each year they receive 1,000 or more manuscripts. Many publishing houses only print 12 new books a year, one each month, and yet they receive ten times that many manuscripts in a single day. What does that mean for you the writer? That means that your manuscript had better be damn good if you want it to punch out the compatition and make it onto the editor’s desk. Once on the editor’s desk it had better glow if it wants to get picked for publication.

Why do editors reject manuscripts? Well as the editor in chief of Moonsnails Magazine and The Twighlight Manor Press, I think I might know the answer.

Here are copies of a few of the rejection forms we use:

Rejection Notice: No Space At This Time; MS Put on File:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on the following:At the current time we do not have space for your story in our publication. The reason for this is that all of the space slots have already been appointed for all of our upcoming issues, meaning that it may be a year or more before we well be able to use your story. However, we did like your story, and may use it in the future. Therefore I have put it on file for possible future publication. This does not mean that we can guarantee we well accept it in the future.
Because it may be a year or more before we would be able to accept your story, you are welcomed to submit this same ms to other publishers. If it is accepted by one of them, please inform us of such. If it does get published in an other magazine, we well move it to a file for possible reprint in our magazine.
If at some point in the future we do decide to use your ms, you well be notified and payment well be sent at the than current payment rate.So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct any spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it even better, maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.While your story was not accepted for publication in our magazine at this time, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Inappropriate Content:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on one or more of the following:

explicit sex or sexual references
graphic violence for violence sake
mention of or reference to suicide
animal, child, or elder abuse
excessive use of vulgar verbology
mention of or reference to drug use — this includes one or more of the following:

smoking
drinking
illegal drug use

At this point if you are like most writers, you are sending me a long letter of complaint, protesting that your ms was misrepresented and misjudged, followed by a list of reasons why sex, drugs and gore are essential to your story, ending with a threat of some sort at the bottom. Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to re-read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.

Our editors read the mss and than accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. Likewise, it is the customer who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. You do a good job, the customer pays you to do your job. What is your job?
Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. What can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read. To determine how to keep our customers happy, we first must know who are customers are.
Who are our customers? Let’s examine our magazine.
Our magazine is family friendly: i.e. read by families. Families include all ages. In other words it would not be unusual for the oldest grandmother to be seen reading a story from our magazine to her youngest grandchildren. Keeping that in mind, we do not accept stories that contain any of the above mentioned things.
We are also a small press, sold locally at a tourist resort town on the frigid North Atlantic coast of Maine. Most people who buy our magazine are often tourists looking for something to read on the beach. Others who buy us are local teachers and parents who trust us to publish stories that provide a safe, clean, enjoyable read for students.
What do our readers want? They want a story that they can enjoy reading again and again. They want action, adventure, fun, and entertainment. They want to read about heroes off on grand adventures, pirates seeking lost treasure, super heroes vanquishing dastardly villains, wars in outer space, knights in shining armor, spooky old haunted houses, the type of stuff that was popular in the 1950’s comic books is what our readers enjoy.
What our readers do not want is pointlessness. What is pointlessness? Pointlessness is ho-hum, I think I’ll ad a sex scene in here because I can’t think of anything else to write right now. Pointlessness is , yawn, the dialogue got to short, so I’ll stick in a few swear words. Pointlessness is, geeze this sure is going slow I’ll add a serial killing vampire and have him splatter entrails all over the pages. Pointlessness is, I can’t think of anything else to write, so I’ll have a teenager overdose herself than slice her wrists while jumping off a bridge, because my life is so dull that that’s what I might do tomorrow. Pointlessness is anything that adds nothing to the story plot, it is simply there to fill up empty space. That is pointlessness. Our readers look at sex, swearing, bloody violence, and suicide and say, “Ho-hum. Looks like yet another depressed teenager wrote that piece of crap. Booooring! When are they going to get some real writers to write some real stories. I’m going to cancel my subscription.”
As you can see, if we print those things we lose our readers. If we lose our readers, we lose our customers. If we lose our customers, we lose money. If we lose money we go bankrupt. If we go bankrupt we have to close down the magazine. If we close down the magazine, we end up homeless and starving. So, the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

It was a dark and stormy night, the night I wrote this story. I remember it was dark and stormy because I was watching the drug dealer outside my window that night. But my story isn’t about him, no, it’s about me and my life as a teenager. This is the coolest story in the world! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! It is all about how my teen years were nothing but heaping loads o’ crapola. You’ll just love to reading about how my step-dad was hell and how he raped me and beat up my dog, and how my mom was on drugs (that‘s how I knew the guy outside my window was a drug dealer), and how I run away and everything! It doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the story don’t need no plot. YAH! But than I got to thinking it’d be great if it was a horror, so I turned my step dad into a blood sucking vampire and I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock your readers with too!!!! Isn’t that jus the coolest thing??? I’ll bet no body ever thought of doing that yet. Yeah I know, it’s great, don’t thank me, I’ll settle for you kissing my ass and being my eternal slave, I’m so great you know. Oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex scene on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? You don’t need a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me! Me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great in your face kiss ass @#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! Oh yeah! I’m right baby! Can ya dig it?!

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to WANT read a ms that is submitted without the author at least stopping to think about what our readers do and do not want. Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories that focus on me, myself and I surrounding by naked girls and serial killers on drugs and nor do we. Okay, maybe there are a few magazines that publish that sort of thing, so, send it to them, they want it, we don’t.
As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories, nor do they want to read pointless ramblings. How long do you think a reader will stay interested in your story if you haven’t actually got a story to tell? You would not read it and you know that, and editors know it even better than you do. You’d never pay money to read something like that, so how can you expect other people to buy it? That said, why should we bother to accept it?

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms, delete the sex, blood, and drugs and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. Remove the vulgarity from it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect. Write it, than re-write it.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about with characters readers well want to read about. Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where did they do it? What was the result of what they did?
Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning tells us what the goal of the story is. The middle tells us what the character did to reach that goal. The ending tells us what happened when the character reaches the goal.
Be sure that your main character is someone that you readers well have a reason to love.
Third person stories (he said she did) get accepted more than 80% times more often than first person stories (I said I did), and second person rarely gets accepted by anyone (you said you did). 99.8% of all best sellers are written in 3rd person.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.
Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can yours become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

While your story was not appropriate for publication in our magazine, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.

Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Lack of Spelling and Grammar:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here]we must regretfully advise you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance is based on:

Lack of correct spelling and an abundance of basic grammar mistakes.

Due to the volume of mss we receive each week, we are unable to read mss which require us to first stop and make spelling and/or grammar corrections in order to be able to read it. In the 1800’s when most authors were unable to spell due to lack of education, yes, editors did correct spelling. This is not the 1800’s, it is 200 years later. In today’s world, you would be hard pressed to find an editor that would correct a writer’s spelling and grammar mistakes. Today authors didn’t grow up in log cabins 1,000 miles from civilization, and even if they do live in the Artic Circle, they type the story up on a computer, and guess what? Computers spell check, and most grammar check too.
Before your ms gets to one of our editors, it must first survive the shush pile. The slush pile is a mountain of stories, which threatens to smother our editors in a paper avalanche. Once in a while is found one or two authors who have sent their 4th or 5th draft, a well polished draft with mistakes corrected, and the ms printed neatly and formatted correctly…and editors can actually read it. Those one or two that we can read because they are clean and neat with no mistakes… those are the ones we read, because those survive the slush pile and make it on to an editor’s desk.
Which mss drown in the slush pile? If the paper is dirty, crumpled, and torn, it drowns. If the font is big and flowery, it gets tossed. If the font is smaller than 12pt, it seeps into the unknown. If the paper is scented and has confetti flying out of each page, it gets fumigated. If the paper is pink, red, yellow, blue, or any other color not white, it gets tossed before it gets a chance to blind the editor. If it reads like a dry collage text book, it gets recycled quickly…we don‘t want our editors sleeping on the job. If there are 10 or more grammar and/or spelling mistakes on the first page, it gets tossed. Of every 100 mss we receive, more than three thirds are tossed in the trash as unreadable. Sadly, your ms has fallen into the unreadable category. As a result, your ms did not survive the slush pile and went unread by our editors.
Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.
Our editors read the ms and accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. The customer is the one who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. What is your job? Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. Now than, what can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read.
The author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

dis is da coolest storee i’s even did wrote!!!! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! it is all about how my teen years were noting but heaping loads o’ crapola, you’ll just lov at read about how my step-dad was hell, and i run away and everting! it doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the storee don’t need no plot. I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock the readers wid too!!!! Is’nt tat jus the coolest thing??? Ya I knoe, it’s great,,, oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex sence on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? you don’t neeed a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great@#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! can ya dig it?! howe loong do ya tink a weeder will stae intrested in yor storee ifing dey kan’t weed wat U al wote? and you hav‘nt actualy got a story to tell ? “YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!“ U wood knot weed it and yos no that, & us editers no dat even betta tan U doo, so why wood we bodder to weed it? even if it had been a goode storee, we wood not have nonw for all the mistakes… !!!! it jus 2 bad that mor wriders did knot spell an grammer checke afor dey submit

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to read a ms that is submitted without the author first spell-checking it at least. A typo here and there is understandable and overlooked, but how often do you see a magazine publish a story in a complete lack of grammar? Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories and nor do we. As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories.

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere. Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?

Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about characters readers well want to read about.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.

Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can your become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

You have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well ever accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss in the future.

Sincerely,

As I said these are premade forms. Why do we have premade forms? Because we do not accept certain things, and no matter how many time we tell people that we do not accept certain things, they still send them out anyways, thinking “well, they well make an eception for me”… no, not even if you were Stephen King, would we make an exception.

Baiscly, write the best you can, edit it yourself as best you can, always read submission guidelines carefully, and send your ms out to the places that WANT the type of work you write. Editors are desperatly seeking good writers, they want to accept your work, you just have to find the right editor for what you wrote.

~~EK

LuLu has come a long way

LuLu seems to be on many writers minds lately. It seems like everywhere I go, someone is talking about how they have published a book on LuLu. I look at these people and I say: “LuLu! You have got to be kidding! Who in their right mind would get a book published by LuLu!” I guess you can tell it’s been a very long time since I had any dealings with LuLu. I remember the old LuLu. Quite differant from the LuLu of today.

I remember LuLu when it first started, not sure when that was, but I remember searching Google for self-publishing and finding this little site that boasted to haveing printed “over 100 books”. The site was a total mess, very unprofessional, hard to navigate, and really had no info about what they did. Basicly the whole thing looked like someone had dropped a bomb on Hell. It was terrible. So terrible in fact, that I never went back.

The whole web site was based on a chat-room, and didn’t really have a home page. I remember laughing at it and saying that no one in their right mind would let such a crappy looking web site publish their book.

That was a few years ago, and their site was online, maybe a month at that point, and had a notation that it was “under construction”. I blew it off as someone’s little pipe dream and never gave it a second thought.

Well, last week I was chatting with some fellow writers and one of them was telling me how she was doing her next book with LuLu. I thought “You have got to be kidding! Is that crappy site still going!” She tells me, that yep they were and boy had they changed. So I went and checked it out, and WOW! Did they ever change! It don’t even look like the same site. I’m amazed that they have come so far in just a few short years.

Well, now I’m intreeged. This “new” LuLu has gathered my interest, and I think I’ll test it out. I’ve got a short story, I wrote a while back, but never published anywhere, yet, and I think I’ll test LuLu out with it, see what happens.

While searching for info about LuLu, I also came across this blog. I recomend it to anyone who is thinking of starting a project with LuLu, as the author has written a wounderfully detail step by step instruction of the LuLu publishing process.

I’m interested in hearing of others’ experiances with LuLu. So if you’ve ever published anything with LuLu, feel free to comment and share your thoughts, both the good and the bad. I’d like to know more about LuLu as told by the authors who’ve been published by them

~~EK

Blogs for Writers: Fourth Round of Blog Additions

Here is the next round of blogs I plan to add to the Z-List for Writers:

The Working Writers Coach

Sylvia’s Insight
Writer in the Making
Ink In My Coffee
Grow Your Writing Business
DESiGN YOUR WRiTiNG LiFE
KCWrite4u
Wealth of Words
Content Done Better
Writers in the Sky
Musings from a Writer
JM Writing and Editing Services
Renegade Writer
Mrs. Write Right, Word Therapist (aka Writer-Editor)
Practicing Writing
WritingThoughts
Engaging Pages For Working Writers
A writer’s life and times
Six Figure Writers
Write For Life
Writers and Authors
Muse Writers Peer Awards
Will Write 4 Food
National Association of Writers’ Groups
My Words, My Way
Writing for Reason
Funds for Writers
Beginner’s Guide to Freelance Writing
The Rural Writer
Paperback Writer
Creatively Self-Employed
Ye Old Inkwell
Writers in the Sky
Bleeding Ink
Editing for Everyone
Newbie’s Guide to Publishing
Irene Goodman
academia
Pub Rants
EVIL EDITOR
iUniverse
Budding Authors
NaNoWriMo
World of Words
Miss Snark
Absolute Write
101 Sites
Agent Query

This Day in History: March 13

March 13 is an interesting day; here are a few examples:

On March 13 in 1781, German born English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the seventh planetfrom the sun, Uranus.

On March 13 1887, Chester Greenwood of Maine recieved a patent for earmuffs.

On March 13, 1964 Catherine Genovese was killed in the Kew Gardens Community of Queens, NY, while 38 of her friends and neighbors, “not wanting the get involved” watched for nearly 30 minutes as the girl was repeatedly stabbed by her 29 years old attacker. Others, outraged by her friends’ testamony declared March 13 “Good Samaritan Day”, a day to emphasize the importance of unselfish aid to those who need it.

What happened to this girl reminds me of our family. Dozens of people, possibly hundreds, know what has been happening to our family, and yet, no one well help us, no one well do anything to stop it, even when we have begged and pleaded for help from everyone we can think of, still no one well help us and thier reason is always the same: “It’s not my place to get involved.” Most of those would say this claim to be Christians. Now I ask you, in view of this being Good Samaritain’s Day, “What would Jesus do?”

Hand Over the Doggie Biscuits and No One Gets Peed On!

As posted on Xaveir’s Nest: Hand Over the Doggie Biscuits and No One Gets Peed On!

 

New from Copper Cockeral

Doggie Biscuits ***

Doggie Biscuits Black ***

Hand over the doggie buscuits and no one gets peed on!

 

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*** These designs by J.J. Voldy’s Assistant

Causes EK Supports: Animal Rights

I support many causes, esp those dealing with chickens, poultry, and farm animals. Other causes I support are animal rights, children’s rights, anti-elder abuse, breast cancer, endangered specices, anti-fur, vegan, the environment, and other such causes.

I was one of the original protestors of Proctor & Gamble, back in the early 1980’s, and am now entering my 18th year of active and ongoing protest and boycott of Proctor & Gamble and it’s masive and shameless support of the Draize Eye Test.

My home is currently the refuge of over 200 stray, abandoned, etc. animals, includeing 9 cats, 2 dogs,  and 200+ roosters and hens.

Listed below are many (though not nearly all) the causes I currently support.

Animal Welfare:

 

300+ Geese to be Slaughtered!

A Cessation to the Illegal Brutal Practices of Farra-do-Boi in Brazil

An Ordinance For Pinellas County Prohibiting the Trapping or Killing of Peacocks

A Petition to Protect the Animal Victims of Hurricane Katrina

AllAboutAnimals.org.uk

AnimalActivist.com

 

Animal rights group to protest KFC

AnimalSavingsClub.com

www.animalwelfaresociety.org – The Animal Welfare Society (were 2 of my dogs came from)

Another Chance Animal Rescue Home Page

Antifreeze is Deadly to Children & Animals – Help Make it Safe

Are You Taking Good Care of Your Pet?

Australian and South Pacific Whales Under Renewed Threat From Whaling

Ban the Export of Live Horses for Slaughter

Be an Angel for Stray Animals

BruceFriedrich.com

CaringConsumer.com

Carrot2004.com

ChuayChangThai.com

 

 

Chickens blow-torched to death, frogs blown up

 

Chickens and Turkeys Deserve Humane Treatment, Too

Circuses.com

CircusWatch.com

 

 

Click daily to make a difference!

 

Click free to help the Wildlife Conservation Society protect big cat territory now!

CLICK HERE TO JOIN LCA’S MAILING LIST!!!!

Cockfighting

CommandoChicks.com

CompassionateCitizen.com

CowsAreCool.com

Crack Down On Canned Hunts!

Cruelty to Pet Shop Animals

Danger! Endangered Species Act Threatened

Dissection

Don’t Abandon Pets in Disasters

DON’T ALLOW THE MORINI FARM TO SELL ANIMALS FOR VIVISECTION. …

Don’t Be Cruel

Dog-Fighting

End Canada’s Merciless Seal Hunt

END CRUELTY TO KFC CHICKENS

European Union allows sadistic torturing of animals because it’s tradition

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Copper Cockeral Introduces it’s New Blog: Xavier’s Nest

The following is an introductory quote from Xavier’s Nest:

Copper Cockeral Cards & Gifts began in November of 2003 when I got this computer I ue today and the free printer that came with it. I had the printer set up in less than an hour and by the end of the day I had gone through 2 reams of paper and card stock, after printing up hundreds of sample designs for cards, stationary, and what not. The printer being also a scanner, ment that I had set out to scanning all of my paintings into the computer as well. One of those paintings I call, The Copper Cockeral. It’s a close up of a rooster’s head, painted an aged copper green-blue. I shrunk it down to a tiny logo and printed it on the back of everything I printed up. A month later I was printing up Christmas cards for paper carriers to hand out o their customers, as task which I continued to do for the next 3 years. And so began Copper Cockeral’s early days as poor quality printed off a free printer. I was happy that I had gotten this business off and running, but I was very displeased with the quality. I went on to test out the quality of four more printers and every type of paper I could find, but still none meet my standerds of perfection.

In the meantime however, I discovered an online printer called Zazzle, who would take my designs and put them on thier products, allowing me to build a website to sell them on. I was intreged and quickly set up my own Zazzle Gallery. In those days Zazle offered 3 products: cards, plain white t-shirts, and posters. Today Zazzle has expanded their line to include buttons, bumper stickers, silk ties, t-shirts in every color imaginable, US Postage stamps, keyrings, posters, framed prints, mugs, hats, totebags, and lots more. As they expand their line, so too does Copper Cockeral.

My income with Zazzle has been hit and miss, mostly due to the fact that they do nothing to promot your line. It’s up to you to do that, marketing and advertising was not something I was interested in, I was more interested in creating the products than promoting them, and back than, the Space Dock 13 Network did not yet exist.

Displeased with the slow sale of Zazzle (and still not marketing on my own) I set out in search of another printer. This time I found CafePress. CafePress, at the time, only had 14 products; today they have 90. Compareing CafePress’s 14 products to Zazzle’s 3, I realized that there was so much room for me to expand the Copper Cockeral line. CafePress not oonly had cards and t-shirts, but they also had clockes, cups, and ceramic tile jewerly boxes. Copper Cockeral expanded.

Today Copper Cockeral embraces both Zazzle and CafePress, offering over 60 designs each on more than 150 products. While most of the line is still designed by me (Wendy C. Allen / EelKat), there are 4 others also creating designs: my three brothers and our mom.

Starting on February 16, 2007, Copper Cockeral now has it’s own web site, still under construction as I type this, but online and taking orders.

This site which you are reading right now, is the blog for Copper Cockeral, named Xavier’s Nest, in memory of the long line of real copper cockerals all named Xavier that have lived on our farm over the years. The original Xavier was Xavier Logan, a character out of my Twighlight Manor series: a wild rock star from planet Flame, most noted for his long firey-red hair and his neon yellow clothes trimmed in pink. In 1989, our farm expanded to include a flock of 25 bantam roosters, which saddly got lost in the mail, and shipped to us 3 days late, with all but one having died. That one went on to become my first Xavier, the first of many. Xavier roosters are always green-eyed Partrige Cochins, a rare mutation, with brilliant green eyes and bright firey red feathers, that oddly resemble Xavier Logan, for whom they are named.

Want to Live Longer? Go Sleep On It.

Today from Answers.com: 

Spotlight: A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine has found that people who take a regular daily nap are less likely to die of a heart attack. Researchers mapped the sleep habits of adults in Greece and found that those who napped most frequently for up to 30 minutes at a time had a 37 percent lower risk of heart disease. In France, the health minister has commissioned a study to determine if napping at work could increase performance and benefit health. And in the US, a study released by Columbia University shows that if you’re middle-aged and sleep five or less hours a night, you may be increasing your risk of developing high blood pressure. So George Costanza had the right idea when he carved himself a little nap area under his desk at work. Sweet dreams.

Quote: “When you can’t figure out what to do, it’s time for a nap.” — Mason Cooley

My Blog Ranking Continues to Rise!

WOW… On February 16, 2007, I had 0 inbound links and $0 value on my blog, and my Technorati rank was in the millions, forget the exact number. I adding the Z-List  yesterday, could that have anything to do with my rank change? My ranking is moving up fast!

Your Blog’s Value is $25.56!

Inbound links: 21
Technorati rank: 649805

Government Corruption: Town’s Harasment of Disabled Senior Goes Too Far!

February 26, 2007

My name is Wendy Allen. I am writing to you on behalf of my father, Kenneth Allen of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Our family is in desperate need of help. In the past year we have tried without success to get help locally, but now the deadline is less than a week away and we do not know what to do or who to turn too for help. Since this is a long and complicated ordeal, I well start at the beginning.First off, I should tell you that we are fighting the local government, the officials of the Town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, for the following charges:Discrimination against a disabled senior. A seniors rights being taken away from him.Repeated harassment, and discriminatory attempts to force a low income family off their land, resulting in the year long hospitalization of already mentioned senior and resulting in his becoming disabled.Threat of the destruction of property, including the threat of tearing down the home of aforementioned senior and his minor children and their pets.Forcing the senior and his minor children out of their home and onto the streets where they lived for much of 2006 in a “tent” constructed out of shipping pallets and a tarp, where they lived in the elements of Maine’s harsh winter, some days suffering at below zero temperatures.The threat of having all our belongings destroyed.The reason the town official Ken Shoup gave for this harassment was quote:“This is Old Orchard, you have to change you lifestyle.”End quote. No other reason has been given.Now, for our story and how this train of events came to be:First off, our family has a long history with the Town of Old Orchard, due to the fact that our family settled this town more than 300 years ago. Our family has lived on the properties here in since 1657. Originally there were several hundred acres on our land, both forest and farmland, but as the centuries went by the land was divided among relatives and passed on in increasingly smaller sections from one generation to the next. As the town grew and the land became more valuable, relatives sold out and moved away. By the 1940’s ours was the last to remain in the original family, a small lot less than an acre in size. Not only was it the last to remain in the original family, but it was also the last farm in Old Orchard Beach.It should be noted that property in Old Orchard is valued in the millions due to it being one of the world’s top rated award-winning beaches, and there in lies the root of our problem. Our farm has been accused of decreasing the property values. By the 1980’s Old Orchard became known as the hang out for biker gangs, honky-tonks, and strip shops. Property values dropped as the family image of the town plummeted. In the 1990’s, things changed once again, the gangs were driven out, the honky-tonks and bars shut down, and the strip shops became restaurants and art galleries. Property taxes sky-rocketed to the second highest in the state as millionaire mansions and high rise condos reconstructed the sky-line, forever blocking out the view of the beach from the roads.Old Orchard beach town officials, spent millions putting in brick sidewalks, Victorian street lamps, and building a replica of the town hall that had stood here in the 1800’s…. their campaign was to create a “historical town” to draw in high income tourists. The campaign was wildly advertised, and well promoted… until the new town manager and his new staff showed their true colors, that is and their campaign turned to harassing long time locals off of their land.  Several families have been driven out already. Most unable and unwilling to fight the local government as the threats of propety destruction, and the removal of personal belongings (including pets) has scared most of the “offending families” into selling thier land and moving. There are only a handful of families that have stood thier ground, but those too are leaving. Ours is one of the last to remain, still standing our round, and refusing to give in to the threats made by local police officers, local code enforcement officers, and the town manager himself. In the past year they have changed (without proper votes from the people) nearly every code on the book in an attempt to force these families off thier land. Changes in code include such things as “banning the growing of vegetation”, “painting your house”,  “owning more than one car per family”, and other ridiculous town laws, that now prohibit such things as growing a garrden. It is like living in a strict gated community, only it is the entire town.On the outskirts of the town, one finds the beautiful rolling acres of Ross Forest, once a candidate to become a national park, most of it now clear cut, and what little remains is soon to be sold for housing complexes, many already under construction. Dividing the Ross Forest from the down town district, lay the remains of a few scattered farms, no longer in use. Except for one: ours. At one time a large full production poultry farm, today the home of pet farm animals, but still very much an active farm, small as it is.

The harassment of our  family began in the fall of 2005 after an unknown person, wrote an editorial to the local newspapers, saying, “Four homes on Portland Avenue were distracting from the value of other properties in the town”. The writer continued saying that something should be done about it, that these four homes “should be torn down”, and the families should be forced to move out of town to make way for the new generation. Two of those four homes mentioned, as it turns out, were 144 Portland Ave and 146 Portland Ave.

At 144 Portland Avenue there lives my elderly dad Kenneth Allen, myself, and my three brothers (all under 16 years of age). As you may guess, our dad was much, much older than our mother, explaining how a senior came to have young children. In 1983, my dad’s mother died and he inherited her house at 146 Portland Ave. The tiny 16 foot by 9-foot house, which never had plumbing, etc. Was turned into a shed, but even so, the town has continued to tax it as a house. Since October of 2001 (six years ago) we have been applying for a permit to repair this building, and turn it into a greenhouse so we can extend our growing season, but the town STILL has that on a waiting list.

We continued to live in the old 700 square foot house, more of a cabin than a house by the town’s standards anyways. My dad was a newspaper carrier for 21 years, our family income was under $20,000 a year, so we were never able to afford much, but we never noticed, because we were happy. Our family was living together, we had our pets with us, and we lived on our farm. That we lacked a “normal income” or a “normal lifestyle” (as the town officials now put it) never occurred to us.

Than in spring of 2006, there came the letters from the town. One after another. Demands to “remove the junk and debris” or else. As it turns out, what they were calling junk and debris, was as follows:

Our car, which though they consider it “junk” still runs in spit of what it looks like, and we use it daily.

Our fire wood (we have a woodstove for heat, cause we can‘t afford anything else.)

My dad’s tools (he was a car mechanic in the 1970’s, and still works on his own car and cars of relatives)

Our brooder (used for raising baby chickens each spring)

My dad’s antique cast iron wood stove collection

Our garden (bean poles, pea fences, etc… they say we can’t have a garden any more either)

Our washing machine (a 1947 wringer, which we use weekly)

Our farming equipment (tiller, ATV, etc…. all used on a regular basis)

In other words, what they are calling “trash”, “junk”, and “debris” are actually things we use every day, things we need in order to survive… without them we can not garden, if we can not garden we can not eat, because we can not afford to buy enough food to eat more than one meal a day per person, without the garden we well starve to death, without the farm equipment we can not garden, they are trying to kill us… this is not a figure of speech… as you shall soon understand.

My dad explained to the town that this stuff is not junk but our livelihood. The town responded by attaching a lean/fine on our property, for “refusal to comply with orders“. I’m not sure how much the amount is unto today, but it was much more than we could afford than, and more so now.

My dad made an attempt to move the items so that they could not be seen from the road, in an attempt to comply with the town’s orders, hoping that if the items could not be seen from the road, that it would stop the harassment by the town… this was the biggest mistake he could have made, because as a result, a few days later on May 9, 2006, he went into a coma.

May 9, 2006 started like any other day. I woke up and went out to feed the chickens, work in the garden, and than help my dad move items out of view of the street. My dad had not yet gotten up. I had been in the yard barely 20 minutes when my 15 year old brother  came running across the yard in a panic… something was wrong, I could see it on his face, and I ran to meet him… he told me that something was wrong with daddy… daddy had woken up and torn the wood stove out of the wall tearing with it all of the water pipes… and now the house was under water, while daddy was throwing everything from the toilet to the tables to shelves to files all over the house. By the time I arrived in the house there was 8 inches of water on the floor, and nothing left of anything… everything in the house was totally destroyed, there was not only nothing left on shelves, there were no longer any shelves. It looked like a tornado had gone through the house. The house was barely recognizable.

My smaller brothers  had run into the bedroom to hide, terrified at the event that was unfolding, while daddy was now in an attempt at tearing out the windows. When I asked him what he was doing, he did not recognize me, he could not hear me, he could not see me… it was like he had turned into a blind man and was tearing at the walls in an attempt to see… I rushed to the neighbor who called an ambulance.

The ambulance arrived, and talk of nervous breakdown and meningitis, were scatted around the conversations… the emergency team was in attempt of asking me what happened, when I was pulled away by a police officer named Jack Nichols, who proceeded to interrogate me about the condition of our house.

The wood stove was laying in pieces in the center of the dinning room, and this was his main focus…

repeating the same question again and again: “How long has this been laying here?” he demanded. I told him, it had just happened, he accused me of lying, and repeated the question…. over and over again, and I kept explaining to him, that daddy had just done this, which was why we had called 911. Than he turned his questions to the piles of paper and mail that scattered the house… “What’s all this clutter?” he yelled. Again I explained that this had just happened, that it was stuff that had been on the shelves and table, but as before, he accused me of lying and repeated the question again and again, his voice growing more heated and temperamental each time. Than in a menacing voice he turned on my three little brothers “Why aren’t these children in school?”. I explained that we home schooled, and we had approval from the town’s superintendent. Next he railed me out about how children can’t live in “clutter and filth” like this… again I explained that this “clutter and filth” as he called it, had just happened moments ago, and it was because this had happened that we had called for his help. He responded by calling the Department of Human Services to take my brothers away, and than calling the town code enforcement officer to condemn the house on grounds of “clutter and filth”.

While all this was happening the ambulance had taken my dad away, to where they had taken him I did not know, because Jack Nichols had not given me a chance to even know what had happened to my dad. More police, this time with cameras, stormed into the house, none of them would tell me what they were doing, why they were there, or what had happened to my dad. In the mean time my mom and her husband arrived, and my brothers and me packed a few things so we could move in with her while we figured out what to do next. We tried to pack what little we could find that hadn’t been destroyed by the flood, and do it around police officers who seemed to be going through everything in the house for no reason at all, and who refused to talk to me or even acknowledge that I was there. Luckily the hospital called us during this time and told us where my dad was, but they would not discuss his condition over the phone. It was four hours before the police would let us leave to find out what happened to my dad. A friend, who had witnessed the police searching the house with their cameras, said that he thought it looked like a drug raid, and he suggested that we get copies of the police report to find out why they were going through the house like that. I told my dad this after he came out of the hospital and he went to the station to get copies of the report, but they refused to give them to him without a court order, so we have been unable to obtain any info as to why the police were going through everything like that.

It was a lesson well learned. We called the police for help and they turned on us like rabid wolves. I well never call 911 again.

Once at the hospital I was told that what we had just witnessed was a diabetic seizure, brought on by extreme amounts of stress. The doctor asked if my dad had any recent stress… yes, he had, with the town harassing him the past couple of weeks, and than the police harassing him even during a medical emergency, nearly hindering the emergency teams ability to get him to the hospital. Dr. Greene than explained that it was luckily he had gotten to the hospital when he did “another 20 minutes and he’d have been dead” is what he said. I shudder to think that the town police and their obsession with throwing us off our land nearly resulted in my dad’s death. Dr. Greene went on to explain that my dad was now in a diabetic coma on full life support. Wither or not he would live was not yet known

As days, turned to weeks, my dad remained in a coma, his system getting weaker by the minute, at one point his kidneys failed him and he had to be rushed in for dialysis.

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My dad remained in Southern Maine Medical Center in a diabetic coma on full life support for 21 days. In mid-June they moved him, wheelchair bound, from SMMC to New England Rehab Center in Portland. On June 29, 2006, my dad came home, unable to walk on his own, and saw for the first time what had become of our house. Just three days after my dad went into the hospital our electricity was shut off. The town claims they had nothing to do with it when I asked them. Without electricity, there was no light, and thus no way to see to clean the mess from the flood, and so, it remained just as it had been left on that day in May.

My dad, was now severely disabled, only able to walk a few feet at a time and unable to lift anything. The stress caused by the town’s harassment had left him with a weak heart and failing kidney’s, but the harassment had only just begun, for almost as soon as he was out of the hospital, the town once again began its relentless pursuit to remove us from our land. Land that for us means our heritage, our history, our legacy, but land that for the town, means nothing but dollar signs and profit margins.

Due to the months of the house sitting filled with water, we could not go back in to live in it. Having no family or relatives willing to help us, we were forced to camp out in the yard. We signed up for various shelter foundations and were put on their waiting lists. At HUD we were informed that we were #600 on the list.

Problems had gotten worse than I had known… for my dad was now disabled and could not go to work, thus I started my long and fruitless search for a job, which is today still ongoing. During his hospitalization, no bills had been paid, and about 10 or so years ago my dad had taken out a mortgage on the house… there has been no money since May of 2006 (nearly a year now), and thus no mortgage payments since that time either, they are now threatening to foreclose, but know the situation and are trying to work out a payment plan with my dad, in hopes that his disability check well eventually be approved by the state (he is still waiting to hear from the state on that… they sure do take a long time. They said it well is approved, they just have to wait for the paperwork to go through, so there should be some type of an income soon, we hope.)

With no income, and a house that we can not live in, my dad lived in his car, my brothers now liveing with our mom and her husband, and I built a house-tent-lean-to type of thing out of 12 shipping pallets, 3 cinderblocks, and a tarp. We had asked the town if we could put up a yurt (not hard to build as our land boarders a forest) until we could get a house back up, but they told us no, only tents were allowed, but we couldn’t afford to buy a real tent, so I built one instead.

Letters from the town continued to arrive. We continued to visit the town hall where we got the run around… “Come back in the morning, he’s only here in the mornings.”…Next day: “I’m sorry, did I say mornings? No, you’ll have to come in the afternoon.”… Day after day after day… week after week after week… “He’s out sick today”… “He’s on vacation this week.”… “He’s out on an inspection today.”… Weeks became months and STILL we had yet to meet the man behind the letters: Ken Shoupe. Though we went to his office almost daily, we would not meet him until November of 2006.

In July my dad had to have surgery, and was bed-ridden or rather car-ridden, as he had no bed, for several weeks afterwards. For food we get a bag a month from the Salvation Army (the only place that made an attempt to help us, little as it was) and each month we stretch that single bag of food as much as we possible can to make it last the entire month, but that often means we are limited to one very small meal a day (sometimes less). The State only allows us $13 a month for food stamps, and we aren’t eligible for TANF or welfare because we own our land.

We went to our church for help, but than there isn’t much they can do, you see, our town manager, the man giving the orders to Ken Shoop, is a “leading member” of the church, and others involved in the letters, such as the secretary who mails them out, also go to our church. The bishop tries to help when he can, but, in the end all he was able to do was get our electricity turned back on, but for that there was a catch: The town was going to let us remove our belongings from the house, before they tore it down. So, with the electricity back on, and this new threat hanging over our heads, me and my 3 brothers, built a second tent next to the first one, and began to move what we could salvage out of the house and into the second tent. Everything we own now sits outside, damp and wet, under a tarp, buried in snow.

Such threats and happenings have been going on now ever since my dad came home from the hospital, and the stress has made his recovery almost impossible, and thus he remains weekly, sometimes daily, in and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals with increasingly failing health, and every day his doctors tell him: “You have got to get the stress out of your life before it kills you.”

And now I shall skip ahead to where we are at today and why I am writing to you:

In December, with below zero temperatures and snow burying the “tent”, a woman from the Department of Human Services showed up at our land, explaining that someone had filed a complaint, because there was a family living outdoors during Maine’s harsh sub-zero winter. We have been on waiting lists for shelter since this had happened, but we are such a large family: 5 people, plus cats, dogs, and farm animals, there is no one who would take us, we had no choice but to sit out Maine’s winter and try to keep the tarp from collapsing on our heads under the weight of the snow. She was furious, at the Town Officials, for she had attempted to contact them first and was given the same “run around” that we had been given. She told them that if they were going to force us out of our home than they should at least pay for a hotel room (Old Orchard Beach has over 300 hotels, motels, cabins, camp grounds and condos.) She said that they had told her off. She is the one who said that what was happening here was not legal, that it was harassment, and that it was bordering on criminal. It seems that if one of us had died from the cold, the town could be charged with murder, we did not realize this. Before the DHS came in, we didn’t know that what was happening was illegal, we didn’t know that we had the right to fight the town. She gave us the phone number of Pine Tree Legal, Maine’s free lawyer group. We called. And called again. And keep calling, but can’t get past the operator, who says our name is on a waiting list.

This woman from DHS was the very first person to make any attempt to really and truly help us, with her help we went from #600 on HUD’s waiting list to #1 and on January 10, 2007, after nine months of homelessness, me and my dad were allowed to move into a temporary apartment in Biddeford, while HUD, AVESTA, and CALEB Foundation, try to find a place that well take both us and my 3 brothers, and our pets… a wait that we are told could take as many as 8 years! Unfortunately the apartment is tiny beyond belief and so everything we own is still back at home in the 2 “tents”.

We thought things were looking up at this point. We should have known that the town officials would not allow us to be happy for a single moment. Following the news that we are in an apartment the town has moved on to a new level of harassment: This week, we received a letter from the town, saying that we have until February 12 (just 3 days from now) to remove EVERYTHING from our land (including not only the things they had listed before but also the 2 tents, our house, the sheds, and the barns), after which time they well come in and level the land. They came to the land and told us that they wanted a totally empty lot… nothing, apparently not even the trees. They are complaining that the tents are an eyesore… the tents that THEY told us we had to put up to store our belongings in, because back than they were threatening to tear down the house. Among the items in the tent is my book collection, some 7,000 books that I have been collecting over the years; antiques that had belonged to my great-grandmother, and

grandmothers; and other such items. Everything we own, now stands to be stolen from us, by the town officials, and why? We asked Shoop why he was doing this to us, he said: “This is Old Orchard, you have to change you lifestyle.”

We know this is Old Orchard! Unlike outsiders like him, our family has been here on this land since 1657. My dad’s family built this town. Of course we know its Old Orchard. What kind of a reason is that to force a family off their land? We have 3 days to stop them, and no one well helps us. It seems like the whole town has turned on us. People who we once called friends now seem to be strangers.

Today this caper of harasment has taken on a new level… they are now threaten to take our animals away, based on false accusations made by one named Morin. They say they well take them in 5 days from today, but they have no grounds to take them, and as with everything else they have done, they have no court order to back themselves up with.

We have gone to everyone we can pleading, begging for help, but no one is willing to help us. Every church, every charity… even the volunteer lawyers, but Old Orchard Beach is Maine’s biggest tourist attraction, a town that draws in millions of tourist each summer, tourists who bring with them, money that makes Old Orchard one of Maine’s wealthiest towns, and because of that no one well help us fight them. We are told to give up, to just move… we are told that we can’t fight the Town of Old Orchard because it’s one of Maine’s most powerful government seats. But that doesn’t give them the right to steal our belongings! That doesn’t give them the right to steal our land! That doesn’t give them the right to force us to live in a tent during the winter! How can they just come in and level our land? They don’t even have any court orders to back themselves up with! What they are doing is not legal, but no one well do anything to stop them! They well not break us into losing, but if this doesn’t stop, they well kill my dad. This has to stop. They have too far. Please, there must be someway someone can help us! If you know of anyone who may be able to help us, please let us know!

