Category Archives: Glynda’s Writings

The Problem with Math and Science

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on August 24, 2013 at 12:25 AM

I’m offering this idea to Junior High Math instructors, Academic program designers or anyone else who may aspire to influence the course of Middle School Aged learning progress. I think there are many students who start out in Grade school, very interested in science but don’t carry through with the interest to the college level. I also think there is a very good, or perhaps bad; reason for this. If you ask a cross section of folks what should a person do if she or he is good in Math, a frequent response will be “Go into science.” The problem is, until one reaches 11th Grade or so in high school, science as generally taught, has very little to do with math.

Science in Grade school and Junior High, is full of fascinating facts, fun experiments and a fair amount of “gee whiz” value. Arithmetic and Mathematics however tend to be fairly dry, unappetizing subjects, satisfying perhaps for those who do it well but fairly deadly for many of the same kids who eat up the science experiments with a spoon, (well, hopefully not in a literal sense.) This tends to set up what we might call an Expectation Gap wherein one starts reading the qualitative science books around third or fourth grade then in high school and college, we can run up against the “Here also be Maths!” disillusionment.

We certainly don’t want to make elementary science less interesting and though many have tried, it’s difficult to make Math quite as yummy as say, Art Class. I think though that the real problem stems from the division of Math and Science early on and the solution may lay in bringing the two subjects together much earlier than is customarily done.

There is a fascinating genre of learning which speaks to both math and science which is simply the realm of Formulae (Formulas) Formulae are in general algebra at an understandable level and convey a great deal of power to those who learn to use them.

Customarily we teach arithmetic then we get into algebra with it’s integers and variables and exponents, it’s Xs and Ys with very little attention given to what we use this stuff for in the long run. Yes there are story problems in grade school arithmetic books and much fewer of them in algebra texts. Still algebra is all around us. We talk about Length and height and weight all the time (L H and W) and every half bright kid knows that H2O = water. Let’s design a course in Formulae pure and simple and let it serve as a pre-algebra course.

One needn’t be a propulsion expert to calculate the areas of rectangles and circles. Anyone who can do multiplication can also calculate the volume of solids such as cylinders, cones and even pyramids.

Simple demos with hollow shapes and graduated cylinders of water could help classes see that their numbers are correct or at least close. Elementary Trig could be done with a board, and angle measure and a measuring tape. How big a board do you need to cover this side of the slanted roof. Clubhouse builders would love it! Starting with cooking recipes we could move fairly directly into calculating how much oxygen you need to combine with two grams of hydrogen to get 18 grams of water. (Basically look at the formula and have a look at the Periodic Table.) Before Course’s end we could be able to calculate things like how much kerosene do you need to burn to heat a tubful of water from whatever the cold tap gives us to a temperature we wouldn’t mind using for a bath. Lots of cool, hands-on stuff here and nothing all that expensive. Kids love knowing how to do things, what things are made of, how to mix things together and come up with exciting new things. Let’s get formulaic and take the myth out of science and the snore out of math!

Glynda Shaw

Hate Groups

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on July 5, 2013 at 5:00 PM

I’d been meaning to write this entry on something else but felt I needed to clear this topic first. The Westboro Baptist Church has been in the news again of late; first for their predictably reprehensible attempts to disrupt the funerals for the 19 heroes who recently gave their lives fighting fire in Arizona, then for a predictably cowardly response from the White House. The WBC, we are given to understand, isn’t a hate group? My response is “why the hell not?!” I’ve got a feeling that if NAACP conventions or memorials for Dr. Martin Luther King were being invaded by spiritually diseased bigots, said bigots and the church they hide behind would quickly become a hate group.

I want to be very clear in saying that no, I don’t want NAACP meetings or King memorials to be invaded by diseased bigots, in the same way that I don’t want somebody burning flags, whether it be mine or someone else’s. There are just some things that honorable people don’t do. No one’s memorial should be a venue for picketing and castigation.

Freedom of speech? Horse droppings! We’ve never truly had absolute freedom of speech in the days of the founders (When a man was dragged out of a tavern and jailed for saying he didn’t care if they fired a cannon ball through John Adams’s ass, he wouldn’t watch the presidential parade), or now when persons who threaten the President are rounded up prior to a visit by the Chief Executive. We also can’t run through a building yelling “fire!” And racial slurs are fast on their way to becoming illegal.

There is no biblical justification whatever for the activities of the Westboro Baptist Church does and as far as I can see, it’s not truly a church. Religious Freedom? Road apples! We don’t allow human sacrifice in America even with the First Amendment, even though human sacrifice has a venerable history. With George W. Bush’s Faith-based Initiative, Wicca was excluded as a religion even though it clearly is; and I heard very little protest except from Wiccan folks. If our president and Federal law-keeping agencies haven’t the grit to put the Westboro Baptist Church on a par with people who hurl racial invective let’s at least deny them tax-exempt status. Perhaps that will cut down on travel funds.

Insulting Emails

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on February 8, 2013 at 1:35 PM

Yesterday at work I got three versions of basically the same E-mail entitled “Lean For Dummies.” A very brief inspection I gave the first iteration indicated that employees in our agency were invited to join an online chat group centered around a book by the same name which presumably deals with issues such as diet and exercise. I didn’t check further versions since in my opinion the first one should have been deleted prior to sending.

No, I don’t have anything particularly against either dieting or exercise. I try to indulge in both from time to time. The thing that angers me is this use and overuse in contemporary culture of book titles of the form …For Dummies. I never read such books and don’t believe anyone else should, in fact I think those who do read such books are probably the audience the authors are seeking. No, that’s not really fair. I am afraid that a lot of people allow themselves to be called condescending names and allow themselves to think of themselves in diminishing terms because they don’t possess much self esteem which is certainly unfortunate but does not mean the persons in question are stupid, unable to speak or clothes mannequins which so far as I know are the three common definition for the term dummy.
Glynda

Second Things First

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on January 16, 2013 at 12:25 PM

I’ve written about this before obviously but would like to clarify and add to something I touched on in one of my entries last month. The shootings of December 14 continue to occupy a fair amount of media attention though now not so much in terms of the victims, perpetrator or survivors, but what this and other events might mean to the debate over gun control. Let alone that nothing being proposed in the Senate or by the President would have had any realistic effect on what happened in Connecicutt, there is a News Void which has scarcely been scratched through all of the coverage of these tragic events.

The preponderantly leftist media has spent a good deal of time crowing about the iron grip of the NRA finally being broken (perhaps) and the NRA appears to be shifting blame to persons labeled as mentally ill. Let’s make those folks bear the scrutiny and restrictions and let us Normal folks alone. In all the hype pro and con about the Second Ammendment, we still have heard precious little about the First. Our society has been spoon fed for generations now the notion that the First Ammendment, Freedom of speech in particular (only part of the amendment) is not only inviolable but noncriticizable as well. TV, Radio stations, newspapers, electronic media feel they can inflict not only whatever content they wish upon the public but in whatever manner they choose and to whatever degree. Still the First Ammendment contains limitations and safeguards.

Persons for example are not allowed to run through public buildings shouting “Fire!” In many places and for many years we’ve tolerated limitations of First Ammendment rights when the names of rape victims for example, juvenile victims and some other protected groups have not been published. We know that not all free communication is necessarily good.

What greater curtain call could a person of diseased morals and hatred toward all humanity itself itself make but to announce it’s presence and ability to wield a very cowardly but pervasive power than to evoke literally international fame? It may only last a few days but kill enough innocents and you will be known to almost everyone!

I lay a good deal of the terrifying trend toward mass murder at the door of Media and it’s cherished, unassailable First Ammendment. When a mass shooting or other multiple murder occurs the degenerate perpetrator’s name, face, and exploits saturate the media. A story is repeated many times during a single hour with no addition of new information generally but keeping the human refuse at the center of the story front and center in our minds.

I submit that were persons not assured of instant if perhaps transitory fame and the thrill of knowing that what they do is burned into every aware consciousness within transmission range, the incentive to commit such acts would be lessened, probably to a very large degree. If reporters and their editor/programmers would perhaps make one announcement, whenever something new was actually known, leaving out the perpetrator’s name, giving no pictures of the event, and having a limit of how many times the story can be mentioned per day, we might knock a lot of the romance out of killing tiny children and innocent movie goers. (Sounds sort of like limiting magazine size doesn’t it?) As things stand today, Media personel, editors, program directors, reporters, commentators are acting as parasites on the misfortune of the least fortunate and aggrandizing the worst of human nature as much as any gun runner or fringe paramilitary partisan ever did. Sure let’s try not to sell guns to people who are likely to kill others (though let’s not always couple this with “likely to hurt themselves” these are separate issues.) I don’t really care if you have 7 or 30 rounds in your clip but I’m willing to accept the lower number. While we’re doing these things and hopefully developing strategies to guard our schools and our children (somehow) let’s start forcing the Media to recognize and do something about the intrinsic part they play in encouraging and sustaining gun violence.

Glynda Shaw

Armed Citizen and Pregnant Women’s Social Worker

Santa brought a tiny headstone this December

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 21, 2012 at 12:15 AM

I don’t usually cry out loud, but Friday after endless cycles of the gruesome news from Connecticut I broke.   I was fixing pizza in the kitchen and I suddenly began to sob, saying “Poor Babies!” I wrote a poem that was so sad I couldn’t read it aloud. If listening over and over to this terribly plaintive news would bring back even one of these little ones I would do so but after a while it’s pretty clear who the shooter was and that he brought a semi automatic rifle and two semiautomatic pistols with him. Once the numbers of dead and wounded stabilized there wasn’t much more to learn. I derived some comfort from the religious services which were broadcast but feel an angry pang each time I hear the story of this mass murder reported as if it’s a new story and we don’t all have the history so far.

There’s nothing much I can say about the event itself that hasn’t been said multiple times and perhaps better than I would have said them but not for the first time I’ve been thinking about not the 2nd amendment but the 1st. While as a gun owner and a proponent of reasonable gun rights myself, I’m not sure at all that I see any reason for any civilian person to own assault rifles, rifles which can fire as fast as one can pull the trigger and fire 30 or more times before being reloaded (itself a matter of a couple seconds) to keep firing. The revolvers I own can fire just as fast, six or nine times depending on the weapon but once that burst of mayhem is over there must elapse some time before I can do it again.

High volume of fire is strictly for attacking large groups of personnel or in some cases, interdicting territory through which you want nothing to pass alive. Neither of these are hunting or civilian or home defense functions. Okay I’ve said these things and may well offend some people but I think a lot of us are missing something pretty important.

While I don’t think assault weapons are necessarily a good idea in the hands of excitable folks I am not at all sure that their absence would prevent episodes such as the one which took place on the 14th in Connecticut. What is it that makes a young man, (yes, usually young and so far, pretty much always male) stoop to such a heinous not to mention cowardly act as to slaughter twenty tots basically, children who are hardly more than babies? Doubtless some internalized disgruntlement must be a factor because consequences will be significant and it’s probably not a lightly arrived upon course of action. Whatever the motivation though, I suspect the reason for committing the act has little to do with the identities of the victims. These acts are cries, shrieks! Of self pity and hatred at the world in general. The reason it is a cry that virtually the entire world can hear is that it is so well covered, over and over againwe hear factoids already burned into our memories and the name of the perpetrator is for a few days at least, one of the most famous in existence even if the killer no longer exists.

When anyone murder a classroom full, a church full, a theatre full or rain devastation on a shopping mall if this name was to be consigned to the ignominy it so richly deserves?

I recall the Marathon race of the ’72 Olympics when a young man appeared to be the winner of the race and eagerly charged the microphones and cameras to have his moment before the world. Just in time it was found that he hadn’t run the race at all, had merely taken a lap around the bleechers and was now poised to deliver some political manifesto. The anchor man said “Take the microphone away from him. Get those cameras off him. Don’t let him have any publicity for his views” or something very much like that. I don’t know what the kid wants. I doubt many people anywhere know.

If cowardisly vicious felons could be Unnamed so they were never spoken of outside their family’s home, no minute by minute coverage of his deeds, no few days of infamy, would we see so many potentially useful though now entirely useless individuals taking this route to newsworthiness? Of course we can’t challenge the Media’s right to report, over report and rereport, can we?

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Flashbacks

19 Monday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 13, 2012 at 12:15 PM

There’ve been three times in my life that I’ve thought I was close to death. The first I learned about in retrospect and involved a teenaged boy with mental health issues, I being myself about three years of age. At this point I’m going to ask you not to look down to the bottom of this entry because I’m making a point.

A few years ago I had my novel Secret Summers edited by a community college English instructor who charged me $350, letting me know it should have been $700. (I paid her $400. She complained about me “stepping out of the story” so I made the reader lose contact with the narrative. The story had been written from the standpoint of an older person remembering some very unusual childhood experiences and I felt some setting up was in order. Sometimes the childhood viewpoint needed supplementing from a wiser, more experienced eye and voice. Also in most of my stories I tend at one time or another to leave the major thread of the story and recall events which occurred at an earlier time. I generally tell part of that story then return to the major thread and provide the ending at some later, perhaps unexpected point in the story.

“Flashbacks.” (No looking!) Some teachers these days appear to think the only way to tell a story is to start from the beginning and plod, outlinewise from I. 1-A. through IL 13-X. The reader is so attention deficient that she or he cannot maintain interest long enough to absorb some possibly valuable information before diving back into the gripping narrative. I’ve even been asked when I was using what a believe is called an “anonymous Narrator Voice” how some distant event could have occurred in the story if none of the characters were present to experience them. This isn’t how we think. It’s not how we talk and it’s certainly not how I learned to write even though my writing training was admittedly somewhat hit and miss.

I love flashbacks because I know of no way better to build tension in a story. I will often stay with a story in order to discover a connection to something dangled but not entirely revealed when otherwise I might have put the book down. Mysteries are so often founded upon something which happened long ago, forgotten by nearly everyone.  It isn’t until David Balfour’s father dies and he meets his Uncle Ebenezer, the Clown returns to town, the reason why the Old House has lain empty all these years is finally uncovered. We are fascinated by faraway places and likewise with farawhen. Computers are good at linear thinking. If there is anything uniquely human in the way thinking is done, is is our wonderful ability to make connections where no logic processor would find anything to connect. This is one of the sub-plots of my current novel in process; The Void Between.

Okay, regarding the boy and my unknown at the time brush with death.  A family near to mine which included Jimmy and Mary, childhood playmates of mine; had taken in this “Troubled Boy”as a foster child. He was found missing from the family home one night and police found him around midnight (another good plot gambit) walking along a rural road, for some reason, wearing a pair of much too large men’s pants, fondling himself and swinging a heavy wrench on a chain. When questioned he said he was on his way to a particular woman’s house (relationship unknown to me) and he was evidently intent on rape and murder. Beyond that he stated he’d planned to kill Jimmy, Mary and myself evidently because he knew we were cared about and nobody had cared about him. Since I first heard about this story when I was perhaps in my 20s I’ve thought often about this boy and how flash-backs intrude into our lives whether we would or not. You may judge for yourself their effectiveness. (As to the other two brushes with death—more suspense—later.)

Glynda

Those who teach us

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originaly posted on November 30, 2012 at 12:25 PM

I’m presently at work on a novel which starts with the viewpoint character Mardi Lamonte checking his Master’s Thesis in the University library and finding instead of the $20 bill he’d left in it, a message from his Third Grade teacher Sue Randall, which soon sends him on a mission which has life or death significance not only for him but for a significant portion of the Human Race. (By the way Sue Randall played the part of Miss Landers on the ‘50s/’60s TV show Leave it to Beaver.) Having so begun therefore it was incumbent on me to show what there was about this grade school teacher that would make anything she might have to say to a man who is five or more years out of graduate school; so crucial. This in turn brings up the question of what is outstanding teaching and who are outstanding teachers?

Mrs. Hazel Barns (6th/7th Grades) scared the living hell out of me but I always liked her. She was strict, exacting, would joke a certain amount but took crap-zero. She also let us know she loved us. She also made us staple in the back of our English books the various parts of speech (I still don’t remember them all but knew them then) and she taught us how to do bibleographies and to write formal reports. Beyond this she was just Mrs. Barns. She was an excellent teacher for me and I believe, most others at that time and place.

Genevieve Gorder 2nd Grade didn’t really teach me all that much but gave me opportunity to learn. She’d talked to me about subjects of interest to me and she shared with us things fun and significant to her. She was sweet and gentle spirited and when she irritated me it was generally that she insisted that certain kids were friends of mine who really weren’t at that place and that time. I called Miss Gorder up when I was 35 years old to tell her I still loved her.

Tom Hall with whom I studied first Physical Science, then Physics, then advanced Physics in high school, had many endearing quirks and in some ways was somewhat inept as a mentor. His organization was poor. His memory was poor especially for things that weren’t in his normal routine. Still he had a way of inspiring students to wonder and to search. He validated the inspiration we drew from elsewhere. He had a sort of “Wow that’s pretty neat!” way about him that might show as much appreciation for a novel toy as for a well-reasoned term paper. I did some of my most interesting speculating and reading while doing assignments for Mr. Hall.

Though I’ve heard of teachers who lead Outward Bound expeditions, found building projects for shop students, lead marches for social/political issues, take kids to Greece or Russia or someplace, none of the most significant teachers in my life did any of those things but still they made impressions which are still very much with me today. Miss Gorder was the first person to suggest that I might be a scientist some day and I did take a degree in engineering. Mrs. Barns told me once during a time when I was in trouble at school for reasons not entirely my fault; that when people said things about me that weren’t true this was hard but I couldn’t let it keep me from doing my class assignments. Mr. Hall wrote in my annual that “This student is able to take anything that someone says and pick out the profundity in it and if there isn’t any profundity this student takes what is said and somehow makes a profundity out of it.” Minor things? Perhaps but guideposts to live by as valid as any others I’ve seen.

It’s hard to convey in mere print that element that makes a good teacher good and a great teacher great because it’s not just a book sort of thing so Poor Sue Randall will be doing unusual, even outlandish things in my novel “The Void Between” but hopefully it will be more exciting to read than the things which really matter.  If anyone is reading this blog, please check in and let us know what your favorite teachers were like and why they were you favorites. Help us learn.

Glynda

Protein Food Drive

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 28, 2012 at 12:30 PM

I work quite a bit with low-income folks and am approached fairly often to help fund raise or collect food/hygiene items for charities such as the Salvation Army. Last year I spearheaded a mid-winter food drive, presenting it as a contest between various departments of my agency. Scoring was kept according to numbers of items brought in and cash rated as $1 = one item. I was dismayed to find that the winning department had scored higher than the rest largely because they submitted bottled water and packets of Ramen noodles scoring each bottle and packet as an item.

This year the director of our local Salvation Army post asked me if I’d have a food drive for them again but he asked me “please no Ramen, those folks are Ramened to death!” and he said what folks really needed was canned or packaged food which they could turn into a meal with minimal preparation such as the addition of hot tap water or perhaps heating of a can, but something containing nutrition. I thought about it and decided that the best way I could come up with to illuminate the empty calories and in some cases zero calories would be to rate contributions on Protein content. Protein isn’t the entire story where nutrition is concerned of course but most generally, foods with significant protein content will also include carbs and fats necessary for keeping warm and active during this Winter season.

This year’s food drive therefore is being scored in terms of grams of protein contained in a can or package. This is calculated by multiplying the number of servings, in a can of chili for instance, by the number of grams protein per serving. This total is marked on the container for easier tallying by contest helpers. I’ve provided a list of commodities which would be good protein sources such as canned stew, tuna, certain soups, granola, dry sausage sticks, canned chicken, sea foods, spaghetti with meat balls and so it goes.

I offer this as a new an improved way of collecting food for the needy. Let your potential contributors know that you don’t expect as many cans as sometimes are collected in previous drives but ask them to give some thought to what they’d like to have in the glove compartment if trapped on a mountain pass in mid-winter. Also Salvation Army and other helping agencies love to get can openers. We’ve had folks arrested in my town for using belt knives too publicly in preparing donated meals. (Let those of us who are able to eat well help some others to eat better.)

Glynda

Useful Things

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 21, 2012 at 8:00 PM

Thanksgiving and the process of giving thanks of course means different things to different people and at times like this when I try to take time to check in with my thankfulness subroutine I tend to think about progress made. Not just things accumulated though that’s part of it, but ways of doing things, remembering to get things done, quality of living emotional as well as physical.

Back in the ‘80s we were quite poor by most standards but we were thrifty and imaginative. We bought a wheat grinder, a Foley food mill, built a dehydrator and set about turning sacks of wheat into bread and cake, culled apples into sauce and juice. We turned waste meat from the meat saw at our local butcher’s into soap and cat food. We dried everything from throwaway grapes to boxes of nectarines found at the top of the grocery dumpster. This was also one of our more successful writing/publishing periods. As I wrote at the time “We would roothog or die (preferably roothog.)”

A tiny rental house in Sedro Woolley, Washington was our learning ground to accumulate skills needed in the back woods of Northern Idaho Where we juiced Serviceberries, made pemmican from prunes and ground beef heart which leftover fat from doughnut making. I could start with a pile of wood and a sack of wheat from the local feed store and turn them into bread loaves. In 1985 we returned to Seattle and things were a little easier in some ways. Eventually we increased our monetary income several fold and now we own three acres and two houses.

With everything there are tradeoffs. When we were underemployed we had lots of time for turning whatever we could get into something closer to what we wanted. As more and more time was spent away from the old homestead stalking salary, less and less time seemed to go into those old and dear processes which had sustained us when we were much younger. It didn’t happen immediately or all at once, but bit by bit Lenore and I began around 2000, reclaiming the best of what we’d had when we were poor. First we reclaimed our fruitcake, always made Sunday after Thanksgiving Thursday, accompanied by a rescreening of “The Homecoming,” pilot to “The Waltons.” We bought a greenhouse, a large steamer. I’ve ground hundreds of pounds of grain, legumes and nuts entirely by hand over the decades and decided that time constraints justified an electric mill. We revitalized our interest in gardening, moved into the County so we could have chickens, planted herbs as well as vegetables and fruit.

Looking at things this Thanksgiving I find I have less to miss and I’ve done not a bad job of keeping faith with my earlier self. I know how to do a great many of the things I wanted to do when I was 25. At this end of harvest time I am thankful for hand-cranked food mills, a 32-gallon sparging vessel, a grain mill, numerous sacks of varied grain in my home office, a cute chicken coop with six hens, food steamer, the skills of hand and mine to transform a piece of property and much else I could hardly even imagine in 1985.

Goddess be praised.

Glynda

Publishing

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 19, 2012 at 12:30 PM

The other day a friend of mine told me that a guy at work had come running out of his office saying “I’ve been published!” my friend added that this guy is a real doofus and he is a chemical engineer. I found this quite surprising as all engineers are cool in one way or another though obviously, some engineers are cooler than others. My friend confirmed that this guy was both an engineer and a doofus. When asked what he meant when claiming to be published this individual said “I’ve written a blog and people are responding to it. I’ve been published!”

I guess most of us wouldn’t count ourselves as published authors on the mere basis of having a blog but think how amazing the whole process of E-mailing itself let alone websites and blogging would have been to Ben Franklin, Will Caxton or even Ernest Hemingway. When I was in college way back there in the Dark Ages, a Communications History prof I had asked us to try to define what constituted publication. Did handing out Xeroxed copies of ones work on the street corner constitute publishing? Certainly many well-known ballads still sung to day were originally handed out as broadsheets in London, Dublin or elsewhere, sold for a penny or a mug of ale. How much greater is the potential circulation of a piece of writing when submitted to electronic channels such as this one?

In a never published (never edited actually) science fiction novel I wrote in high school I predicted that sometime in the 21st Century publishing as we had known it would cease to exist. People would submit articles, stories, books to a “Computer bank” Readers would search the bank using robotic programs which would match reader’s interest with selections available and would pay a modest price for items received. Editting would largely be a thing of the past in the sense that nobody would gate-keep anyone else’s access to publication. Anyone could do it.

Contrast this with the process still very much alive today, of submission, acceptance or rejection, agent contracts and all the rest that discourages so many people who might at some other time made reasonably good writers. And yes I have published a fair amount under that paradigm, not so much as I would have liked surely but a respectable smattering. The problem I have with the editor/agent/publication company conspiracy is while the outcome of these processes should offer some confidence of quality output to the bookstore, much of what gets published is rubbish. Other things are going on besides critiquing and wordsmithing. In general though, the process tends to reach more people than those of us with blogs or Xerox machines tend to reach on our own.

When I was growing up if one claimed to be published someone would pretty quickly ask if we were paid for the publication and as before, yes I have been. I’ve also sold an article that so far as I know, was never printed so being paid isn’t the only condition necessary for publication. Is it then the number of people reached which makes the difference between being published or not? A single copy of the Fax or laser printer wouldn’t qualify as publication otherwise anyone who writes a letter is publishing.

Perhaps we can take an analogy from the world of insurance sales. During a brief stint I did as an life insurance agent I was told that I could only sell a certain percentage of policies to friends and relatives, meaning I was expected to make contacts I didn’t previously possess in order to close sales. I think this perhaps is the key to publication. Are we reaching readers who are not included among our day to day circle of friends and relations, people we might engage with some frequency in conversation oral, written or electronic? Are people we’ve never met likely to see our work.

Under this definition our Doofus friend (remember him?) might very well have been published. If he could find a way to get someone to buy some of his material as an electronic download then so much to better but I don’t think being paid for one’s work is necessary for publication I think it is that process of striking out and creating new subscribers that is the key. When I give a copy of a bound book or an article to a friend or chance acquaintance I like to tell them “It you don’t want to read it, pass it along to someone else. If you don’t like it then give it to someone you don’t like. Publish it for me.”