Category: writer

I considered myself savvy and educated and an advocate for peace, fairness and equality. I thought abuse was something that happened to others, not me. But it was happening to me. It had happened to me and I didn’t see the danger signs as my life careened off the road. I became aware abuse and the resulting trauma can happen to anyone. I came to realize we have to examine all aspects of our lives for both blatant and insidious abuse. We must recognize it and take steps to eradicate abuse from our lives and society. That’s where I’ve been on for the last five years and I’m only now able to begin to share that journey. To write a new book, Normalizing Abuse, and bring my radio show, Voices of the Sacred Feminine, back on the air after a long hiatus.

Part One

If you knew me before…

Written By Elizabeth Palmer

Sigmund Freud writes that the uncanny is a distinct “class of…frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” He goes on to rhetorically ask how it is “possible…[for] the familiar [to] become uncanny and frightening.” What frightens us most are the things which we can almost recognize. Sometimes, that almost recognizable thing is memory. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the word “rememory” is used when the main character, Sethe, recalls moments that have been forgotten. She is faced with these uncanny re-memories—moments that are not quite familiar because they have been tucked away for so long—and at their sudden manifestation, becomes haunted by their existence.

Writing fellowship/grant proposals and putting together applications for these can be both time-consuming and emotionally taxing. It’s a long process, success rates for the competitive ones are anywhere between 5-7%, and you have to make time for it during what would already be a busy semester or quarter. And there’s a good chance that you will not get it. I know… I have been there… a LOT.

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I am a proponent of perseverance. 🙂 So it won’t come as a surprise to you that I have written more fellowship proposals in the last four years than anyone else in my PhD program. Even though I have not won most of the fellowships I have applied for, I still have the highest number of fellowships anyone has received in my cohort. So the first advice I have for you is to keep…

The Book Deal: Territorial Rights

Most people think of book deals as just that: a author gets paid by a publisher to publish his/her book. But it is a little more complicated than that. The book deal is a  negotiation that includes, not just how much the author will get paid, but  also what “subsidiary rights” will be granted to the publisher for exploitation. There are numerous revenue generating opportunities when you write a book. They include: right to license in the English Language in the UK and other English speaking countries, translation rights, audio rights, e-book rights, sale of abridgements, magazine excerpts,  movie/tv/performance rights, merchandise spin-off rights, and many more. All book deals include negotiations of  which of these sub-rights are being granted to the publisher and what will be the revenue split between publisher and author.

Today we will talk about territory rights. These are important deal points…

Book Review by Sylvia D. Between 1835 and the early 1840s some twelve to fourteen thousand Boers (Dutch/Afrikaans for “farmers”) who were descended from settlers who had come from western Europe (mainly from the Netherlands and north-west Germany and Huguenots from France) to settle in Cape Colony, migrated eastward and north-eastward – the Great Trek. It was this mass movement of settlers that eventually saw the establishment of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The voortrekkers, as they were known, were seeking to escape British control and were in search of new land. The family of Stuart Cloete (1897-1976 and pronounced “Clooty”) had settled in the Cape in 1652 and he was able to draw on the writings of his great-grandfather to write a novel about the Great Trek entitled Turning Wheels.