PLEASE . . . . somebody, anybody. . . . PLEASE HELP ME!

They just now, just called again. Again demanding that I come into the the bishop’s office at the church tonight, again demanding that I meet with the Stake President. And again it has triggered a mass panic attack. It’s happening again. JUST LIKE BEFORE. I can’t stop shaking. My chest hurts and my lungs hurt. My hands are shaking so bad I can barely type this. It’s like before. Only, I’m shaking a lot worse, it’s so bad my glasses keep falling off. I can’t stop shaking. I can’t breath.

It’s like before, like a panic attack, only really, really, really bad. Why won’t they leave me alone. I need them to leave me alone. Please make them leave me alone. I don’t know if I can live through many more of these stroke like attacks. I have one every time they call. Please make them stop calling me. Tell them to leave me a lone. Please help me. I can’t stop shaking. My whole body is skaking all over I don’t know what to do.

Please call the church at 607-9517 or 207-666-3481 and tell them to leave me alone (I find the 666 in their # ironic) Ask for Robert Taylor. He is the counselor in charge of handling phone calls to the Stake Presadent of the Augusta Maine Stake.

You can read more about this 31 year on going harassment at the following links:

Excommunication for publishing my 2008 NaNoWriMo Book – Update

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HELP! Any doctors out there? Medical advice?

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Health UPDATE – Stroke caused by panic attack triggered by LDS Church excommunication threats :(

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Still Planning on Doing NaNoWriMo this year in spite of recent health issues

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Eleven Days Til NaNoWriMo and Stroke Update

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For Those interested- here is the Final (edited and spell checked) Draft of For Fear of Little Men, my 2008 NaNoWriMo book

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My Aliens vs Your Demons – Yep – If I’m Crazy, What Are You???????

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The Poison Pen Letters Return – AGAIN

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Excommunication – 2008 NaNoWriMo book banned – Update – My Inbox if overloading – a mass reply going here

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REPOST: For Fear of Little Men: First Draft of my autobiography book to be published in 2010+/-

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Note – I have not been to the LDS/Mormon church in 13 years, and yet, they continue to harass me on an almost daily basis.

In 2004 I started writing “Faith Not Religion”, my infamous 900 page rant on why I left the Mormon church. It was during the two years where I just sat there doing nothing but writing that book that I finally realized for the first time in my life that I WASN’T evil, like so many bishop kept telling me! I wasn’t demon possessed, like so many bishop kept telling me . What I was, was a victim of 27 years of mental and emotional abuse at the hands of a bunch of crazy tyrants. While writing “Faith Not Religion” I learned quite a bit about myself. Among them I learned:

I’m tired of being told I’m a witch.
I’m tired of being told I’m evil.
I’m tired of being told I do the things I do because I’m possessed by a demon.
I’m tired of being told I’m going to hell.
I’m tired of being told I’m inferior because I’m a lowly female.
I’m tired of being told not to talk because that’s reserved for men.
I’m just plain tired of BEING TOLD.
Every one talks to me, no one ever talks with me.
I want freedom from BEING TOLD.
I wish, that there was someone who would actually treat me like I was a person. Like I was important. Like I mattered.
I’m tired of being harassed by these people.
I’m tired of it.
Putting up with the abuse all those years was killing me.
Them killing my pets was an evil act.
Them paintballing my car was an evil act.
Them throwing rocks at and blinding my horse, was an evil act.
Them burning my drawings in the woodstove was and evil act.
Them burning my manuscripts in the wood stove was an evil act.
Them saying I was evil was an evil act.
They were the ones who were evil, not me.
Not being allowed to get a job because I was a female, was an evil thing for them to do to me.
Them smashing my Liberace` records was an evil act.
Them stealing parts off of my car and leaving it in ruins was an evil act.
Them setting fire to my home and leaving me homeless was an evil act.

Please put an end to this before they cause my death. I don’t think I can live through another stroke. PLEASE HELP ME!. Please call the church at 607-9517 or 207-666-3481 and tell them to leave me alone (I find the 666 in their # ironic) Ask for Robert Taylor. He is the counselor in charge of handling phone calls to the Stake Presadent of the Augusta Maine Stake. Please. call him. PLEASE! Why won’t they leave me alone. I need them to leave me alone. Please make them leave me alone. I don’t know if I can live through many more of these stroke like attacks. I have one every time they call. Please make them stop calling me. Tell them to leave me a lone. Please help me. I can’t stop shaking. My whole body is shaking all over I don’t know what to do. Please some one help me.

Waiting for Emmett to come.

http://twitter.com/EelKat
http://www.facebook.com/EelKat
http://eknano.blogspot.com

Categories: About me · Biddeford · LDS · Life · Lifestyle · Maine · Maineland · Mormons · Mourning · Old Orchard · Old Orchard Beach · On the Beach · Persecution · Saints · The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints · Town of Old Orchard · Wendy C. Allen · York county · advice · authors helpers · book cencorship · boycotts · harasement · harasment · harassment · help · homeless · homelessness · human rights · laws · legal issues · legal issuses · life blogging · life on the streets · logic · make America the land of the free again · mean people · medical · medical advice · my thoughts on… · news · oob · pain · people · politics · poverty · random thoughts · real life · religion · religious leaders · religon · sleep · stolen items · stress · stroke · tent · terrorists · thieves · threats · world peace · writer · writer’s rights · writer’s voice · writing · writing lessons

Tagged: authors, Biddeford, book cencorship, church corruption, church leaders, evil, Family, For Fear of Little Men, harassment, Life, life blogging, Maine, my thoughts on…, Old Orchard Beach, religion, religious leaders, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Wendy C. Allen, Writing Life, York county

Plagiarism Update: Sent Report To WordPress

Plagiarism Update: Sent Report To WordPress

I have just sent a report on this evil thief’s activities to WordPress. I urge anyone with the sewing related WordPress blog to look at the thief’s blog and see if your posts are being stolen. If they are, please send a report to WordPress as well. If there is a way to identify this plager and send them to jail, let me know, because I will pursue that course of action. As an author I take plagiarism very seriously, and so should you. Well, at least they chose the right name for their blog: Scum Bag Clothing. I can’t think of anything that makes a person more of a scumbag than being a thief.

