Nadia Lee :: Romance Writer

I happened to see a hilarious post by The Rejectionist:

FOR GOD'S SAKE PEOPLE IF YOU WERE SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OLD AND REALLY GOOD-LOOKING AND HAD SUPERPOWERS AND A BAZILLION DOLLARS WOULD YOU REALLY BE FARTING AROUND HIGH SCHOOLS AND WASTING YOUR TIME IN ALGEBRA II NO YOU WOULD NOT. YOU WOULDN'T. SO PLEASE WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE NOW. JUST DO IT FOR THE FUCKING ASSISTANT, OKAY? THINK OF IT AS COMMUNITY SERVICE.

Her frustration is palpable. And why not? How many times do you need to take high school-level algebra before you really get it?

Eight things my awesome 700 year-old vampire would do

1. Secretly lead a vampire worshipping cult.
2. Eradicate vampire hunters.
3. Have a harem of hot chicks, who he all loves equally.
4. Own Wall Street. Make Goldman Sachs look positively angelic and amateurish by comparison.
5. Own the media.
6. Own the Internet.
7. Control the world's superpower governments and politicians.
8. Rule the universe with an iron fist.

What would your awesome 700 year-old vampire do?

Got a book coming out soon? Want to pimp your favorite authors, books and/or TV shows? Or just want to chat about what interests you the most?

Here's your chance. I don't usually open my blog up for guest bloggers -- actually this is my first time, but I've decided to have guest bloggers from August 3 - August 13. You don't have to be a writer to guest blog, and I won't allow blatant 100% pure unadulterated self-promotion.

Possible Topics:

If you're a writer:

• How I write
• How I revise
• How I plot
• Cool Things I Learned While Writing (my latest release, etc.)

If you're a reader / writer / neither of the above:

• Why you should try (author, book, series, TV show, hobby [such as knitting, etc.], product and/or service you like) -- You may not pimp your own books, products and services, but you can pimp your friends' if you'd like.
• My Favorite Summer Spots (or Winter for those of you in the southern hemisphere)
• Why I like (genre, season or anything else)
• Things you wish were different
• How to's -- recipes, tips, etc.
• Anything else that you feel strongly about (except politics and/or religion!)

In return for your time and effort I'll:

• Put your name in my monthly message (along w/ a link to your website or blog [or other social media profiles you have any] if applicable) on my main page for the entire month of August.
• Put your guest post on my main index page (not just the blog page) for 24 hours.
• Put your cover graphic up (just one....sorry...!).
• Put your byline (a short bio, etc.).

Please leave a comment and/or contact me via email.

Thanks!

P.S. I already have five or so people interested. I'd love five more. Thanks!

You must must must must must get all html, css & graphic files, etc. from your designer even if s/he uploads them to a server for you. This is especially important if you haven't bought your own hosting service and therefore don't have ftp access information, etc.

If you don't do this AND your designer disappears on you and/or you don't want to use her to make every little change (or god forbid, your designer is an a-hole who's decided to hijack your site and hold it for ransom), you are totally screwed unless you're tech savvy. 99.9% of people are probably doomed to go through the horrible time-consuming exercise of getting all their files back by using the "view source code" command on their browser. And they better hope that their designer didn't code in PHP because PHP sourcecode is hidden if you access the file via a browser.

Remember: html, css, graphics files (jpg, gif, etc.) should be a part of the deliverables. You paid for them, so you're entitled to them. Specify this clearly when you hire someone.

BTW -- the list of designers I can now recommend has dwindled even more. In case you're wondering, I wholly recommend Frauke from CrocoDesigns and Tara O'Shea from Fringe Element. I've worked with them both, and they're excellent professionals. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them in any way.)

I was going to blog about something else, but I just couldn't stop myself from saying something about the ridiculous situation in Bell, CA.

In case you didn't know, California and all its cities are suffering from massive budget shortfalls. In Bell's case, it appears that the obscene pay to public officials is a big contributing factor to the budget crisis.

LA Times reports in two parts:

www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bell-cuts-20100727,0,5834864.story

The report shows that community services, including social services and recreation programs, were cut by 21%, or $593,438, while public safety took a 3.7% hit, or $228,888. Police training was whacked by 58%.

The salaries of [City Admin Officer] Rizzo, [Police Chief] Adams and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia are equal to about 10% of Bell's $15.9-million general fund budget.

www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bell-salaries-20100727,0,1970663.story

...the city's top officials received some of the highest municipal wages in the nation. City Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo made $787,637 a year, almost twice the salary of President Obama; Police Chief Randy Adams made $457,000, 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck; and Assistant City Manager Spaccia made $376,288, more than the top administrator for Los Angeles County.

All three resigned last week.

I really hope it doesn't end with their resignations because it's an empty gesture.

They got to keep their ridiculous pay (almost twice what we pay our commander-in-chief!) and as far as I can tell, they'll be able to get their pensions when they reach retirement age. This is the biggest F-you to the people Rizzo, Adams and Spaccia can come up with on their way out. (Oh, BTW -- Rizzo has been collecting that big pay from the city for fifteen years!)

And to further illustrate how outrageous their pay was -- the population of Bell is about 38,000. No, that's not a typo. It's only 38,000.

If Bell had paid just those three half of what they made, the city would've saved $810,462.50 this year. That's enough to preserve the funding for community services for the residents, and it would have almost no impact on the funding level for public safety. Now this is just those three. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars could've been saved if the city hadn't overpaid other public official fat cats.

Nothing short of a full investigation, and new laws with claw-back features will stop public officials from pulling this kind of stunt again.

I've been on a bit of a YA reading binge recently. Okay, that really means I read like four YAs in a row, which to some of you may not be a lot, but is to me, especially since I'm in the midst of a big brain-draining revision. (I love revision, though it's grueling, thank you very much!)

Anyway, in some of them, the setup of the world (I read mostly paranormal and/or SF YAs) makes me snort out loud. It's primarily because the authors say their world has this set of rules or that, but none of them adequately address the unintended consequences of each set of rules.

Since I'm feeling lazy, I'll copy-paste Wikipedia's definition:

In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not (or not limited to) the results originally intended by a particular action. The unintended results, not recognized by the actor, may be positive or negative. The concept has long existed, but was named and popularised in the 20th century by the American sociologist, Robert K. Merton. The law of unintended consequences is an adage or idiom warning that an intervention in a complex system invariably creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.

...

Unintended consequences can be grouped into roughly three types:

• a positive unexpected benefit, usually referred to as serendipity or a windfall.
• a negative unexpected drawback, occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy - e.g. while irrigation schemes do provide people with water for agriculture, they often increase waterborne disease which can a have a devastating negative health effect, such as schistosomiasis.
• a perverse effect, that may be contrary to what was originally intended (i.e. when an intended solution to a problem only makes the problem worse). This situation can arise when a policy has a perverse incentive and causes actions contrary to what is desired.

Every new policy and rule almost always changes the characters' individual motivators and artificially creates winners and losers. For a example, outsourcing manufacturing in the States made a lot of goods very cheap, so consumers won, but many who worked in factories in America lost their jobs. (This is a big oversimplification, but you get the idea.) The new economic dynamics caused a strong downward pressure on blue-collar workers' wages and standard of living, among various other unintended consequences.

So I find it hard to buy into a scenario when every new rule, etc. does exactly what it was designed to do. It feels like the author just doesn't understand how economic incentives work or doesn't want to dig deeper than the surface.

P.S. As for the cartoon...I kinda feel that way about the way our government officials tried to help the small folks on Main Street.