Our Mailing address is still the same as it was before the apartment:

Kenneth R. Allen

Wendy C. Allen

144 Portland Ave

Old Orchard Beach, ME 04064

my email address (my dad don’t have one) xavychup@yahoo.com

edit:

Updates to this post have been made in the following posts:

Government Corruption: Another Update…

  • 2 Comments (Edit)

An upate on THIS POST.

The latest round of harasment is now a requirerment that we keep a log of each and every time we feed our pets and give them water. The town has required that we keep a logbook hanging at our frontdoor so that the police can come in a check it whenever they deem it “necassary”.

They have also said that we must cut a hole in the wall so that the cats and dogs can go in and out 24 hours a day. These are house pets! They don’t even LIKE going outside! Worse, there is a pack of cyotees and at least one black bear, that rutinely wander about on our land. We can’t have a hole cut in the side of our house! The cyottees well eat my babies! The town laws have  reached the point that they have become Communistic. This is insane! How can they pass laws like this?

They are also requiring that all cars be in a garage. They say that we can not have more than one car, and that if we own more than one car they can fine us $2,500 for each day that we have more than one car in our yard and not in a garage! How can they get away with this? Old Orchard Beach is a town not a dynasty! What is wrong with them? How do these laws get passed?

Well, a result of these latest harasements is that my dad has had yet another stress overload, and has to go in for surgery yet again, tomorrow morning as a result.

What they are doing to us is not right.

~~EK

human-rights

civil-rights

government corruption

corrupt leaders

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Are You a Witch?

The following article was written on March 8, 2004 and is copied from my book “My Grimoir: EelKat’s Views on Witchcraft”

 

Are You a Witch?

This is a test of how well you will be able to adjust to the life style of a Witch. A test to see if you have what it takes to become a Witch. Below is a list of 150 statements that any good Witch should be able to say about themselves. Next to each statement is a space to make a check mark. Carefully read each statement and think about what it says and what it means. If after much thought you decide that you can truly and honestly say this out loud about yourself, than place a check mark next to it and move on. If for some reason you feel that the statement does not apply to you and your life at this time in your life, than skip it and move on. Now take your test. You will find instruction on graded your test at the end of it.

 

 

_____ I pray every day.

_____ I am very religious.

_____ I can remain strong in my beliefs even if it means losing all of my friends.

_____ I believe that we were created by a Supreme Being that we did not “just happen”.

_____ I believe that abortion is murder

_____ I always seek for spiritual/divine inspiration and guidance.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a religious leader (priest, pastor, monk, nun, preacher, etc.).

_____ I do not tell people that their religion is “wrong”,”evil”, or “of Satan” or that “they will go to hell” if they don’t give up their religion to join mine.

_____ I do not tell other people that my religion is “the one true religion” or that “my way is the only way”.

_____ I am respectful of other’s religious beliefs.

_____ I own a Rosary or string of Prayer Beads.

_____ I am a holy person.

_____ I have a positive outlook on life.

_____ I have very high moral and ethical standards.

_____ I can get along with people of all races.

_____ I believe in life after death

_____ I attended the funeral of a close friend or relative.

____ There has been a death in my immediate family, close friend, or a pet that affected me greatly.

_____ I have helped dig a grave for someone I loved (this can include pets).

_____ I have touched/held a dead body (this can include pets).

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a funeral home director.

_____Sometimes I think that I might like to become a mortician.

_____ I am able to provide comfort to the grieving.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a guidance counselor.

_____ I have studied some psychiatric medical science and am able to diagnose many “simple” ailments as well as correctly prescribe a method of cure (counsel, therapy, herbs, massage, over the counter medicine, homeopathy, ect.).

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a psychiatrist.

_____ I am caring and compassionate.

_____ I have a deep since of integrity.

_____ I obey the laws of the land–(including such “minor” overlooked things as not speeding and not talking back).

_____ I like to always be on time–I try to never be late.

_____ I can remain focused.

_____ I try to love everyone as though they were my brothers and sisters-even my enemies.

_____ I am very enthusiastic.

_____ I can fast from food for 3 days (72 hours)–NOTE: this does not apply to those with a medical condition, such as diabetes, that does not allow them to fast from food.

_____ I believe that a career that I enjoy and am happy with is more important than a career that brings in a lot of money.

_____ I am good at theoretical analysis and logical problem solving.

_____ I am intuitive.

_____ I can understand complex and difficult subjects.

_____ I love challenges.

_____ I try to turn every thing in life into a learning opportunity.

_____ I have a very good memory.

_____ I visit the library at least twice a month.

_____ I like to do a lot of research and book learning.

_____ I love to read lots of books.

_____ I am self-motivated.

_____ I like/liked school.

_____ Science is/was one of my favorite subjects.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a schoolteacher.

_____ I put a lot of effort into my education.

_____ I believe that studying my textbooks is more important than socializing with friends.

_____ I believe that no matter how well I do, there is always room for improvement.

_____ I strive to expand my intelligence as much as I can.

_____ I can commit myself to many years of self-schooling and difficult training.

_____ I like working with people.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a doctor.

_____ I have studied some medical science, and am able to diagnose many “simple” aliments as well as correctly prescribe a method of cure (herbs, massage, over the counter medicine, homeopathy, ect.).

_____ I like/liked Biology class.

_____ I enjoy volunteer work.

_____ I want to heal the sick.

_____ I want to ease the needs of others.

_____ I want to feed the hungry.

_____ I want to shelter the homeless.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to start a homeless/food/animal shelter.

_____ I like working with animals.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a veterinarian.

_____ I like helping sick animals, get well.

_____ I can complete a complex 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle in an hour or two. (Not a requirement of Witchcraft, but it shows that you are a patiant, fast working, and a dedicated problem solver, with a good eye for finding the solution to tough problems)

_____ I am good at solving problems (in math, riddles, or your daily life).

_____ I use ingenuity and the ability to improvise to solve difficult problems.

_____ I give money/food/clothing/blankets to the homeless people that I see on the streets in my local area.

_____ I give money/toys/food to charity organizations.

_____ I am persistent-I never give in or give up.

_____ I enjoy helping people.

_____ I feel that I am responsible for making my community a better place.

_____ I am deeply emotional.

_____ I am very patient.

_____ I am honest–I would never tell even the slightest hint of a tiny white lie.

_____ I am willing to change my habits for the better.

_____ I am courteous and kind.

_____ I feel that I have a lot to offer to the world.

_____ I like gazing at the stars.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become an astronomer.

_____ I can identify some of the stars, constalations, and planets in the night sky.

_____ I can correctly identify most crystals and gemstones.

_____ I like to walk to places, rather than use a car.

_____ I love all outdoor activities-from sunning on the beach to hiking on snowcapped mountains and everything in between.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become an environmentalist.

_____ I never pass a dead or injured animal (wild or domestic) in the road, without stopping to help them, bless them, get them to a vet, bury them, and/or find their owner.

_____ I like working with plants.

_____ I have a garden-or at least a few houseplants.

_____Sometimes I think that I might like to become a herb/flower/vegetable grower/farmer.

_____ I know basic outdoor survival skills.

_____ I could live without electricity if I had to.

_____ I can correctly identify both edible and poisonous plants.

_____ I can correctly identify most wild plants, know how to harvest them, and know many of their medicinal uses.

_____ I know which vitamins, who should take and when they should take them.

_____ I know how to use and prescribe homeopathy pills.

_____ Sometimes think that I might like to become a pharmacist.

_____ I am dedicated.

_____ I can get up and get going without being told to–I don‘t even own an alarm clock.

_____ I strive not to be vain or prideful.

_____ I do not seek to “keep up with the Jones”.

_____ I do not buy things just because someone else has one.

_____I do not seek after wealth and great riches.

_____ I do not require instant gratification.

_____ I am confident that I can do or be anything that I choose.

_____I am determined, even in the face of opposition.

_____ I can give up modern life and city habits–I can give up material things such as a car, a TV, or electricity because I do not need them.

_____ I enjoy creative and intellectual challenges.

_____ I can look forward and “see” possibilities that don’t exist at this time.

_____ When I make a commitment, I always see it through.

_____ I have set goals and succeeded.

_____ I am able to change my goals when new information becomes available.

_____ I do not see time as an infinite or renewable resource–every second that goes by is gone forever and can never be replaced–therefore I use my time wisely.

_____ I can work well alone, without the help of others.

_____ I am able to make personal sacrifices.

_____ I can handle criticism.

_____ I can handle failure.

_____ I do not have a bad temper-I can control my anger.

_____ I love to laugh.

_____ I eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains.

_____ I am a vegetarian.

_____ I live a healthy lifestyle.

_____ I can handle stress.

_____ I like Yoga.

_____ I love classical music and/or opera-I don’t need rock music anymore.

_____ I like to meditate.

_____ I am able to relax–stress is not a problem in my life.

_____ I can do without a bed, sleeping on the floor is fine.

_____ I can do without table and chairs; I can eat while sitting on the floor.

_____

_____ I can live without a driver’s license or a car.

_____ I would rather make my own things, instead of using store bought ones.

_____ I make most items myself, and try to do without things I don’t really need.

_____ I own and know how to use a sewing machine (or I sew by hand).

_____ I sew my own home furnishings.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a seamstress/tailor.

_____ I like to sew my own clothes.

_____ I like to wear capes, cloaks, and robes.

_____ I like to wear ankle length dresses and long skirts. (Long, loose, unresticting, unadorned clothing is preferred by most Witches–both men and women–as it frees the body and mind of pressure, stress, vanity, and pride and allows free, fluid movement unhampered by pants and tight sleeves)

_____ I can go out in public without any makeup on at all. (Many Witches feel that wearing makeup is a thing of vanity and pride and protest against pride and vanity by throwing away their cosmetics-this is not a requirement of Witchcraft, but many Witches-both male and female-feel so liberated and free once they throw away their face paints and live just as natural as the Creator intended them to be)

_____ I can go out in public without any jewelry on at all. (Many Witches feel that jewelry is a thing of vanity and pride and protest against pride and vanity by throwing away their jewelry-this is not a requirement of Witchcraft, but many Witches-both male and female-feel so liberated and free once they live unadorned and just as natural as the Creator intended them to be) _____. I can go out in public without shaving for two months or more.

(Many Witches feel that shaving legs, face, underarms, and other places is a thing of vanity and pride and protest against pride and vanity by throwing away their razors-this is not a requirement of Witchcraft, but many Witches-both male and female-feel so liberated and free once they throw away their razors and live just as natural as the Creator intended them to be)

_____ I can go a whole year without dyeing my hair, using a dryer or curler, or getting a hair cut. (Witches live naturally–both men and women–this includes their hair-which they let grow long-when Witches do dye their hair they use herbs such as hibiscus and henna–if you see a “Witch” with their hair dyed black, chances are they are not Witches.)

_____If I am not married, I am a virgin.

_____If I am married, I have never cheated on my spouse.

_____If I am widowed/divorced, I do not seek another, and live in celibacy.

_____ I can live my entire life without sex.

_____ I do not smoke.

_____ I do not drink alcoholic drinks.

_____ I do not use drugs (including tobacco).

_____ I own a sword.

 

Now that you have completed your test, go back and count how many statement you have checked off. Take the total you have and find your score on the chart below. After each score is a corresponding grade. Take the grade letter that corresponds with you’re total and find out how qualified you are to become a Witch.

 

After reading your answer think about how important it is to you to become a Witch, ask yourself why you want to be a Witch, and than go back and read all of the statements that you checked off. How does each of these statements apply to you in your life? Why did you check them off?

 

Now go back to the test again, this time read only those statements that you did not check off. Why didn’t you mark them? Can you still be a good Witch without having those things in your life? How can you change your habits to include more of these things in your life? Do you really want to change your whole life around like that? Are you sure you are that dedicated to becoming a Witch? Or are you just going through a phase that will pass by in a year or two or even sooner? Do you truly want to make such dramatic changes in your life? Are you willing to put your hands to the plow and never look back? Will you be able to stand strong when friends and family come down around you and turn their backs on you because they think you’ve lost your mind? These are things that you really want to consider very seriously before you decide wither or not you really want to be a Witch.

 

 

145-150 = A+

 

125-144= A

 

99-124 = B

 

75-98 = C

 

50-74 = D

 

1-49 = F

 

 

 

A+.) Wow! Maybe you should write a book about Witchcraft. You harm no one, you love nature, and death doesn’t frighten you. You have no trouble living in the woods with absolutely nothing, just living off the land. You most certainly have a Witch hiding somewhere inside of you-find him/her and set ‘em free. You are already a Witch at heart wither you realize it or not, you may be a little rusty and need a little practice on some things, but you really aren’t going to need much help-if you need any at all. You have soared far above the average, and should really consider seeking to start a professional practice of your own. With your talent you can certainly take your pick of just about any career in Witchcraft. If you aren’t one already you might want to look into becoming a Hougan, Mambo, High Preist/ess, Monk, Nun, or a Witch Doctor. You should most certainly be able to do one of these high-ranking jobs. You are by far ready for them.

 

A.) You are already a Witch at heart wither you realize it or not, you may be a little rusty and need a little practice on some things, but you really aren’t going to need much help. You have soared above the average, and should really consider seeking to start a professional practice. You may even make an excellent candidate for becoming a Houngan, Mambo, High Priest, Monk, Nun, or Priestess and you may also want to consider such other high-ranking jobs as a Witch Doctor, Priest, Priestess, Shaman, or Magician Man/Woman. You can choose from almost any career in Witchcraft–however if you are weak hearted around the dead, you will want to avoid the following jobs: Hogan, Mambo, High Priest, High Priestess, Al Keem, Borka, or Witch Doctor.

 

B.) You are well on your way to becoming an excellent Witch, and could certainly start practicing now; there’s a few things that you need to brush up on, but basically you have an above average chance at making Witchcraft your lifelong career if you work hard at it. With a a bit of extra effort you may make a good candidate for becoming a Priest or Priestess over time, but this type of Witchcraft is probably not really to your likeing, and may want to consider such jobs as a Shaman, or Magician Man/Woman instead. Becoming a Witch Doctor, Hogan, Mambo, Monk, Nun, High Prehistory High Priestess will probably not be in your reach though, and you should focus your career towards the less demanding jobs in Witchcraft–if you are weak hearted around the dead, you will want to avoid the following jobs: Hougan, Mambo, High Priest, High Priestess, Al Keem, Borka, or Witch Doctor

 

C.) While you do have the potential to become a Witch, but you still have a very long ways to go before you will even be able to think about qualifying to become a Priest or Priestess, and it is unlikely that you will ever become a High Priest, High Priestess, Monk, Nun, Hougan, Mambo, or Witch Doctor. You should stick with the more “common” jobs of Witchcraft-herbalism, astrology, fortune telling, community service, etc.–if you are weak hearted or squeamish around the sick, the dieing, or dead bodies, you will want to avoid the following jobs: Hougan, Mambo, High Priest, High Priestess, Al-Keem, Borka, Witch Doctor, Priest, Priestess, Shaman, Monk, Nun, or Medicine Man/Woman.

 

D.) While it is possible for you to become a Witch at some distant time in your life (though much training, hard work, and personal effort will be required on your part) you really don’t have what it takes to practice Witchcraft at this time in your life. While you could strive for a career in Witchcraft if you really worked at it really hard, I don’t think that you will ever truly be happy being a Witch Are you sure you know what a Witch is–maybe what you really want to be is a Wicca? You may just be looking for costumes, makeup, chat clubs, and religious rituals–if so than you should forget about Witchcraft and get a book on Wicca instead. You probably will find Witchcraft rather dull and boring, and you may be much happier with a different career; you really should rethink your options. You really need to sit down and think long and hard about why you want to become a Witch, what it is that attracted you to Witchcraft–if you looked to become a Witch based on movies, T.V., fairy tales, and fantasy role playing games, than you had better just go back to watching movies and playing games, or better yet you should consider joining the theater, because a lifelong career in Witchcraft will do nothing but disappoint you. Don’t despair-very few people who take this test, scored any higher than you did, most don’t even make it this far–just like you they didn’t really want to become a Witch either, and were just fascinated, with Wicca and fairy tales.

 

F.) Although anything is possible, if you really put your mind to it, and if you really, really worked really hard; it is very unlikely that you will ever become good Witch material at any point in your life. Don’t feel bad though, this doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you, it simply means that Witchcraft is not your career path in life. There are thousands of other careers out there that would be just perfect for you, but Witchcraft is not one of them. You need to really sit down and think long and hard about why you want to become a Witch, what it is that attracted you to Witchcraft in the first place–if you looked to become a Witch based on movies, T.V., fairy tales, and fantasy role playing games, than you had better just go back to watching movies and playing games, because a lifelong career in Witchcraft will do nothing but sore fully disappoint you. If you want to wear costumes and makeup, maybe you should consider joining a local drama club–you may have a very good future in theater. Witchcraft requires you to be totally dedicated to it 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the rest of your life, and frankly, your heart isn’t in it. You are in good company-there are very few people who stick to Witchcraft for very long–the hours are to long, the work to grueling, and the lifestyle too demanding for the average person. Good luck looking for a job, elsewhere.

 

 

 

Explaining some statements in this test.

 

 

There are some statements here that most people new to Witchcraft, look at with a sense of awe and confusion. Such as “I am a holy person” or “I always seek for spiritual inspiration and guidance” or “I have very high moral and ethical standards”. When most “new” Witches think about Witchcraft they are thinking about Wicca and not Witchcraft, so they are quite taking back, when the subject of high moral standards, daily prayer, and living a very holy life is used to describe Witches. Most “new” Witches even get angry and say such things as: ” I don’t want to be morally clean, I just want to be a Witch, I don’t want to live like some saintly monk; I want to wear cool clothes and cast spells on my enemies. Why should I try to live a holy life? I ain’t no saint and you can’t make me be. I’m going to be a Witch and that’s final.” So you want to be a Witch, but you don’t want to accept the lifestyle of a Witch. Why? You just want to have fun, right? Let’s think about this. Why does it bother you that to be a Witch you must live like a saint? Are you suffering from a guilty conscience because you know that many of the things you do are morally wrong? Is that why it bothers you–that to become a Witch, you must be a morally clean, spiritual person? Are you sure that you really want to be a Witch? It sounds to me more like you want to be a Wicca or a Wiccan and not a Witch. Wiccas are known for their “freedoms”: freedom to drink, freedom to smoke, freedom of sex, freedom from marriage, freedom to use drugs, freedom to rebel, freedom to denounce God, freedom to denounce government, freedom to murder unborn babies, freedom of same sex relations–and all sorts of other immoral, unspiritual, unholy so called “freedoms” that the Wicca religion allows it’s members to commit without conscience. Unfortunately, because Wiccas and Wiccans like to falsely call themselves Witches, these same immoral acts are often thought of as being done by practitioners of Witchcraft as well. Did you know that personal sacrifice is one of the things that make a Witch a Witch–most all Witches abstain from things that the average person would consider a necessity of life. Common things that Witches abstain from include: meat, sex, luxury items such as beds or cars, electricity, television, telephones, and sometimes even talking? Did you know that most Witches live in small houses, with little or no furniture, that most sleep and eat on the floor because they gave up such luxuries as owning a bed, table, or chairs? Many Witches abstain from as much food as they can, fasting for days at a time, sometimes eating only one or two simple meals a week. Did you know that unmarried Witches (male and female) remain virgins their entire lives? That Witches view the act of sex as a distraction that interferes with their work–that many even become eunuchs, so that they will not have to be bothered by sex at all, ever? Did you know that Witches view sex as a means of creation and not a means of pleasure, and that sex is only done when a child is desired? Did you also know that Witches do not believe in public schools? When Witches have children, they raise them at home, away from the luxury laden vain influences of the schools of the world.

Before you decide to call yourself a Witch you really, need to find out if that’s really want you want to do with your life. Are you sure that you want to be a Witch? I have found that most people, especially teenagers, who say that they want to be a Witch, really want to be a Wicca. Wiccas do not believe in all of the personal monk-like sacrifices that Witches do. Wiccas often live very luxuriant lives of excess, vanity, pride, and sexual freedom, but Witches do not.

Can you give up your luxuries as other Witches have? Many people think, that this all sounds good on paper, but laugh and say that no body gives up stuff like that, so why should they; they then continue and try to say that I myself, although I preach it, wouldn’t even do this. Well, I couldn’t in good faith preach something that I don’t practice myself, now could I? What luxuries have I given up, you ask. Well now, let’s see: I grew up on a poultry farm and fried chicken was my favorite food, but eating chicken became the first luxury to go and I haven’t eaten any meat in twenty-two years, I love antique cars, can name most any model, and would like to collect and restore them, but I have no driver’s license and I have no car. I was once a “Goth-queen”, dripping in black eye shadow and lipstick, with red hair and blue nails, but I haven’t worn makeup in twelve years, haven’t shaved in three years, and have slept on the floor these past eleven years. I used to collect shoes-loved platforms, but now I have one pair of sandals that I’ve worn for four years now all year round, even during the worst of Maine’s three to six foot blizzards. I lived in spandex pants, bellbottoms, and micro mini skirts, but I stopped wearing pants twelve years ago, and haven’t worn a dress that was shorter than my ankles ever since. I was once addicted to TV-couldn’t get away from it, today I own a TV/VCR/DVD player, but the TV was used for less than ten hours in 2003, and similar amounts other years and the VCR and DVD, while used five or six hours each week, are now only used to watch “family” shows, such as “Little House on the Prairie”,”1776″,”King of Kings”, and other such shows. I was once a huge heavy metal music fan with hundreds of albums-but I gave up all but two bands in 1991,and stopped listening to the radio that same year, and I gave up rock music entirely two years ago, listening now to Liberace, Rossini, Handel, Mozart, Chopin, and others-I own a CD player and over 500 classics on 62 CD’s. I eat sitting on a pillow on the floor-and my diet is very strict: pasta and rice and fresh fruits and vegetables, many of which I grew myself-my diet also includes eggs from my hens, and some dairy products such heavy cream (but no mass produced milk), milk and ice cream from local farms, and soybean based meat substitutes from the “Seventh Day Adventist Church”, snacks include fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts, pretzels, chips from a local potato farm, “natural” candies made without preservatives, and homemade candy from a local confectioner. I drink water, green tea, herb tea, and 100% fruit juice.

For my gardening, I hand plow my field with a spade shovel and my hens and roosters do their part digging and scratching as fast as they can, I fertilize the ground with poultry manure and raked leaves, and when insects or weeds become a problem, I turn my roosters and hens lose in the garden, and pray they don’t eat the harvest, too.

I am often asked what I do for “entertainment” well, I leave a mile from Old Orchard’s seven-mile long white sands beach. For entertainment I walk to the beach, walk the length of the beach, turn around walk back to the beginning of the beach and than walk back home with four tote bags filled with shells, beach glass, beach pebbles, and seaweed, and a camera loaded with pictures of birds. My land boarders a 26-acre section of the Ross Forest, which is loaded with wildlife, plants, and has a small brook running the length of it. Here is where I take my dog Buddy and my rooster Chup-Chup for walks. The thing that entertains me the most is sitting beside the brook on a rock in my flower garden surrounded by my tiny bantam roosters, who happily cultivate the roots of my roses. Here I can read, write, and meditate. To me this is heaven, sheer bliss, and pure joy-there is nothing that makes me happier, than breathing the fresh air and listening to the babbling brook and the songs of a hundred roosters all crowing their shrieks of joy for hours on end-I have no need for anything more.

Don’t go thinking that I live on some big isolated country homestead in the middle of nowhere. Our land is only 3/4 of an acre and has four condominiums and a nursing home just across the street, right in the middle of town. I am quite fortunate to live next door to an empty 26-acre wooded lot (the last remaining section of Ross Forest), which, has been preserved, for use by a local campground. While more land would certainly be better in the since that I could have a larger garden and hundreds more roosters, it would be almost impossible to find another place walking distance from such a beautiful beach, a wonderful forest, and have a brook too. The land may be small, but it is my peace of heaven, a perfect paradise for me and my roosters.

While my way of life is the ideal paradise for me, my town thinks otherwise. My roosters live on my land, were the zoning says they can’t, however the zoning laws were made in the 1900′s,and this land has been in my family since the 1600′s. My Native American and Scottish ancestors raised chickens on this land since the very first day they settled it all those years ago, and since that day, never has a day gone by that chickens have not lived here. In the 1800′s huge barns were built for thousands of chickens-a barn for egg hens and a barn for meat roosters; in the 1960′s the barns came down and the meat production stopped; in the 1980′s I took over the chickens, egg sale ended and the pit fighter and rare breed rescue began; but in all of those hundreds of years, not once did chickens not live here. That is what they call the “grandfather law”, as long as the original family remains on the land and raises the original kinds of animals there, the government cannot tell them not to raise the livestock. The neighbors can complain of the “horrendous noise, the vile shrieks and eerie screams” of the crowing roosters sun rise to sunset to sun rise 24 hours a day, they can complain of the “toxic stench” of the manure, but no matter how hard or how long they complain the fact is the roosters were here first, and they have been here for 400 years, and as long as my family continues to lives here and raises poultry there isn’t a thing that they can do. The town hopes and prays that we will sell out and leave to “someplace in the country”. What?! And leave this sacred beach-the sacred holy ground of my people-were thousands gather each year to be healed in its sacred waters? Never! Small though it may be, crowed though the town becomes, I love my home and the land that the Great Spirit blessed us with.

Well now, enough ramblings from me. What about you? How much are you willing to give up to walk the path of a Witch? Your bed? Your TV? Eating meat? Wearing pants and short skirts? Can you stop shaving and wearing makeup? Are there things that you can give up in your life that I haven’t mentioned? How much are you willing to leave behind on your road to becoming a Witch? Now, as you can see from my own life, giving things up is a hard sacrifice that may take several years to complete. I found that by giving up the hardest thing first, that other sacrifices come easier. For me, I love chicken; it was my favorite meal, yet I love chickens too. My best friends have always been my chickens-I had thought about giving up meat, but it didn’t stick. Than one day a man came to the house saying his wife wanted to make chicken stew and asked to buy a chicken. My dad sent him out to take his pick, and I being a poultry farmer thought nothing of it–until that night when my little pet rooster wasn’t there to meet me at the door and by that time it was to late to do anything about it. That’s when it hit me, and it hit me hard–that man had murdered and eaten my best friend. It’s like if you had a little pet cat and one day someone came along and killed it for its fur. He was my pet. More than that, he was my friend, and he was gone. I thought about it long and hard. That rooster was my best friend-and someone bought him and killed him for food. He wasn’t even kept with the other roosters; he wasn’t like the other roosters–he was my pet. And than it hit me: Why was that rooster any different from the others? Why was it wrong to kill this rooster, but okay to kill the others? He was a rooster; just like the rest of them-they were all roosters. I sat there and took a good long look at those roosters-they looked just like my pet rooster, they acted like him, and for good reason too–they were just like him. The man came back a few days later, just as he often did, and needless to say he left empty handed, and never came back again–and neither did anyone else who came looking to by meat birds. A few days later when some frozen “store bought” chicken was being served–my favorite food–something happened to me. I looked at that chicken on my plate and I couldn’t eat it. All I could think about was-this wasn’t one of my chickens from my farm, it came from some other farm, but it was still a chicken. I thought about my rooster and how this could have been his cousin or his mother or father–and I was so sick at the thought that I refused to eat. I couldn’t, I felt like I was a murderer, I felt like I was betraying that rooster who had been my friend. I haven’t touched chicken since–I can’t even see one at the store without getting sick. But at that point it was just chicken and turkey. I didn’t eat chicken and I didn’t eat turkey–I won’t eat anything that might have been related to one of my friends. So for Thanksgiving that year we had roast beef–you know the big one’s, the kind that’s got a big bone down the middle. We were all getting ready to eat and I just sat there staring at that bone. A piece of a skeleton. I don’t know where I thought meat came from but I never connected it with a living creature before that day. There it was-a bone. That could only mean one thing–that that was a dead body–only dead bodies have bones. I felt like a grave robber. There was a piece of a dead body sitting on the table!! I felt so sick I couldn’t eat. At that point I didn’t realize that beef came from cow and that that was a cow’s leg sitting on the table, all I could think was “There a dead body on the table and we’re getting ready to eat it”. I stopped eating meat “cold turkey” and never looked back. Now I won’t by any product without first reading the label and being sure that no meat contaminated it in any way. As a result of this I came to the shocking discovery that it is nearly impossible to find any prepackaged food that does not contain meat! Seemingly “vegetarian” things often have such things as Tallow, Fat, Lard, Broth, Dehydrated Chicken Powder, and By Products listed in them (including such things as crème filled chocolate sandwich cookies, jello, crackers, chocolates, candy, some” plain cheese” pizzas, and even some ice cream!!). I am very careful not to touch anything or be other contaminated by any food that contains any part of any body that was once alive being–this means that shopping take’s several hours while I read entire labels to ensure that no death has contaminated it. I believe it to be a grave sin to steal someone’s life away, just to satisfy the vain lust of eating his or her flesh.

And so that is how I came about my first sacrifice of a luxury. Not having a driver’ license or a car is perhaps the hardest one for me–the one that temps me the most–of course I never learned to drive either, so although it’s a sorrowful temptation, I couldn’t drive anyone else’s car either, because I haven’t the slightest idea how one should go about it. The one that took the longest for me to give up was heavy metal and punk music–I struggled with that one for over ten years before I succeeded–I was never without music–slept with it on at night–listened to it on headphones all day long (I never took them off!). I had rock music playing 24 hours a day. It got to the point were I couldn’t do anything, everything evolved around how long my tapes were. After a while I started to get depressed all the time, and I couldn’t understand why. I realized one day, that I had a problem, a really big problem–I was addicted to music–not just a little addiction–a big addiction–and it was controlling my entire life. One day I was feeling really blue when I noticed the words to the song I was playing–How depressing I thought. I loved the music–the screeching guitars and booming drum, but I never really listened to the words. I started listening and than it hit me–all of these songs were either very depressing and sad or mean and violent–no one was ever happy and joyful. So I made major changes–I got rid of them, most of them: Guns and Roses, Motley Crew, Warrant, etc (If it was heavy metal from the eighties, I probably had it). I left in my collection only a few namely: David Bowie, Bon Jovi, Poison, White Lion, Carman, and Alice Cooper–and today David Bowie, Carman, and Bon Jovi alone remain in my collection, because they were the only three that ever sounded happy. However, getting rid of the collection and hiding my radio, didn’t end the addiction-I was going crazy-I needed music, I felt like I was gonna die if I didn’t have music. Than one day I was watching some old Bugs Bunny cartoons (I love the Looney Toons- -especially- -that’s right, you guessed it: Foghorn Leghorn the smart mouthed rooster). I’m sitting there watching as they play reruns of Bug Bunny’s spins of opera–you know Bugs as Leopold with the guy’s singing Rossini’s “Figero’s C—-”, Bugs and Elmer fighting in the barber’s shop will “The Barber of Seville” plays in the background, and who can forget Elmer Fudd the Viking singing “Kill the Rabbit” in tune to Wagner’s “Ring of N—-Ride of the Valkers”. I was mesmerized–I remembered loving these three Bugs Bunny episodes as a kid. I remembered too, how much I used to love watching “Great Performances” on PBS back in the 1970′s,and how I loved ballet and theater. And especially the story of Peer Gyunt and the Mountain King-the story that had inspired my favorite cartoon the Smurfs, and was played throughout the background of every episode, how whenever I heard “The Mountain King” I used to go twilling and dancing free as a bird, not caring who saw me. Suddenly I realized why I had liked Heavy Metal so much-it was the loud, boisterous, booming noise–I didn’t like heavy metal, I liked classical music, heavy metal was merely a substitute for what I really truly loved–screeching violins, banging cymbals, blatting horns, happy tinkling pianos, and lots of big booming drums. Well, that was two years ago–and during that time David Bowie and Bon Jovi have had three new albums come out and I wasn’t even the least bit tempted to buy a one of them (and I used to wait in line to be the first one in the store on the first day of the release of any Bowie album-I own 57 Bowie albums alone). So, while I’m still badly addicted to music and it still plays all day and all night, I’m no longer depressed and spend my time happy and joyful now. I keep my David Bowie and Bon Jovi and Carman albums and maybe I’ll listen to them again someday, but just knowing that I have them and I’m no longer tempted to play them all day long is a reward in itself, as I realize now that I was a slave to music.

So what are you addicted to? Does it stop you from doing other things you’d like to do? Can you give it up? One of the things that Witches believe is, simplicity and freedom–freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from slavery. Now by freedom of slavery I don’t mean a bondman’s slavery with chains and whips and taskmasters-I mean slavery to vanity, slavery to addiction, slavery to wealth, slavery to power–if you are not free from these slaveries than you are no better than bondman-for you are chained to your whip wielding taskmasters just as much as he-chained to them-chained to addictions and vanities. To be a Witch you must one by one break free from the chains of luxuries and now–now granted you don’t have to give everything up all at once–some Witches do, but most give up one thing this year and another the next and keep on going. The goal is to reach perfection, to strive to become more like our Creator. A difficult task yes, but one well worth the effort. Reaching spiritual perfection is the reason behind everything that a Witch does-the strange clothing, the chants, the prayers, the spells, everything–everything is done with one goal in mind–to become like the Creator–to live in the spirit world with our Creator–to make this world as much like our spirit home was before we came here. As a Witch that is your purpose that is your goal and you must never forget it–no matter how different the practices, rituals, and spell of each Witch may be–all Witches regardless of religion–strive for the spiritual perfection that will make us at one with our Creator.

And now, you decide: Are you ready to become a Witch? Do you have what it takes? Are you willing to make great sacrifices for your faith? Will you stand firm and strong year after year? Are you a Witch?

 

 

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Pingoat

I have just signed EK’s Star Log up, for membership with Pingoat.

Your Blog’s Value is $13.36!

Inbound links: 8
Technorati rank: 758241

Let’s see how that changes over time, shall we? 

 

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Goddess Dolls From The Doll Palace

Here are some more dolls; these were not made by me, they are from the archives at The Doll Palace, from their Greek Goddess Collection. These are the ones I like best from their files.

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Paid to Blog???

I have a question… I keep hearing about how people are getting paid to write in their blogs… or how people are makeing money just writing blogs…well, I’d like to do that too, if it’s true that you can do that, I mean I’m writing something every day as it is, I might as well get paid to do it right?so, my question is, has anyone done this? are there any good places you could recommend that actually work… meaning they aren’t just scams, that have you write something and than never pay you… is this whole geting paid to blog a real thing that you really can get money to do, or is it just another scam? Anyone know?  

I’m new to the blogging world though… I’ve been online since 1997, and only just FINALLY started blogging! LOL! I’ve got 4 on Blogger, 3 on MySpace, one that I lost the link to and can’t remember the name of the host, and one one WordPress… so that’s 9 right now, but no dought there well be more…I try to keep each on on it’s own topicAs soon as I started though, everyone starts asking me “How much are you getting paid to blog?” and I’m like wth? They don’t blog, but they said they heard people get paid lots to do it, and well, that was news to me, so I figured, well, if I can get paid to do it, than why am I doing it for free right? so, now I’m researching the whole idea of getting paid to blogg… but as far as I can tell so far, it’s just alot of hype… I’ve found a ton of places that “pay to blog”, but than when you read the fine print, they only pay likr .002c per thousand people who read your post!!!!!! wow! that’s less than half a cent for every thousand uniquie page hits! highway robbery that’s what it is!than I found these otherplaces, that you have to pay like $25 a month, to join, and than they pay you to write articles for THIER blog, and than they only pay you if that post gets enough hits… YIKES! what a scam!

 I searched on Google and found a couple of sites that say they pay $4-$25 per post, if you sing your blog up with them, and write reviews for other web sites and products… but they also say that your blog has to be well established and get regular visitors before they well aprove it… I just signed up (cause they said it was free, so I figure what the heck), but my blog has only been around a short while, and I think it’s only had like a hundred visitors since it started,, so I don’t know if they well approve it or not… I’ll just wait and see what happens next.…but, my search continues, I’ve found a few folks who are getting paid to blog, not getting rich by any means, but they are getting an income comming in here and there, and that gives me hope, so, I am studying them and their blogs to find out how they are doing it and how I can do the same thing they are doing, only do it better . If I find out anything that really truly works I’ll post it here and let you guys all know so’s you can do it too.~~EK

What is your writing’s biggest flaw?

This is sort of a self-searching exercise for all you fellow writers out there. The topic of which is the question: What is your writings biggest flaw?

The question is inspired by the fact, that all to often, we as writers look at our work as absolutely perfect. You know you do. Admit it. You do it, I do it, we all do it. It a flaw that all writers have and none can escape. We think that everything we write is perfect. We think that everyone well love it. Our kind, often goes so far as to think that it is so perfect that we don’t need to edit it past the first draft. We write the first draft and say: “Ah huh! This is perfect!”

We are a strange breed, driven to write, yet compleded to igrore the act of editing what we write. We well sit at the computer for hours, days, weeks, even month, typing out our heart and soul. Than without editing it we send it off, and quickly get a rejection slip. We become degected, paranoid, hurt, angery. What went wrong here? Well, we as writers, can get so blinded by how great we think our story is, that we forget to look for any flaws in it. I think this is prob’ly the most common mistake made by ever single writer to ever exist.

So, my exercise today is, to take something you have written, recently or in the far past, a one page poem or a three hundred page novel, fiction or non-fiction. It doesn’t matter what it is or when you wrote it, just take it and look at it. Really look at it. Look at it as though you were the toughest editor the world has ever known. Look for flaws in it. Take a red pen and cross out everything that shouldn’t be there: everything, from extra adjectives and adverbs, to the compound sentence that should have been two separate sentences, the prepositions that aren’t really needed… anything. Kill the passive voice. Correct spelling errors. Get rid of characters that do not add to the story. Cross out the don’ts and replace them with do nots instead. Cut scenes that are not one hundred percent nessacery. When you are done, your script will be bleeding red ink, but don’t do not worry about that. Take a careful look at the things you have crossed out. Why did you cross them out? How could you have written them better? Did you notice that you are crossing out the same mistake again and again? Chances are, you well find two or three mistakes that have been repeated throughout your writing. Take note of these. They are the areas on which you well need to work the hardest to correct.

I could continue, by telling you how to correct each flaw, but I well not, because that is not the point pf this article. The point of this article is to find the flaws, not correct them. You can correct them later, but you can’t correct them if yo have not looked for them. You want to improve your writing skills, but you can not improve something that is perfect can you? So the first thing you must do, is to realize that your writing is not perfect, no ones is. All writing has its good points. All writing has its bad points. Every writer has talent. Every writer has flaws. Your goal here is to look for the bad, and make it good. Once you can see the flaws, than you can correct them. In the end, your writing well be all the better for it. Besides, the better your writing is, the better your pay well be too.

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