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to WordPress:

Posts off of more than 30 different WordPress blogs (all sewing topics) are being copied and posted word for word, picture for picture, on someone else’s blog!

I use CopyScape on my posts, and CopyScape notified me that my posts were being copied and distributed on someone else’s blog without my permission, so I went to their blog to check and CopyScape was right. They copied everything, word for word, picture for picture… even the CopyScape plagiarizing warning gif!

Because they are copying posts off of my sewing blog, so I started checking all the other posts on their blog, and they’ve plagiarized every single post on their blog, by stealing posts and pictures off of other people’s blogs! I’ve only checked the posts for Jun so far, but so far I’ve counted over 30 different WordPress blogs from which they are stealing posts and hotlinking images from!

Here is their blog link:

http://www.scumbagclothing.com/category/dressmaking/

I don’t know how to stop them. I’ve been trying to find a way to notify their blog host, but so far have not had any luck. If you know of a way to stop them from stealing the posts off of our blogs, please let me know, cause I don’t like them claiming that they wrote the articles I wrote. They are even displaying my drawings on their blog and claiming they drew them!

Sorry for the rant, but I thought you’d want to know that they’ve been stealing posts and passing them off as theirs.

This is so frustrating. I put so much work into writing my articles and drawing my artwork, and I know other folks do as well. It’d be one thing if they were linking back to our blogs with a review or something, but they are claiming that they wrote all of these posts and drew all of the art and took all of the photos themselves!

Is there a law enforcement agency I can contact about this? I was told that the FBI had an identity theft division that handles online predators that steal other peoples identities. Should I contact the FBI about this? I mean who ever is running this blog is claiming to be me, by saying they wrote those articles, so that’s identity theft as far as I can tell.

What should I do?

Is there anything that you can do about it, since they are stealing posts off of WordPress blogs?

testing tags

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

An Autobiography of a car…

Shot at 2007-04-04

Hello! I am a 1964 Dodge 330 4-door sedan, VIN 4142216364, my name is The Goldeneagle. This site was created by my owner Wendy C. Allen of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, to save my life.

I am the main character of the original Twighlight Manor book, and a major supporting character of more that 30 other books and short stories by Maine author Wendy C. Allen.

I started out in life as a silver undercover Police car in Maine. In 1975 I retired from my job as a police car and was sent to Marcot Motors of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where I was painted gold by some fool with a paint brush. He totally ruined my lovely silver paint job and left me streaked with brush lines. I was only there a few months before I was bought by the Allen family, who sanded me down and painted a lovely shade of metalic orange.

I remained the faithful family chauffer for the next ten years. Together we drove on many roadtrips throughout the NorthEast. In 1978, I took them to New York where we croosed the Brooklen Bridge during it’s major repair construction. That same year we went to Washington D.C. I took the Allen family to Arcadia in Bar Harbor to see The Thunder Hole in 1981. Every year I drove them to New Hampshire where we visited The Old Man on the Mountain and Story Land and The Swift River. Three times I climbed Mt. Washington.

I’ve brought home puppies and baby chickens. I waited in hospital parking lots and veterinary clinics. I remained forever and always a faithful friend. The only friend who was always there, steadfast and unmoveble, silent and unjudgmental. My red plush seats always there like a shoulder to cry on when no one else would lend and ear or a shoulder. I alone remained to one true friend, the only friend to the child who loved me and defend me when no one else would put up with my break downs and failrues.

Over the years I grew old and tired, my engine weak and my transmission failing. My last trip was a desperate trip to the hospital, one dark and stormy night in 1985 when a hurrican flooded the town, sending the Atlantic Ocean over the Peir and up Maine Street. My last trip came when abulances could ride faster than my Mopar engine and Mrs Allen had to be rushed to the hostpital at 3AM. We speed through Old Orchard fatser than ever before, through hurrican floods that went higher than my door panels seeping water into my interior and flooding my floors, filling my transmission and engine with icy salt water, we made it to the hospital with Mrs. Allen, but I did not make it back home on my own and was towed home by a friend’s little VW Rabbit.

In spite of my loyalty, with a dead trasmission and an engine full of salt, I was usless, and parked in the yard, put up for sale for junk.

I was rescued from a trip to the junk yard in 1985 by 9 year old, Wendy C. Allen, after my trans died. Since 1985 I have remained a decoration on the hill in her rose garden, where she sits in my seats or on my hood to write the stories in which I appear. Without me, she can not write these stories for I am the one that inspires them. I have been happy in my life of peace and rest here in Old Orchard Beach these past 30 years. That has now changed.

New town ordinances and zoning laws have been set in Old Orchard Beach. As a result the police, the code enforments officers, and the town manager are now in attempt to see my death and destruction, with threats of stealing me from my rightful owner and sending me to become scrap metal in the junk yard.

This is an outrage! They well not listen to reason.

My profile now comes to you to spread the word and ask for your help in saveing my life. An entire network of websites devoted to my plight are now in the works and links to them well be added here within the next few hours.

Please join the protest and put an end to the Old Orchard Beach reign of terror. Old Orchard Beach is a town not a dynasty, they have no right to take me from my home and kill me!

PLEASE DON’T LET THEM KILL ME!!!!!

To read more, please visit my profile: http://www.myspace.com/savethegoldeneagle

Shot at 2007-04-04

Why I am not in church today

I can’t believe the odasoity of some people! After what Jim Thomas did to us, they have the nerve to ask us to go back to church! Jim Thomas for those who haven’t been reading my blog very long, is the Old Orchartd Beach town manager who forced us out of our home and off our land. Land that had been in our family over 300 years! Land that was settled by the original found of the Town and my several greats grandfather Thomas Rogers! Jim Thomas and Ken Shoop those greedy, high poluting, money grubing land monger bastards took everything away from us and forced us to live homeless on the streets until hud finally got us into an apartment!

We had to live on the streets in a tent for 8 months! And it wasn’t even a tent, it was a trap and so cinder block. And it was during Maines sub-zero winter of 2006 when the temp went down to -15 below zero. My fingers froze and are now stiff as a result, and I can draw any more, and it’s hell for me to pick up a pen a write now. Me and artist and writer, not only did he steel our home, he lost me my career!

People at church know about this, and yet they have the odassity to actually ask me to come back to church! Come back to church! Why, so I can sit there next to Jim Thomas? So I can meet up with him the hall? Or his croony secritary and her husband, whov’e been hounding the hell out on us? I’d have to sit for 3 hours with those thieving bastards! They stole or house. And why? What was there reason? In the words of Ken Shoop:” Because this is Old Orchard!”… huh? what? What the hell kind of a reason is that???

They tried to take our animals! My babies! My cats and dog and birds! We had fight like hell to keep them. The members of that church put us through hell and back and they expect us to want to go to church????? They did that to us and they really don’t know why I stopped going to church????

“Do you want to go to church?” oh yes, of course I’m just dieing to go back to the church that help steel our home from us. The church that seperated me from my family, and my animals, and destroied my book collection, and stole my grandmothers stamp collection, smashed my records, puverized my grandmother clock, they seperated me from my brothers and my animals and they can actually think I want anything to do with going back to church!!!!!!! …. oh yes, I’m just dieing to go back to that church! What the hell are they thinking? “but They’ve changed, they backed off”…. yeah, right, they backed off after they tforced us out on the streets and ruined my hands so I can’t draw and write anymore. They cbacked off after they got our land. Of course they backed offf. What need is there for the 2 years of harassment and vandalisim anymore now that the have the land? Answer me that one! The only way I want to go back to that church is if Jim Thomas, gets up in front of the ward and apologiges in front of his peers and prints up a public apology in at least 5 big newspapers and returns our land to us. Than and only than well I want to go back to that church, and even than I’m not sure I’ll want to go back.

All I have is this to say:

Going to church on Sunday does not make you a Christian anymore than sitting in a garage on Saterday makes you a car!

It is what you say, that makes you a Christian.
It is what you do, that makes you a Christian.
It is how you treat others, that makes you a Christian.
It is what is in your heart, that makes you a Christian.
It is love for one another, that makes you a Christian.

It is who you are,
not where you are,
that makes you what you are!

Squidoo’s wish list

I sent this comment to my 3 Squidoo friends here on MySpace, but than I thought, I’m gonna want to referance this list myself. There aren’t actually very many things on this list that I would use to create Squidoo lenses, however reading the list does spark a few ideas for other topics I’d like to write about, so here is the comment I sent them, posted here for my personal referance:

Seth Godwin (the guy that created Squidoo) sent me an email. He said that people have been requesting lens topics to be made, and he from those requests has made a list of the top 100 most requested lens topics. (Topics that there are currently no lenses for, but that people have asked more than once for others to build). I don’t know if there’s anything on the list that you’d want to build a lens for or not, cause I didn’t read the entire list yet; but I figured it might give you some ideas for new topics to create lenses for, even if there wasn’t anything on the list that you wanted to write about, so, here’s the list that he sent me:

~~Wendy

Feel like building a new lens? Here’s a list Megan and I put together of 100 dream topics.

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Adrianna Costa
Akon
All Natural Vintage Oolong Tea
Authority
Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse
Bebo
Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans
Bon Jovi
Can Stress Turn Your Hair White?
Canon Digital Rebel XTi
Canon PowerShot A550
Canon PowerShot Pro Series
Carrie Fisher
Christopher Hitchens (Author)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Cloverfield
Conn Iggulden
Copyblogger
Crash
Cynthia Nixon
Dailymotion
Daniel Radcliffe
Descargar
Die Hard
E.T.
Easy Tiger, Ryan Adams
Eat, Pray, Love
Facebook
Fergie
Film-Noir
Flip Video Camcorder
Fred Claus
Galilea Montijo
Garry Marshall
Get Smart With Steve Carell
Guitar Hero T-Shirts
Hairspray, the Movie
Hannah Montana
Hot Fuzz
Hotel Rwanda
Hoteldipity
I Know Who Killed Me
Icky Thump
Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur
Is My Boyfriend Making Me Fat?
John Krasinski
Khaled Hosseini
Kim Catrall
License to Wed
Lifehacker
Little Miss Sunshine
Live Earth
Mallu
Maroon 5
Michael Bay
Michael Patrick King
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
My favorite Whole Foods foods
My Mother is Driving me to Drink!Naruto
Nikon D40 6.1MP Digital SLR Camera
Noelia video
Our Love to Admire, by Interpol
Pamela Anderson
Paris Hilton
Photobucket
Problogger
Ratatouille
Rihanna
Rocky
Ron Paul
Sellendipity
Serendipity 3 Frrrozen Hot Chocolate, Yum!
Shakira
Sicko
Skyblog
So You Think You Can Dance
The 4-Hour Workweek
The 5-Factor Diet
The Dangerous Book for Boys
The Diana Chronicles
The Host
The Huffington Post
The Martha’s Vineyard Diet Detox
The Simpsons, the movie
The Truth About My No or Low Carb Diet
Tina Brown
Traveling Wilburys
Truthiness
Unlock Your Creativity
Untitled JJ Abrams movie
Vitter
Water for Elephants
What is the Craziest thing you Have Ever Done in a Car
Yahoomail
Zeitgeist, by The Smashing Pumpkins
10 Places to See in Canada Before You Die
10 Places to See in the UK Before You Die
10 Places to See in the US Before You Die

Narration for Writers Explained

Attention writers! Have you ever wondered what’s the differance between one type of narration and another? Look no farther, I shall explain them all here. Check it out.

http://www.squidoo.com/Narration-for-Writers/

World’s Worst Poet

Never give up, there are lessons to be learned from failrure. Just look at this guy. He was the world’s worst poet when he was alive, and yet 100 years later he’s still the world’s worst poet, but his poems continue to sell anyways! Besides, now you know that no matter how bad your poems are, their well always be someone who is worse!

Today’s Answers.com Spotlight:

William McGonagall, gleefully known as one of English language’s worst poets, continues to get no respect. Last month, plans for a memorial to him at the Writers Museum in Edinburgh (alongside those honoring Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott) were blocked by the Saltire Society in Scotland. In an epithet on a volume of his works, McGonagall’s own publisher called him the world’s worst poet. In spite of his detractors, McGonagall’s works have remained in print for over a hundred years. He used to carry an umbrella everywhere he went, because there was always a chance he would be pelted with tomatoes.

Quote: “I wondered what could be the matter with me, and I began to walk backwards and forwards in a great fit of excitement, saying to myself, ‘I know nothing about poetry.’” — William McGonagall

My Website ranks at 32!!!!!

OMG! My Squidoo lense now ranks in at 32 on the Squidoo top 100 list! 32 out of 220,000 lenses! I can’t believe it!

Here it is if you want to check it out:

http://www.squidoo.com/PublishingMethods/

Why I Write Horror

It has been asked of me, more than once, by multiple peoples:

“How can someone like you, who loves peace, non-violence, and animals; how can you write the horrible things you do in your books?”

This question is most often presented after someone reads about either The Lansquin or The Red Dragon, the two vivisecting blood crazed villains from The Twighlight Manor series.

My answer to that question: As writers we write what we know. Every writer will tell you that they get their ideas from events of their own lives. I am no different than they. As my fans, friends, and family all know, I am more outspoken for animals rights than the average animal rights activist.

Ask anyone who knows me personally, and they will warn you to stay clear of that subject with me. They warn you for good reason. I was only 6 years old when I began my early protests. I lived on a chicken farm. We ate chicken. One day when I was 6 years old it occurred to me that my beloved babies in the yard and the food on the table were both called chicken, because they were in fact the very same thing. I stopped eating chicken and turkey that same day. About a year later I found out that steak was cow, and I stopped eating that as well. By the time I was 8 years old I had become a devote vegan, and have been so ever since. What does this have to do with me writing horror? I’m getting to that.

As most of you know, I had already written the first 2 volumes of The Twighlight Manor series by the time I was 8 years old. Those early stories of cute talking animals and Herbie-esce living cars, were markedly different from the later rewrites that dripped of horror and blood. Friends Are Forever, originally written in 1978, has undergone 3 major rewrites since it’s first creation, each more grim than the last. Why?

By 1982, I heard news stories of a young girl who refused to dissect frogs in science class. The school expelled her, even though she was only 12 years old. The story mesmerized me. It was one of the few times in my life that I became truly interested in watching the news. I began to tell anyone I could about the evils of frog dissection.

When I was 12 years old, I was with my mom, while she was visiting one of her Avon customers. Who was also one of Maine’s most dramatic and outspoken PETA members. I listened for 2 hours as she retold her latest adventures of rescuing a circus donkey, followed by her latest craze: she was hell bent on telling the world about the horrors of a company known as Proctor & Gamble. It was the first time I had ever heard of them. At this time, almost no one knew anything about P&G’s vivisection and Draize testing, as the horror of this fact had only been just discovered that same year. My mom and me went home that day with a carload of pamphlets about PETA and animal rights and how evil animal testing was.

Over the next few months, I sent for every free pamphlet, brochure, magazine, and catalog I could find about the animal rights movement. By the end of the year, the first revision of volume one of The Twighlight Manor series, Friends Are Forever, had been written. Into the series had been added a new set of characters. The cars were no longer living cars, but now had owners who had taken on the characteristics the cars had had. That same year I would start writing The Wild Years.

the new characters included also a new planet into The Twighlight Manor solar system: Planet Diona, and its formidable scientists who had infiltrated the earth. Testing lab scientists on Earth, were no longer humans, but now aliens. A later, rewrite would change this, and instead of animals, the alien scientist would do word for word everything that P&G did, only my scientist would do it to humans.

In 1993, The Twighlight Manor series took its final turn, becoming what it is known as today, when the addition of a prime villain known as The Lansquin was added to the series. The Lansquin was everything in my book that Proctor and Gamble was in real life. Every bloody glorified horror straight from the laboratories of Proctor & Gamble went straight into my books, under the guise of a deranged madmen bent of torturing every human to cross his path. His reason? For the good of science. For the good of mankind.

And that is how I came to write horror.

Though I write a wide range of other things, including children’s books and romance, it is for my Twighlight Manor series and it’s M rated graphic tales of horror that I am most well known. Yes, I love animals. Yes, I hate war and promote world peace. Yes, I abhor fighting and violence. And yes, I write some of the most graphic tales of gore ever written. Why? It is because I love animals and hate fighting that I write what I do: to open readers’ eyes, so that they too, may come to hate fighting and love peace. Peace for all, including peace for those who cannot speak for themselves. I speak for the animals. I write the tales they themselves cannot tell. I write in memory of those who died for the name of science, for the good of mankind. That is why I write horror, so that the animal who have died at the hands of P&G scientists, may not have died in vain.

~~Wendy.

Self Publish? Vanity Press? Traditonal Publisher? Something Else?

A question I see time and time again is: Is *name of business here* a self publisher, vanity press, or traditional publisher? How do I tell the differance?

While there are many branches of the publishing tree, these 3 are the big limbs, from which all the branches shoot off of. Here is how to tell them apart:
a self publisher, is an author who gets a business license, buys the ISBN #s, hires a printing press (print shop/printer) to print the books, than sells them themself… the author keeps 100% of the profits, because no one pays royalities; you keep 100% of the copyright (which btw, does not cost a penny)… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a vanity press is a print shop/printer/printing press, that does that for you, they usually ask you to pay money for them to edit your MS, they also chagre you if you want a color cover, (often they charge you for such things as “the right to keep your copyright”, or the ISBN #, in addition to the cost of everything else they chage) and than pays you a percentange (royalty), after you first pay them for the books… the royalty they pay, though it may sound high, is actually very low, because you don’t see that money until after they have deducted what you “owe them” for printing the books… in short, they make money, while you go broke, and you may or may not get to keep the rights to your book, depending on how much money you paid to buy your own rights back from them… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a traditional publisher, hires editors who read your MS which you send to them; they recive thousands of MSs each week, so it may take up to 2 years before they get around to reading it; after they read it, they either reject it or accept it; if they accept it, you well be sent a contact (and often with a recommendation that you go over it with your literay agent/lawyer before you sign it). Once you sign the contract and send it back, than the publisher’s laywer checks it to be certain that all is in order (and done legally). The publisher is given the tempory copyright allowing them to print and distribute your book to the public… they hire and editor to type set and spell check your MS, than they hire an artist to create the cover art, they distribute the book to bookstores worldwide, you never own them a cent, they pay you royalties

in other words:

self publishing is you starting your own business (a publishing house) and earning an income

vanity press is you doing a lot of hard work, getting your book printed, and getting scammed out of the money that should be yours, while they get rich and leave you with nothing

traditional publishing is you hireing a business to to the work for you and you both earn an income

I hope this helps

~~EK

Harassment Continues and Grows Worse by the day…

Oh, man! It’s been like a week since I was last here, sorry guys, but real life has kept me offline for a bit, the harasment has increseased at an alarming rate, as has the daily bouts of vandalism we have to content with. It’s down right sickening coming home to this every day. As usual we came home tonight to find pack-boxes now unpacked and strewn all over the yard. Once again, the vandls tore stuff out of the tent and just threw it. Stuff, like usual is broken. More items have been stolen.  This time, not only did they tear the lock off the front door, but they tore the front door off the house. They tore the door off the outhouse as well. I think today’s round of vandalism has to rank at the most destructive yet.

We still do not know who is behind this. All we do know for certain is that it is obviously someone who knows when we are and are not home and that the police well do nothing for fear of loseing there jobs as a result of threats from the town manager.

We are not gone from home on a regular schedul… one day we well leave at 7AM and get home at  noon, another day we will leave at 4PM and get home at 5PM… other times we leave at 9PM and get home around midnight… there is no set pattern, no work schedule, every day is differant, sometimes we leave in the monring, sometimes noon, sometimes  night… some times we gone 20 mins, sometimes we are gone for hours… who ever it is that is doing this vandalism, they live in seeing distanct from our comings and goings otherwise they would not know the exact time we are gone each day, and we only have 3 neighbors in seeing distance. One a peacful eldery man who I could not see doing anything like this… the others… related and one of them on the  town counsel, and works closely with the Town Manager… uh-huh! alarm bells are ringing on that one! but, as I said we have no  proof as to who is doing this, so we do not know who to sue for the damages.

~~EK

Communist blacklist, Communism in America, the communist town of Old Orchard Beach, Jim Thomas the Communist, Will Watson the Communist, down with Communism, fight for your rights, make America the land of the free again, 1964 Dodge 330, angry, animal rights, animal welfare, animals, anti-elder abuse, antiquies, author’s rights, authors, bantams, belief, beliefs, Biddeford, birds, cats, chickens, Christ, Christianity, church corruption, conspiracy, corrupt leaders, corruption, crime, criminal, criminals, cruel, cruelty, danger, disabled, discrimination, dogs, evil, evil men, faith, Family, farm animals, farm life, fear, Garden by the Sea, geography, God, government, government crime, harasment, harassment, hell, help wanted, Holiness, Holy Spirit, humans, in need of help, Jesus, LDS, lies, Life, life blogging, local government, Maineland, Mormons, my thoughts on…, news, ocean, ocean life, Old Orchard, police, police corruption, police threats, politics, Relationships, religon, seniors, sin, sinner, sinners, social change, stamp collecting, stamps, stealing, Stolen House, stolen items, strange but true, strangers, tent, terror, terrorism, terrorists, Theology, theology beliefs, thief, thieves, thoughts, threats, town hall, Town of Old Orchard, vandelism, vandels, villain, war, weather, Winter, World, writer, writer’s rights, writers, York county

animal rights, bad habits, conspiracy, corrupt leaders, corruption, disabled, Discernment, discrimination, EelKat, EK, Family, fear, Future, geography, government, harassment, help wanted, humans, in need of help, Jesus, lies, Life, local government, my thoughts on…, Old Orchard, Personal, politics, Power, stealing, tent, thieves, Town of Old Orchard, unprotected, unsafe, vegetarian, war, wisdom, World, York county, Communist blacklist, Communism in America, the communist town of Old Orchard Beach, Jim Thomas the Communist, Will Watson the Communist, down with Communism, fight for your rights, make America the land of the free again, 1964 Dodge 330, angry, animal rights, animal welfare, animals, anti-elder abuse, antiquies, author’s rights, authors, bantams, belief, beliefs, Biddeford, birds, cats, chickens, Christ, Christianity, church corruption, conspiracy, corrupt leaders, corruption, crime, criminal, criminals, cruel, cruelty, danger, disabled, discrimination, dogs, evil, evil men, faith, Family, farm animals, farm life, fear, Garden by the Sea, geography, God, government, government crime, harasment, harassment, hell, help wanted, Holiness, Holy Spirit, humans, in need of help, Jesus, LDS, lies, Life, life blogging, local government, Maineland, Mormons, my thoughts on…, news, ocean, ocean life, Old Orchard, police, police corruption, police threats, politics, Relationships, religon, seniors, sin, sinner, sinners, social change, stamp collecting, stamps, stealing, Stolen House, stolen items, strange but true, strangers, tent, terror, terrorism, terrorists, Theology, theology beliefs, thief, thieves, thoughts, threats, town hall, Town of Old Orchard, vandelism, vandels, villain, war, weather, Winter, World, writer, writer’s rights, writers, York county

Update on The Lockdown & More Harassment & Vandelism

We spent the last 2 days calling everyone under the sun, trying to find out what the hell is going on, but we can’t get through to anyone; they are just giving us the run around again, putting us on hold, directing our calls to someone else who in turn directs them to someone else, who has no idea why we were directed to them and hangs up with a “Sorry”.

Well, since no one well tell us what’s going on, we just went ahead and broke down the barricade. Well wonders never cease? Now that we’ve gotting back in to see the damage, I can honesty say I hope these jackasses die a long slow death. The bastards stole my grandmother’s stamp collection. They tore the pages out of a second stamp book, keeping the pages that had stamps on them. They also stole the comb my dad’s uncle brought back from PNG when he was one of the soliders who was there and discovered that people lived their back in 1937. They also stole the photos of the uncle. They smashed my other grandmother’s gold and glass anniversay clock that she brought to America with her from Germany. To top it all off the bastards took my records and it looks like they used them for frisbies, they are strewn from one end of the house to the other, several of them broken.

We still don’t know who is behind this, but who ever they are I hope they die soon, so that they well have a longer time to burn in hell.

~~EK

Star Log’s Blog Carnival for Writers

I have spent the last couple of hours browsing through Blog Carnivals. I love them.  They are such a great way to find new blogs to read. Well, I submitted several posts from Star Log to some of the carnivals. When browseing the carnival index though, I was disapointed to find that more than half of those aimed at writers have been shut down and are no longer taking new submissions.

In light of that info, I am now starting a new one, to be posted on an ongoing basis here at Star Log. I have decided to hold 12 carnivals a year, one each month. Submissions are open and accepted year ’round.

The overall theme is blog posts of interest to writers. What I am looking for are posts (written by you and posted on your blog), that offer advice to writers of all levels. The prime focus being on fiction stories, though all advice for writers is accepted. Posts on “general” writing topics accepted each month. Additionaly, I’d like to have a sub-theme each month as follows:

January: Writing Mysteries

February: Writing Romance

March: Writing Children’s Fiction

April: Writing Fantasy

May: Writing Science Fiction

June: Writing Pirate Fiction

July: Writing Action/Adventure

August: Writing Gothic

September: Writing High Fantasy

October: Writing Horror

November: Writing Family Memoires

December: Writing Holiday Fiction

Submissions are due by the last day of the previous month. Blog listings will be posted the first week the month. Send your submissions here.

You can copy the following tag to add to your blog so people will have a link back to find your listing with Star Log’s Blog Carnival For Writers:

Conventional Advice that Didn’t Work for Her (or Me Either!)…

Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”.  After reading her article, I have to say that basicly, she has said pretty much what I would have said, and what I do say, whenever someone asks me.

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

1) Write every day.

This piece of advice is repeated in almost every book on “how to write.” Maybe some people need this sort of discipline, but I would find it counterproductive. Sometimes I write feverishly every day. Sometimes real life intervenes. I have a demanding job and a family. If I believed I had to write every day, even when I absolutely had no time, I’d quickly grow to hate writing and I’d stop doing it. Mostly, I have more ideas than I have time to process, so “forcing myself to write” is not a problem. And during those periods when “real life” heats up and I can’t write, I don’t feel any guilt. Why should I? Writing isn’t a religious penance or a health routine. It’s something I enjoy.

My responce to what she says:

You’ve heard it preached from the pulpit of every sacred book on writing: WRITE EVERY DAY!!!

Now ask yourself this: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A hobby?

If you think of writing as a hobby, than who cares when you write? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if your writing gets sloppy? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if you ever get published? No one. If you write as a hobby, than by all means writer seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, because you know what? If you are writing because writing is a hobby, no one cares. Why? Because hobby writers write for their own pleasure. If they get published, it’s a great big WOO-HOO! for themselves and their family. But very few hobby writers ever get published. Why? Because they are content to post their stories on message boards and web-sites and blogs. They are happy to see their work on the internet. Writing after all is just a hobby to them. They are content with what they do.  So, for writers who write as a hobby, it is not important when they write, because their family is not dependant on the writing. Just search on Google for Fan-Fiction. Millions of stories are posted all over the internet, but because they are written by hobby writers, tthose stories well never be printed in books. They well never be published, but no one cares, not even the writer. So why than does it matter if the hobby writer writes every day?

Let’s look at the other side of this story.

Now ask yourself this once again: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A career?

I ask you: What is your day job? Do you  wait tables? Drive a school  bus? Are you a cashier at the local super market? Maybe you teach high-school geography? Whatever it is that you do for your day job, ask yourself this: How many days do you work each week? A few well say three, some well say four, almost all of you well say five. By law your employer is required to give you at least two days off each week. That’s a law. That law is enforced. If an employer asks you to work more than five days a week, they are required to pay you time and a half. That too is a law. Why? Because even the government knows that you can’t get the job done if you are not given a day or two of rest. If you work seven days a week, you well run down, wear out and get sloppy. Your work well suffer, because you didn’t get a day off.

So, we come back to your answer: Why do you write? Hobby or career? If you said career, than you know that being a writer is just like every other 9 to 5 job. Nine o clock you sit down at your desk and you start writing. Around noon you take an hour break for lunch. After lunch it’s back to your desk to write until five. Five o clock comes around and no matter how compelled you are to keep writing, you put down your pen, turn off the light and don’t go back to your desk again until tomorrow morning when nine o clock rolls around again. Like any other job, you take the weekend off. Why? Because for you writing is more than a hobby. For you writing is what puts food on the table. For you writing is what puts clothes on your children. Writing just paid for your teenager’s PS3. Writing pays the mortage. Writing pays the vet bills caused by the recent pet-food recall. You write because writing is your career, your job, your livelyhood. For you writing is not a hobby. You can’t afford to let you writing get sloppy and you know that, which is why you also know that it is foolish for you or any other writer to think that it is in your best interest to write every day.

And that is  why I do not write every day.

Moving on to myth #2…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

2. Don’t Edit Until the First Draft is Done.

I edit obsessively as I go along. I like rewriting things. I can’t imagine another way to write and would be utterly incapable of completing that first draft if I didn’t do it this way.

My responce to what she says:

This, I think, depends on the writer and what they are writing about at the time. Personaly I do not believe in editing as you write, as a general rule. Why? I find that when I am writing, I  write better if I don’t stop. I have learned to ignore typos and spelling mistakes, to turn a blind eye to bad grammar, and to not listen when my mind says I should go back and re-write what I just wrote. Why? Because if I stop, it creates a speed bump. That speed bump slows me down and causes me to go lose track of what it was I was writing. So I find myself going back to where I had stopped, because I have to re-read what I wrote several times before I can remember where it was I was going with that train of thought. In a sence by stopping to edit while I was writing, I have now derailed my writing train, and put it back on a new track, and it just can’t get back onto that old track, because the old track for some odd reason is no longer there. On a road, a speed bump just jostles your car a bit and make you slow down, but on a train track, that same little speed bump not only jostles the train, but knocks it off track and sends it flying into the oncoming train on the other track. That speed bump is now a mangled mess of crumpled train cars, which ow must be towed away and tossed into  a junk heap. A huge rusted junk heap towering high above your head. The next thing you know you can’t write anything at all because all there is is a pile of mangled wreckage. You have hot a writer’s block.

So, where are we now? Well, for me, stopping to edit while I’m still writing is the deadliest thing that can happen while I’m writing. Usually, but not always. This is just me though, and as I said, all writers are differant.

Moving on…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

3. Use Note cards or Notebooks to Organize Ideas

Even the thought of using index cards to organize fiction ideas is almost enough to make me run screaming into traffic. In my mind, these little cards will forever be associated with undergraduate term papers. I don’t use notebooks because I hate to write longhand. I do all my writing on the word processor — even background notes for novels. Actually, I prefer to do background for novels as short stories, even lame short stories with no chance of selling. I see things better that way.

My responce to what she says:

As most of you know, I never went to school. I can’t identify with term papers because I’ve never had one, let alone seen one, and I’m not realy sure what they are, except that everyone who talks about school talks about term papers too. I’m not sure what an undergraduate is, I’ll look it up next time I’ve got my dictionary at hand. For those who have followed my posts on the net since 1997, you already know that when I joined the internet world, it was my first time typing. I had never used a keyboard before in my life. Likewise, I had also never learned how to spell. I wrote at that time in what I have since been told is a form of a “native lingo of my own invention, cause by lack of previous contact with humans”. In 1997, I first I joined the internet, and became an over night celebrity, not because I posted on every forum and chat room I could find, but because people were fascinated by my complete and total lack of any ability to spell. In the years since that time, my fan following grew to a cult status as people set out to teach me how to spell via online forums.

Than came a revilation to the world, that no one had befor known: My books, the Twighlight Manor seires, several thousand pages, and countless drafts of each, had never seen typewritter, I had written all of them in longhand. The manuscipts where totally written in bright colored notebooks with Lisa Frank art on the covers: thousands of them. Some 40 boxs worth of notebooks, stacked floor to ceiling. Noetbooks that I have been writing in since 1978. Thirty years worth of notebooks.

Today, I still write my books in longhand. I still hand write all of my manuscripts in bright colored children’s note books. To date, I have only ever written one outline. I have never used index cards. I do not type my manuscripts until after haveing hand written several drafts. I do not organize my ideas, my ideas flow from my mind at a rapid rate, and I write them as they come. No notes. No note taking. They are not my style.  They do not work for me.

And finally we come to:

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

4. Keep a Story Circulating until it Sells.

This is another piece of almost universal advice that I don’t follow. I tend to select my markets rather carefully. If something is rejected at the market I’ve thought most probable for it, I will normally only try it on one or two other markets before giving up (or in some cases no other markets). Although there are a lot of magazine markets for speculative short fiction, there are actually relatively few professional markets for speculative short fiction of any given type. I guess my economics training makes me weight the possible benefit (payment for a story) by my subjective evaluation of the “odds” of being published in that magazine. If the weighted payoff is less than the postage, I put the story in a drawer and work on another one.

My responce to what she says:

In some cases, this is true, in others it is not.

Some times I write for copyrighted characters not of my own making. For these stories there is only one publisher that I can legally send the stories to. If they reject the story, than that’s it. It can’t be sent to anyone else.

More often I write stories of characters of my own invention, and for these, I can choose any publisher I damn well please. I can also choose who I DO NOT want to publish it. Than again I can also choose to do what I usually do, and that is to self publish my stories. That is how I came to own my own publishing house. It is through owning my publishing house that I came to become an editor. Today I am a writer, a publisher, and an editor, because I reserved the right to choose when, where, and to whom I sent my manuscripts too: no one!

Well, that is my take on what Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”. 

~~EK

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

Happy Easter from EelKat, Moonsnails, and the Vampire Easter Minions!

Happy Easter from EelKat, Moonsnails, and the Vampire Easter Minions! May they inspire you to write about dancing vampire bunnys!

 

EelKat

Moonsnails Magazine

“Where reality becomes a dream & dreams become reality.”

Get Yourself Banned!

As you know, I finished NaNoWriMo 2006 in flying colors. My NaNo entry, “Love, Lust, Madness” is the latest addition to The Twighlight Manor series. Since than I’ve been editing and rewriting and perfecting. I have  come to a conclusion about “Love, Lust, Madness”, it’s rated M and deals with a very controversial subject. I really went out on limb with this one and now I wonder, Can I even put this thing in print? It’ll get banned before it hits the store shelves. So, for now I have put it aside to collect some dut, while I think about what to do next.

I’ve always believed that the quickest way to become famous is the write a book that the critics well ban… nothing gets your sale up like a book that is banned, it seems the harder the ban hits the more fans gobble it up… just look at the Bible and Harry Potter, the 2 most banned books in history are also the 2 with the highest sales worldwide.

Now Harry Potter has no reason to be banned, there isn’t a single bad thing in it (moral wise). On the other hand you had the Bible, a story about rape, insest, murder, pride, racial hatred, and glorification of blood and slaughter, and yet it sells millions of copies a year, because people  love the story of a 12 year old girl who is raped by a deity only to have her child slaughtered in a grisly bloodbath, by that same deity. Today being Easter, the day we gloriy that rape and murder.  I look at “Love, Lust, Madness” and than I look at the Easter story, and I ask myself… Why should I worry, at least it ain’t as bad as the Easter story.

