How to Write a Book

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Lately I've seen a rash of "Easy Ways to Write a Business Book and Make a Killing" type posts on the various social media channels I frequent. You'd be right to be suspicious of anyone shilling those programs because the truth of the matter is that any book worth reading likely had a great deal of blood, sweat and tears poured into it. Scott Adams, he of Dilbert fame, offers a glimpse into his writing process and reveals how hard writing a book really is:

Part of the problem is that writing a book is the loneliest job in the world, and an immense amount of work. It's hard to get started on a project so daunting. My new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, took two years to write. For most of that time, no one but me saw any part of it. My publisher and I have a long history, so he lets me run free after the general concept for the book is nailed down. I probably worked for 18 months without anyone else seeing a word of it…

For nearly two years I plugged away on a collection of ideas around my theme and I have to say that none of it worked until the next-to-last round of edits. With my layered writing process, success tends to be binary. The book is a lifeless bunch of ideas until the moment it isn't. As a writer, you hope that moment comes, but you can never know for sure. This is yet another case in which my natural inclination for optimism comes in handy. I tell myself I can smell a book before I can see it. I know it's in me; I just need to write until I find it. I'm not entirely sure if I am intuitive or irrational, or even if those things are different.

If you're planning to write a book, ask yourself if you are the type of person that can spend that much time completely alone, doing unpleasant work, while receiving nothing in the way of encouragement or positive feedback along the way. You won't even know if anyone will read your book when you're done. If you answered "Yes, I can do that," I recommend these steps:

He then goes on to detail the six major steps in his writing process and they are indeed daunting. As he points out, every writer has his own method but what the good ones have in common is that their methods all include a great deal of hard work.

On the LDS Hit List

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Let's start with a little background: when my parents were married my dad was Mormon and my mom was Methodist. Mom converted to being a Mormon a couple of years into their marriage and for the first eight years of my life our family was very active in the church. Then my parents got divorced and left the church. For years afterwards the church would call our house and invite me and my younger brother back to church without my mom with whom we lived. Understandably, I declined.  

All of my adult life whenever I've moved my name has eventually ended up on a list in the local ward (kind of like a Catholic parish) and I've started to get regular visits from the missionaries. I've always been cordial and have even taken the time to sit and chat with them, give them my background story, give them something cold to drink and then sent them on their way. The visits were usually about six months apart and generally not too bothersome so I didn't feel compelled to do anything about it, but that all changed over the last couple of months.

For some reason the local ward in Clemmons has decided to ratchet up the visits.  Our household has had three visits in the last month, and unfortunately for my wife I haven't been home for a couple of those. She was born and raised Catholic – I converted to Catholicism soon after we were married – and we now attend a Moravian church. Literally, there's no reason for her to talk to these young people other than she's married to me. Last week the missionaries showed up and my wife had finally had it. She asked the young ladies to leave us alone (the last few months our missionaries have been young ladies) and was curt enough that one of the young ladies started crying. She asked what she was supposed to do about our situation and talked about how stressed she was being away from home and of course my wife felt terrible about it. She commiserated with the young lady, explained it wasn't anything personal, but that we just desired to be left alone. That's when it got weird.

According to the missionaries the only way to stop the visits is for me to meet with the local bishop (think priest/lay minister) and fill out paperwork requesting that I be removed from their list. That of course floored my wife, but she took the bishop's information and it's sitting on our kitchen counter where it will continue to sit until I act. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do, but I do know this: I don't respond well to unreasonable demands and this most definitely feels unreasonable.

Here's what I'm likely to do in the short term:

  • Contact the bishop and ask him to remove me from their list immediately. 
  • If he refuses I'll put up a no soliciting sign on our property and doors and tell him that any representative from the church, missionaries or otherwise, who set foot on my property without being invited will have the sheriff called on them and I'll ask that they be charged with trespassing
  • Under no circumstance will I meet with him, in much the same way I won't meet with a salesperson to fill out paperwork to get him to stop selling to me.

That's about as far as I've gotten. I should note that I really respect these kids who leave home for two years to do what they consider their calling in faraway places, and I really don't want to have to take out my frustrations on them, but if the LDS is going to demand I jump through some silly hoops to get my name off of some list I never put myself on then their messengers will have to deal with it.

Credit Where Credit is Due

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Walmart catches a lot of heat,  much of it probably justified, for its treatment of employees, low wages, sourcing practices, etc. but it rarely seems to get credit when it does something right. That's why I found this story from Louisiana so interesting.

Two Walmart stores in Louisiana will be stuck with most of the bill after food stamp recipients went on a huge shopping spree after a power outage temporarily lifted their spending limits, resulting in cleared store shelves and mass chaos…

According to a Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services’ spokesman, retailers who chose not to use the emergency procedures that limit sales up to $50 per cardholder during an emergency would be responsible for any additional amount spent during the power outage…

The shopping frenzy was triggered after the Electronics Benefits Transfer system went down because a back-up generator failed at 11 a.m. EST on Saturday…

Around 9 p.m. CT on Saturday, a Walmart employee made an announcement that the computer system had been restored and all card limits had returned. At that time, many customers left shopping carts full of food inside the store.

The focus of the story is on the food stamp recipients taking advantage of a computer glitch to go on a shopping spree, but what caught my attention was the fact that the Walmart stores continued to allow the customers to use their EBT cards even though they knew there was an issue. They could just as easily have said they wouldn't process the cards until the system came back online, but the store managers chose to continue processing. Maybe they thought they'd eventually get their money, or maybe they were compelled to by law – I have no idea – but the fact of the matter is they did a generous thing by not denying the EBT payments.

And those folks who took advantage of the situation? That's a perfect example of why the backlash against government aid programs is gaining traction.

C-SPAN Sports

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If you're into Robert's Rules of Order and all things parliamentary procedure-y you'll get a kick out of this. The Republican bloc in the House performed some parliamentary gymnastics to make sure they controlled how/if the Senate's continuing resolution made it to the floor and Maryland's Rep. Van Hollen (D) decided to call them on it. Confused? Welcome to the club, but it's crap like this that convinces the vast majority of Americans that Congress is totally screwed up.

The Red State ACA Donut Holes

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North Carolina, like many states controlled by Republicans, opted out of the Medicaid-expansion component of the Affordable Care Act. A New York Times article explores the practical effect it's having on those states' citizens:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states…

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”

We're going to be hearing a LOT about the ACA, aka Obamacare, rollout over the next few months. The program opened for enrollment on Tuesday (Oct 1) with a start date set for January and the traffic to the website was heavy enough that it slowed to a crawl.  Like any new program, especially one of this scale, there will be issues but it will be interesting to see if the overall benefits outweigh the problems enough that people will eventually say "Keep the government's hands off my ACA!"

If that does happen it will be with folks like the self-employed who couldn't get on a regular insurance plan that was anywhere near affordable, the employees working for small employers who stopped offering health insurance long ago because they couldn't afford to provide coverage and weren't legally required to, and the folks with preexisting conditions who couldn't get any coverage no matter how much they were willing to spend. Sadly it seems that a huge chunk of the working poor will fall in the "not poor enough" donut hole created by states' refusal to expand Medicaid and won't have access to a program that was most definitely intended for them.

As you can likely tell I'm one of those who is truly hoping that ACA is a step in the right direction for our country. I don't believe it's a silver bullet or that it truly fixes anything, but I'm hoping that it's a step in the direction of a comprehensive, effective reform of our health care system. It's still way too early to see what the end result of ACA is going to be, but quite frankly it would be hard to go backwards from where we've been in the recent past so I'm pretty confident it will be a net benefit for society. On the other hand I seriously doubt it's enough on its own and I hope we continue to look for ways to make sure the neediest have some form of health coverage without bankrupting the rest of us in the process.

Living in the Land of the Suicide Caucus

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The 80 Republican representatives who signed the letter sent to House Speaker John Boehner urging the course of action that has led to the government shutdown were dubbed The Suicide Caucus by none other than conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. Who are they and where are they from? Let's see:

On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina…

Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out…

Before Meadows sent off his letter to Boehner, he circulated it among his colleagues, and with the help of the conservative group FreedomWorks, as well as some heavy campaigning by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee, seventy-nine like-minded House Republicans from districts very similar to Meadows’s added their signatures.

Here's a map showing the 80 districts. I live smack dab in the middle of the heaviest concentration:

SuicidePactDistricts

But are they really suicidal? Actually they're acting rationally if you look at where they're coming from:

In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).

Most folks here in the land of the Suicide Caucus despise "libruls" and distrust the government intensely. What would be interesting to see is how they would react if their reps got their way and shrank government programs drastically. Most folks don't realize all the programs the government is behind – "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare! – so would they put two and two together and blame their representative for their lost money/service? Probably not. 

What’s In a Name

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This is easily the most unsurprising video you'll see today. Street interviews with people who are against Obamacare but for the Affordable Care Act. If you don't know why that's funny then you may now understand why we have a problem here.

Two big points to make here:

  • This highlights why the names assigned to bills/laws are so important. People like the Affordable Care Act not because they know what it is, but because it must be affordable because that's what they call it!
  • We can also see how effective the relentless hammering home of simple talking points like "Obamacare is Socialist" has been. There's a reason political hacks on both sides of the aisle come up with a couple of simple blurbs and repeat them relentlessly-in this day of 10-second sound bites it's a very effective way to frame an issue.

Enjoy: