Endless Knots

The problem with moving too quickly - Engage with Grace 2

Bloggers will understand. In my haste to throw up the previous post before doing something else that was no doubt vitally important, I failed to look at the slide I included, which was for fun during last year's Engage with Grace campaign. The real slide, with the right questions for your family to discuss relative to end-of-life issues is this one. Sorry (and I'm slowing down, she says, while typing like a maniac).

Remember Engage with Grace?

Very important story on end-of-life decisions or, more importantly, discussions that we all need to have. Piece on NPR site and authored by "AP" (whoever wrote it deserves a decent byline), "Americans are treated, and overtreated to death," features the story of Rosaria Vandenberg, who died from a brain tumor in 2004, with very little time at home and, in retrospect, her family thinks, too much intervention.

The result: her sister-in-law Alexandra Drane started Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project, which I've participated in on Thanksgiving for the past few years during its annual blog rally. Will be even more poignant for us this year.

Here are the five questions for your family to talk about:

 

Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf

Harvard Business Review Blogs carries our post today on the role BP's organizational structure may have played in causing the horror show in the gulf. See "Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf." I wrote about this briefly here shortly after the explosion on April 20.

The language of leaving: Passages in Caregiving

A few days after posting about our current predicament, my friend Emily called with urgent news: she'd just heard Gail Sheehy on NPR and I had to read her new book. I picked up Passages in Caregiving a few weeks later. In it, Sheehy, author of the spectacularly successful Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life and many other books, speaks of "eight turnings" in caregiving. That post of mine, titled "A turning for J&J," was written in what Sheehy identifies as the first, Shock and Mobilization. (We're now in The New Normal, according to Sheehy, a fair description of how it feels, a phrase that our friend Carole used after the initial crisis period ended.) I'd used the phrase without benefit of having read her book.

I'm struck with many of the words Sheehy's uses, which so perfectly capture this strange land: shock and mobilization, the new normal, the in-between stage, the long goodbye. We've used them all, others have used those same terms with us, all seemingly spontaneously.

There is no lingua franca for this kind of experience. As our friend Tom (Emily's hubby) said, "We don't know how to do this. We're not trained." Yet when you're in it, the descriptive terms fall out of our mouths without our having googled "terms for stages of terminal illness." Yes, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages of grief, which are both similar and different. Much as I respect her work and have found it useful, those stages don't really apply to where we are with this.

Sheehy's book is filled with stories, including her own, the 17-year saga of her husband, Clay Felker's, cancer. She was the caregiver; they suffered mightily, including financially to support him; and she's drawn brilliant conclusions, including the one that stands out for me: establish your network and you'll be OK. In our experience, our "friendhood" has meant everything to us.

Buy multiple copies of her book and give them to everyone who's going through what Jeff and I are.

Solstice Summer Reading Program

Posting the latest from Solstice, a great line-up of writer/readers, as always:

(Chestnut Hill, MA, June 2010):  The Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College announces its July Reading Series. All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are held in the Founder’s Room of Pine Manor College located at 400 Heath Street in Chestnut Hill. Copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale after all readings, and there is plenty of free parking!

Friday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m.: Poet and creative nonfiction writer Anne-Marie Oomen (An American Map: Essays and Un-coded Woman), & multi-genre writer Jaime Manrique (Our Lives Are the Rivers and Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, & Me)

Saturday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m.: Poet Kathleen Aguero (Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth and Daughter Of); author and illustrator Grace Lin (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and The Year of the Rat); & fiction and nonfiction writer Randall Kenan (Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Century and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead).

Sunday, July 11 at 7:30 p.m.: YA novelist Laura Williams McCaffrey (Alia Waking and the forthcoming Lyla’s Flight); Special guest Patrick Donnelly (The Charge and the forthcoming Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin); & fiction and nonfiction writer M. Evelina Galang (Her Wild American Self and One Tribe).

Tuesday, July 13 at 7:30 p.m.: Solstice Assistant Director and fiction writer Tanya Whiton (published in Crazyhorse and Northwest Review); multi-genre writer Laban Carrick Hill (America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s and Casa Azul); & poet and fiction writer Steven Huff (A Pig In Paris and The Water We Came From).

Wednesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m.: creative nonfiction writer Michael Steinberg (editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching); Special guest Lesléa Newman (Nobody’s Mother and The Reluctant Daughter); and poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar (A New Hunger and The Hour Between Dog & Wolf).

Thursday, July 15 at 7:30 p.m.: Special guest Kevin McLellan (Round Trip); YA writer David Yoo (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before and the forthcoming The Choke Artist); & Program Director Meg Kearney (Home By Now and the forthcoming Trouper the Three-Legged Dog).

Friday, July 16 at 7:30 p.m.: Novelist Sterling Watson (The Calling and Sweet Dream Baby); fiction writer Helen Elaine Lee (Water Marked and The Serpent’s Gift); & Dennis Lehane (The Given Day, Mystic River, and Shutter Island).

Directions to Pine Manor College, complete bios of our authors, and more information about the Solstice MFA Program can be found at www.pmc.edu/mfa.

Wiley: books, royalties, dust-ups, etc...from a Wiley author

There's a bit of a row going on at the moment of the arcane variety that only authors (and their publishers) can truly appreciate. Not necessarily understand - that might take some accountants, but it's the kind of thing that happens/is happening in publishing that drives everyone involved a bit mad.

Facts: In March, 2010, Wiley and Bloomberg announced a new line, "Bloomberg Press, a Wiley imprint," naming Wiley as the new global publisher and distributor of Bloomberg's books.

We've been Wiley authors for 15 years so have some appreciation for the power of the brand (disclosure: we know and respect a lot of people at Wiley, some of whom are very old friends). Of course, like all authors, we've had our share of complaints but what author can really gripe about receiving regular royalties on a book with multiple translations that came out ten years ago (Virtual Teams)?  Wiley is a very reputable house that's managed to weather the downturn in publishing better than most if not all. Search the stock price and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Now for the dust-up. Some weeks ago Wiley sent a letter to Bloomberg authors explaining the way in which royalty calculations would be done going forward, a change for about 20% of the authors, according to Wiley's press release issued after The Authors Guild took issue with the new arrangement.

To excavate the depth of the disagreement, please read the material from both sides. In brief, there are two principal ways in which royalties, the money paid out to authors, are calculated: 1. on the basis of list price (the price that you see discounted at say, Amazon - here's ours for Virtual Teams (a 35% discount off list); and 2. on the basis of "net proceeds," meaning whatever the publisher receives after everyone in the supply chain takes their cuts. Royalty percentages vary depending on which method is used to calculate royalties -- lower for list (because it's a larger amount); higher for net proceeds (because it's smaller). We have a net proceeds agreement for Virtual Teams and a list price agreement for The TeamNet Factor. Apparently, all Bloomberg authors are being shifted to the net proceeds agreement.

Or, I should say, we would have that agreement if our books were still in regular distribution, which brings us to the next thing that The Authors Guild has pointed out. Like so many other authors whose books still sell in sufficient quantities for publishers to want to keep them on their lists, both of these books of ours are only available now as print-on-demand, POD in the lingo, meaning the publisher doesn't maintain inventory but prints individual copies as they're ordered, likely a somewhat expensive process for the publisher (I don't know the figures at all), which drives the price up (Virtual Teams listed at $29.95 when it first came out in regular distribution; POD lists for $52.50).

Royalty agreements for POD are quite low, which means although the list price is much higher, the percentage for each book sold is low. For the author, this means that fewer books are sold (because market resistance is greater at higher prices) and those that are sold generate a smaller payout. In our case, we're just lucky that Virtual Teams is still in demand. Not true for most authors.

In the case of the Bloomberg authors that The Authors Guild is concerned about, a number (I don't have a precise figure but maybe Authors Guild does and certainly Wiley knows) DID NOT HAVE POD AGREEMENTS in their original contracts. Thus, ex post facto, Wiley is adding contract terms without negotiation. While Wiley may be absolutely right that this will in most cases generate better payouts to authors, the process seems less than ideal.

Blockbuster author Scott Turow is concerned enough that he issued a very quotable statement ("Wiley should knock it off and do the right thing") and I've received a number of emails about this from author organizations that I belong to and from other friends.

I encourage my friends at Wiley to work this through as quickly as possible, sitting down (virtually of course) with each of the affected authors, then making as transparent a statement as possible to the public. The number of authors impacted is very small but the effect on Wiley's reputation could be outsized in proportion.

Who are you, J?

Earlier this week I received an ad with a post-it on it, as per what appears at the left. Hard to read, I realize, so here's the "informative" text: "JESSICA, TRY THIS. IT'S REALLY GOOD! J"

Ok, it's a marketing ploy from someone trying to sell me something. Howevuh, I've been receiving these missives, sometimes with ads, sometimes with articles, very occasionally with some kind of religious message FOR YEARS! Maybe 20 years.

I have no idea who's sending them. J, who are you? And why are you so reluctant to reveal who you are?

Anyone else ever had anything like this happen

UPDATE: Forgot to mention--all are postmarked Santa Ana, Calif, with no return address.