~~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

Spring In Maine

It’s a nice warm spring day in April in Maine. I bet you can tell, that is if you can see through the driving snow outside your window. Yep, it’s April, and right on schedual is our annual snowstorm. Jim Thomas and Ken Shoop must be ripping their hair out right now.  More snow mean longer snow on the ground and a longer time we got to stop them from stealing the Goldeneagle (my 1964 Dodge 330 which they have said must be junked as soon as the snow melts, otherwise the town of Old Orchard Beach well fine us $2,500 a day for each day we refuse to remove it.)

For those of you who do not know The Goldeneagle is the heart and soul of The Twighlight Manor series. If not for this car, none of the books would ever have been written. Back in 1978 when the first volum was written their were 4 characters: EelKat, Sir Roderic, Emporer Blue, and Captain Goldeneagle a.k.a Etiole. Captain Goldeneagle was the character based on this car, the character that would go on to be the most celebrated and most contraversal of the entire series: Etiole. The car itself has been featured again and again thoughout the series. It is an icon with fans of the series. An icon who is now threatened on the latest method of harassment that Jim Thomas and Ken Shoop have brought down on our family. (and ours is not the first they have done this to, they have a long history of doing this!)

First they put my dad in the hospital in a coma.

Than they force us to live in a tent during Maine’s sub-zero winter.

Than they threaten our pets.

Now they threaten my car.

And I continue to wonder: when well this end? When well someone put a stop to this man’s reign of terror? Why does everyone turn a blind eye to what they are doing?

~~EK

Communist blacklist, Communism in America, the communist town of Old Orchard Beach, Jim Thomas the Communist, Will Watson the Communist, down with Communism, fight for your rights, make America the land of the free again, 1964 Dodge 330, angry, animal rights, animal welfare, animals, anti-elder abuse, antiquies, author’s rights, authors, bantams, belief, beliefs, Biddeford, birds, cats, chickens, Christ, Christianity, church corruption, conspiracy, corrupt leaders, corruption, crime, criminal, criminals, cruel, cruelty, danger, disabled, discrimination, dogs, evil, evil men, faith, Family, farm animals, farm life, fear, Garden by the Sea, geography, God, government, government crime, harasment, harassment, hell, help wanted, Holiness, Holy Spirit, humans, in need of help, Jesus, LDS, lies, Life, life blogging, local government, Maineland, Mormons, my thoughts on…, news, ocean, ocean life, Old Orchard, police, police corruption, police threats, politics, Relationships, religon, seniors, sin, sinner, sinners, social change, stamp collecting, stamps, stealing, Stolen House, stolen items, strange but true, strangers, tent, terror, terrorism, terrorists, Theology, theology beliefs, thief, thieves, thoughts, threats, town hall, Town of Old Orchard, vandelism, vandels, villain, war, weather, Winter, World, writer, writer’s rights, writers, York county

Rant: When Did Gothic Go To Hell?

What happened to Gothic? Where did it go? And who are the black clothed demons that took it’s place? There are times when I get totally pissed over little things. This is one of them. I have been a fan of Gothic since the mid 1970′s. My entire life has been built around Gothic. I wear 13th century gowns of rose velvet. Haunted houses are more than a hobby, they are the core of my existance. Top hats and frock coats are part of my daily wardrobe. I wear burnoose and houplandres and cockscombs. Men I love are romantic owners of haunted house dressed ala Vincent Price. At age 9 my favorite book was Jane Eyre. Gothic flows through my viens. More than half of my fiction books are Gothics written from the 1850′s through the 1970′s.

So what brings on this rant? I just did a Google search for Gothic fiction, because a search on Harlequin’s website revealed that they no longer sell Gothic fiction. You know what I got back as results? Vampires. Death. Sex fetish cloths and weapons. Death. Black leather. Death. Demons. Death. Grim Reapers. Death. Blood lust. Death. Suicide. Death. Depression. Death. More Death. And, well death again. Not one single book. No romance. No haunted houses. No 13th century fashions. In other words, not one single solitary thing that is Gothic.

From what I can tell of Google search, the Gothic of today is nothing like the Gothic I grew up with as a child. Where is the romance? Where are the castles? Where are the handom men in poet blouses and frock coats? When did Gothic die and go to hell? When did Gothic raise from the depths of hell and return as a pit of demonic blackness of suicide and depression? When did Gothic stop being Gothic and start being Satanic?

Where has Gothic gone, and what is this grim blackness that claims to be Gothic today?

~~EK

testing tags

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

Banned Book Meme, Pass It On…

Z-List, Weirdly Wednesday, Thinking Blogs… you all know I love passing on Meme posts. Well, here’s one I had not seen before. Man! I should have thought of this myself! Banned books! That’s just perfect for me and my blog. You think?

Here it is, and how it works. Just copy this quote into your own blog, than follow the instructions to pick your answers.

Quote:

Do you Read Banned Books? – By Aimee Dupre

Aimee DuPre’s Journal: Have you read these banned books?

Have you read these banned books?

I READ BANNED BOOKS

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you’ve read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur’an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccoli Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misrables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

posted by Leslie Shelor 8:01 PM Comments (3)
postCountTB(’111249006831132626′);
Trackback who found this at Downward Facing Life, an amazing blog about knitting and life.

/End Quote.

And here now is my answers:
2007-04-02T06:38:14+00:00

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur’an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccoli Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misrables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder(all 7 volums)
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Well, bold = the ones I’ve read, italic = the ones I’ve read part of, underlined = the ones I plan to read. So, how many have you read? Pass it on and let the world know.

I do have one question though: Why are Justine and Julie (both by Comte de Sade`) not on the list? These banned books are so banned that it’s hard to even find copies of them. Should they not be on the list, up there near the top?

~~EK

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.

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