In a recent survey by PriceGrubber.com, 41 % of readers said they would miss aspects of reading paper books if they switched to reading e-books.

Why, you ask?  Here are the top three reasons people still love books with paper pages:

• 36 % would miss the feel of books. (My husband Dan is among them.)
• 13 % would miss their portability.  (That’s right. People actually like lugging them around.)
• 13 % would miss underlining and writing notes in the margin. (No, e-notes are not the same!)

How about you?  Would you miss paper books?  Why or why not?

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough” bookshelves.

Anna Quindlen

Happy endings. It’s the stuff our childhood.  The goal of our lives.

But is it always the best ending for your story?

Certain types of fiction do lend themselves to happy-ever-after endings.  Romance, for instance.  And some contemporary fiction.  Christian fiction, too, perhaps.  Then again, maybe not.  But what about historical fiction?  Or science fiction?  Or literary fiction? Or global fiction?

One of my all time favorite historical novels is Year of Wonder, by Geraldine Brooks.  It’s a grim setting, to be sure, and a harsh topic–1665, during the plague years.  But Brooks draws us into one village and focuses her story on one person.  Not only are we pulled into a gripping tale, but we come away with a whole new understanding of a time and place in history. Unfortunately, she felt she needed to tack on a fanciful happy-ever-after ending.

Much of my writing is also set in the shadowy periods of our past.  There wasn’t much happiness for slaves. The Indian caste system is extremely resistant to change.  Becoming a Christian doesn’t necessarily mean one walks out of life’s oppressive fog and into no-problem, no-worry sunlight.

I do love happiness.  And I am not a fan of downer endings.  And I know an ending must be satisfying, or why go to the trouble of reading the book?   But for me, the best endings are hope-ever-after.  (Which, by the way, are oftentimes quite happy.)  Even a novel set in the plague years, or in strife-torn Sudan, or on a slave ship, or in a nest of human traffickers, can end with hope.  And hope is happy.  And extremely satisfying.

But, of course, that’s just me.  How about you?  What type of ending do you find satisfying?  Does your preference define what type of fiction you read?

“True love stories never have endings.”

Richard Bach, author

Good idea.  May I share a story with you?

A couple of years ago, an Indian teenager was showing me her home—a make-shift village thrown together in the middle of a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of one of India’s most industrialized cities. I spotted a smudge-faced little girl picking through the mounds of trash. She stepped barefoot into a ditch running with raw sewage, then looked up and caught sight of me. 

I smiled. “Hi,” I said.  (The teenager with me translated.)

The child’s dark eyes opened wide.  She fingered the rusty safety-pin held her dirty blue dress closed. 

“That’s a pretty color,” I offered, motioning to her dress.

 The child neither moved nor spoke.

I asked her name, but she continued to stare in silence. Then I blurted out the question I ask children all over the world: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The girl, still silent, kept her eyes on me.

Somewhat nonplussed, and overwhelmingly sad, I bid the little one good-bye and turned to go.  That’s when she spoke.  In a voice so soft I barely heard it, she said, “I can’t be anything.”

Traffickers don’t agree.  They spy such ones as that child and see horrible possibilities. Fortunately, they aren’t the only ones who disagree with the girl.  Shortly after I left, two young Indian teachers came to that garbage dump and sought out children for a school they were starting.  Since then, they have patiently taught those forgotten children to read and write, and have prepared them to make better lives for themselves.  Even that little girl in the pinned together blue dress.  She was in their first class.

 “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Mohandas Ghandi

Ten years ago, when I first started writing about 21^st century slavery, people had trouble believing this was actually happening.  People–especially girls and women–kidnapped, bought and sold?  Forced to work as slave labor… or prostitutes?  “You writers,” one radio interviewer huffed after Daughers of Hope, my first book on the subject, came out.  “You do like to grab hold of some fringe cause and blow it all out of proportions.”

That was then.  Today, after so many celebrities have dipped their toes into the abolition waters, most of us know something about human trafficking. 

 Here are some facts you may not know:

1. Approximately 40 million people are held as slaves today, more than ever before in history.
2. Trafficking takes many forms, including forcing victims into prostitution, making them labor as slaves, tricking them into debt bondage, forcing them to serve in wars, harvesting their organs.
3. The average cost of a slave is around $90—an all time low.
4. 80% of trafficking involves sexual exploitation.
5. About half of all trafficking victims are children.  80% are under 24. 
6. An estimated 30,000 victims die each year.
7. Family members often sell children and other family members into slavery.
8. According to a 2009 Washington Times article, the Taliban buys children as young as seven years old to act as suicide bombers. The price? $7,000 to $14,000.
9. Countries that rank high as a source of trafficking includeBelarus,Russia,Ukraine,Albania,Bulgaria,Romania,China,Thailand, andNigeria.
10. Victims are trafficked to many countries.  High on the destination list areBelgium,Germany,Greece,Israel,Italy,Japan, theNetherlands,Brazil,Turkeyand theU.S.
11. Most human trafficking in theU.S.occurs inNew York,California, andFlorida.
12. Human trafficking has been reported in all 50U.S.states,Washington,D.C., and in someU.S.territories.
13. The FBI estimates that over 100,000 children and young women are trafficked inAmerica.
14. Women are trafficked into theU.S.mostly to work in sex industries.  Others are trafficked in to work in seatshops, in people’s homes, and in agriculture.
15. Human trafficking is one of the fastest growing crimes because it is hugely profitable and it involves little risk.
16. Human trafficking is estimated to bring in somewhere between $9 billion and $31 billion.
17. In less than five years, it is expected to surpass the drug trade.
18. According to the U.S. State Department, human trafficking is one of the greatest human rights challenges of this century, both in theUnited Statesand around the world.

 (All these statistics are estimates, of course. Human trafficking is so shadowy a crime that it’s difficult to get accurate statistics.)

Today, January 11, is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.  But President Obama went a step further and named all of January National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.  Thank you, Mr. President.

“Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.” 

Winston Churchill

What Do Editors Really Want? A Ratings System!

One of my writing students was all excited. She’d self-pubbed her first book and written a memoir, and stood pitching it to an editor at a writing conference. Editor confessed that the student’s memoir was a tough sell (in editorspeak, No way, Jose), but what if she designed a women’s devotional on the same topic? Now, THAT he’d be interested in seeing. “Write 12 of these devotions and send me the proposal,” editor said.

Long story short, she hired me to whip a proposal into shape per Editor’s specifications. She and I were both satisfied with the results. She sent her work in and received a quick turnaround email: Sorry, Editor wasn’t as enthusiastic as he needed to be about Student’s project. Student considered taking up knitting instead of writing.

This scenario happens more often than it should. Even seasoned writers latch on to what they believe is genuine enthusiasm for a project, only to learn that their stuff was never really in the running. Once I sent a novel to an editor I know personally, who requested my work and was excited to read an historical by me. A week later Editor claimed the company was only looking for contemporary novels. Say what?

Maybe we all need a rating system to gauge Editors’ reactions, something like the old American Bandstand TV dance show. Songs, not dancers, were evaluated by participants who rated rock and roll classics on stuff like “the beat,” “danceability” and other properties. An editor could respond to my proposal or manuscript on a scale from one to ten, ten being “your story is cool and I will try to get it through committee.” A five would indicate, “Your stuff is great but to be honest, this is a book I myself plan to write and you haven’t got a chance.” That I could live with.

Editors can’t afford to pass up the one story that is the next bestseller, so they cheat by feigning enthusiasm for stuff they know in advance they can’t use. And writers do their best to interpret the smallest positive response as a shoo-in for publication. I wish both would be a bit more realistic, so writers wouldn’t get their egos bruised and editors would still find the diamond among all the dirt clods. At least I’d know whether the historical that just got turned down had a good beat you could dance to.

 Linda Clare (AKA: Miss Writerly Crankypants)

Read more of Linda’s blog posts at: 

Say what?  I congratulate those industrious critters for taking on such a project, but who is Claude?  And what does this have to do with the new edition of my book, The Cancer Survival Guide: Practical Help, Spirtual Hope, that I am so busily updating?

I’m a patient person.  I gave my dragon another chance. It wrote: “The land was ravaged by her hairy slugs.”

Come on, Dragon. That’s going too far!

Perhaps I should explain. My new dragon is a speech recognition program called Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I put on a headset and speak into the microphone, and the dragon turns my dictation into typed text.  Since I have been contracted for an updated version of The Cancer Survial Guide (it is now ten years old), I jumped at the chance to read the text in rather than retype the entire book.  The program really does work well.  Most of the time.  Until the dragon belches out an unintelligible sentence such as: “Israelites laundered in the wilderness forty years.”

I have decided that my dragon simply doesn’t want me to take him for granted.  If I stay attentive and regularly take time to read over what he writes, I can easily mend his goofs.  Those church-building beavers?  What I said was, “The believers…”  And Claude?  I said “God.”   The land ravaged by hairy slugs?  Should have read,  “The land ravaged by horrendous floods.” And those laundering Israelites?  Easy mistake.  I said they “wandered in the wilderness forty years.”  (I’m sure their clothes were filthy, however, so the laundering wouldn’t have been such a bad idea!)

After two weeks together, my dragon and I have come to an understanding.  I will speak more carefully and correct him gently, and he will continue to learn from his mistakes. 

As Dragon wrote, “Give Claude flea control.”  (I said, God is in complete control.)

“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”

J.R. R. Tolkien 

At Christmas, she gave me a card with a picture of Santa and his reindeer bowing reverently before the Babe in the manger as Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the wisemen looked on.  “Is it a good card?” she asked.  “Is it American?”

Well, yes, it really was.

Inside Rika had written, in her most heartfelt American: “Best wishes for a year of health, education and welfare.”

Years later, Rika’s Christmas message was my first sell as a writer.  Kiplinger’s Changing Times paid me $25 for it.

Merry Christmas, Rika, wherever you are. 

And to everyone else, have a Blessed Christmas!

For Thanksgiving our church had brought us a gift box filled with a turkey and all the fixings. I found a twenty dollar bill tucked between the cranberry sauce and the stuffing mix. We feasted on that delicious turkey, and I hid twenty away to save for Christmas.

We knew a couple who owned a Christmas tree farm, so I got up my courage to ask if they might have a reject tree they would sell us cheap. They did.  It was small and leaned to the side, but to us it was lovely.

Twenty dollars for Christmas gifts.  I went to the local thrift store and bought my husband a shirt, my daughter a sweater, and a sweatshirt for my son. Next door, I got each of them their favorite candy bar for their stocking.

Only three dollars left.

A sudden inspiration hit me. I hurried to our local library and rifled through a huge selection of donated books—paperbacks: 15 cents each or four for a dollar. I bought twelve.

Our tradition has always been to label the wrapped gift from some name that would give a hint to what’s in the gift without giving away what the gift is. (For instance, a checked flannel shirt might be from Paul Bunyan.) So on each individually wrapped book I put a tag with the recipient’s name, then from Ben Franklin. (We do have him to thank for our public libraries, after all!)

My expectations for that lean Christmas morning were slim. But an amazing thing happened–everyone loved it! We all spent the day nibbling our favorite candy bars and reading by a crackling fire.

When my kids talk about their favorite Christmases, guess which one is always at the top of the list? Right!  And still today, years later, every Christmas someone gets a gift from Ben Franklin.  Just because he was there when we needed him.

“I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.”

Benjamin Franklin

An academic tool, he figured.  Maybe with business possibilities.

Who could have known?  Today, there are more than 200 million web sites.  One is mine (www.kaystrom.com ).

On behalf of writers everywhere, I say a hearty:  “Thanks, Tim!”

“The Internet is just the world passing around notes in a classroom.”

Jon Stewart

I did know Dr. Voskuyl, who also worked on the project.  He was president of the college I attended.  Years after I graduated, for my first serious piece of writing,  I interviewed him about his part in the project.

Not long ago I read about the pilot of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped that first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  The young lieutenant colonel, Paul Tibbets, watched in shock as a horrible boiling mushroom cloud enshrouded the city of Hiroshima.  Afterward he wrote these words in his journal: “My God, what have we done?”

That’s what I wanted to know back when I interviewed Dr. Voskuyl.  The question I posed to him was this:  “If you had known then what that bomb would lead to, would you still have been a part of it?”

“We did know,” he said. 

That dignified, white-haired man took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped gathering tears from his eyes. 

“We did know. But what choice did we have?”

I never wrote the article.

“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.”

~Song lyrics by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson~