Coals In My Stocking

Imagine "Coals In My Stocking" rinsed and repeated to a refrain from Carole King's "You're So Vain", and you will share my earworm of the day.

One cannot copyright a title, but one can trademark it.

It is quite possible that Carole King could have trademarked her metaphor involving “clouds” and “coffee” (from "You’re So Vain"), so although that line of that lovely song is in my head, I consider coals in my stockings to be a safer choice.

There’s a copyright related point or three to this. 

Use of other people's words, quotes, lyrics seems to be on several fora and copyright-related legal blogs that I have read in recent days.

Science writer John Iovine has a really succinct and helpful 5-minute read on quoting lyrics or song titles to advance your plot and/or add mood to your story.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-legally-quote-song-lyrics-in-your-stories-books-and-articles-b0e62510ed55

That particular article is also a very good example of how to give proper credit, he walks the talk (to coin a phrase.)

By the way, "to coin a phrase" is irony. 

Wise, generous and canny author Milton Trachtenburg suggests wrapping a Disney movie quote within his character's dialogue in order to avoid copyright problems.

"Like The Wicked Witch said in Wizard of Oz, 'How about a little fire, scarecrow?' You get my point?"

Presumably, there would be a "So-and-so said" tag, either before the "Like..." or after the "...point?" 

I added the italics. Personally, I would have given "Scarecrow" and upper case first character because it appears to be used in the vocative case.

Characters, or for that matter, narrators can quote old movies, and even not-so-old movies. For instance, in the movie "Man Up" it is essential to the economy of various scenes, and to giving the audience a greater insight than the characters have, that both the hero and the heroine know "Silence of the Lambs" by heart, and saying, "Quid Pro Quo, Clarice" or even "Quid Pro Quo" is a verbal ticket to getting on (well).

Similarly, the characters in the same movie appear to be completely oblivious to another interest they have in common as they argue their way through the dance moves to Duran Duran's "Reflex".

My remarks plus text links come under fair use for commentary/reportage/critique/review.

The copyrightalliance has a very helpful article on how to legally use images, videos and the written text of others in blogs. 

https://copyrightalliance.org/legally-use-images-videos-content-blogs/

 

Crystal Everson, JD, for Legal Zoom explains the difference between parody versus satire.  Parody is the use of someone else's original work in order to comment on it, or criticize it. Most copyright owners do not like being the butt of someone else's humor, or vitriol, so are unlikely to grant permission. So, there is a Fair Use exemption. Satire, not so much, because with satire, one uses one person's work to poke fun at another. 

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/parody-vs-satire-in-copyright-law

It is an important distinction, and the article is well worth reading.

For anyone wondering where coals or clouds fit in at all, there's Disney, to wit, #DisneyMustPay. SFWA appears to be spearheading an effort to stand up for Science Fiction and Fantasy authors who may not be being paid royalties by Disney. Everyone is asked to support the principle that WritersMustBePaid by using the #DisneyMustPay hashtag, and spreading the message.

There is also the allegedly copyright-infringing "Internet Archive", but there is good news. New Zealand has paused its plans to donate foreign authors' copyrighted works without the consent of the foreign authors to the "Archive", thanks to publicity and the protests received from copyright owners.

Finally, and a propos of absolutely nothing, except perhaps that the Christmas stockings are a mixed bag, SFWA posted a great link to an article about how to make aliens and robots fight more convincingly.

https://www.sfwa.org/2021/04/20/spec-fic-fu-how-to-make-aliens-and-robots-fight-better/

All the best,

Rowena Cherry  

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/

Karen Wiesner: I Have Dreamed a Little Dream (Authors and Dream Inspiration), Part 4

I Have Dreamed a Little Dream, Part 4

by Karen Wiesner

"Believe in your dreams. They were given to you for a reason." ~Katrina Mayer

As a writer, the question I get most often is where my ideas come from a lot. While I can honestly say everywhere, more often than not, dreams play a huge role of my fiction writing. Something about that twilight between sleep and dreams is a veritable playground for imagination! Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is one of my series, in particular, in which many of the stories within it stemmed from a fragment of a dream that I was able to develop into a story. In a series of posts, I've revealed how these nightmarish gifts from the ether came to me. 

This is the final of four posts focusing on my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series and the vivid nightmares or ideas that inspired the titles.

Karen Wiesner's Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series

** Nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin is a small, secluded town called Bloodmoon Cove with volatile weather, suspicious folk…and newly awakened ghosts.

Don’t close your eyes… **

What's coming up next in the series:

One of the things I love the most as I'm developing this series is that the characters from previous books make solid (i.e. not simply "glimpses" from one book to the next) appearances in later books. Considering how small Bloodmoon Cove is and how involved they are in each other's lives, it makes sense that the developing characters would be seen all through subsequent stories. I can hardly wait to write each one of these books in order to expand the world I'm creating with them. I hope readers will also be just as excited in seeing more from this series as I am.

BONE OF MY BONE, Book 7 

(release date estimate: April 2022)

** When Bennet was eight, he fell for Ice despite how she concealed who she was and where she came from. When they were 19, she disappeared. Still grieving a year later, he's floored at her return. Her comment about "how to bury what won't stay dead" compels him to solve her mysteries. But how does a mortal fight creation's first murderer when the entity bears an immortal seal and made a pact with the devil? **

I've outlined and I'm currently writing this novel. This is a newer idea I had for the series. At the end of 2020, I couldn’t stop coming up with notes for after a very vivid dream I had of the first “scene” in the story. I already had the title and had some very loose ideas about the story before I had the dream. At that point, I was sure that, with this much material, I could move right into outlining it. Past experience has taught me that, if I can complete an outline, I always know I can write the story. If I can't outline it, I'll either take it off my list of Works in Progress or simply reschedule the release date and work on it at a later time, when hopefully I'm more inspired after a great deal of time trying to brainstorm new ideas for it.

LOST AND FOUND, A Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series 2-in-1 including "Lost", Book 8, and "Found", Book 9 

** "Lost": Damaris remembers nothing of the past 48 hours. A retired couple found her in their woods. Their remodeling efforts uncover a hidden enclosure that cages what they don't dare set free.

"Found": What does a lifelong bachelor do when the woman of his dreams steps into his sanctuary and he finds all he's been missing…but revealing the truth behind their meeting could tear them apart for all time? ** 

The main characters in both books (I'm unsure whether they'll be novellas or novels at this point) will work for the library, so LOST AND FOUND was a great title that played on that. The idea for "Lost" came from a nightmare I'd had about a woman whose car broke down on the edge of the woods and she woke up in a cabin deep in the woods owned by an older couple without technology who are digging up something in the basement of their home. The idea for "Found" came about when my sister was talking about a story she wanted to write about a ghost in a library. 

HELL HATH NO FURY, Book 10

(release date estimate: April 2023)

** Eager to get a cake decorating business up and running, Isabelle inherits an old house in Bloodmoon Cove that seems like a boon…until she pieces together the tragic story of a poor immigrant who lived in this house and the woman he scorned. When Kesara committed suicide over his rejection, her heart-broken mother plotted revenge. Newly awakened to the legacy Isabelle has inherited, two ghosts plan to finish what they started a hundred years before. **

This story came from another dream I had about a young immigrant who came over to America because of lack of opportunity in his own country and fell in love with the daughter of the man who employed him. The bakery angle with the man's ancestor being willed the house the immigrant and his wife lived in wove itself into the story, given my love for TV shows focused on baking.

 

HAUNTED LEGACY, Book 11

(release date estimate: October 2023)

** After a teenage pregnancy, Danielle and Andy unsuccessfully made a go of marriage. After the split, Andy started a business while Dani’s art career took off with the help of Douglas Marx, whose reputation is spoken of in the same hushed tones as black magic. When Doug invites her to join him in Bloodmoon Cove, Dani notices a painting that haunts her as the figure in the painting becomes familiar—more and more like her own… **

The idea for this story has been with me for many, many years, titled for most of that time GILDED PROMISES and a contemporary romance without any supernatural aspects. I had the idea to make the story a suspense with Dani’s art agent being a villain. A little later, the painting I had in the outline I'd started (though never finished) made me wonder how I could make this a supernatural kind of story. I love Susan Hills THE MAN IN THE PICTURE, and who isn't deeply disturbed by Oscar Wilde's THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY? I wanted to put a paranormal spin on my original idea, and merging it into my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series seemed natural. The title changed, stemming from the concept that not only would Dani’s agent be a villain but he would have a supernatural aid in his villainy—a painting handed down from father to son for generations that “captures” and drains the life from a victim, thereby transferring it to this creature.

ELDRITCH JUSTICE, Book 12

(release date estimate: January 2024)

** Rafe Yager (of CROOKED HOUSE, Book 3) has settled in Bloodmoon Cove with his wife Corinne. Given his former ghost hunting, he can't put aside his paranormal past as easily as he'd like to. He's been following the trail of a law firm that caters to the dead with unfinished business. His quest leads to the sinister Thoth, scribe of the underworld and Ma'at, justice personified …and the weighing of his own heart on the scale against the feather of truth. **

Rafe and Cori's story started in CROOKED HOUSE, but I wasn't ready to let go of them when I was finished with that tale, nor of an intriguing plot thread that actually started earlier in the series about a lawyer that caters to the dead with unfinished legal business (RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR, Book 4).

GHOSTLY TALES FROM ERIE COUNTY including "Bad Blood", "Dead Man's Road", "The Haunting of Desolation Cottage", "Keeper of Grimoire", "Cappy's Cupid", and "The Ancient One"

(release date estimate: October 2024)

** Short, haunted stories set in Bloodmoon Cove and Grimoire, Erie County, Wisconsin. **

I knew as soon as I conceived of Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series that I'd want to do a collection of ghost short stories with the volume covering some of the early years of the town as well as following up on the previous novels. The characters--main and secondary--introduced in all that came before will make appearances in the shorts.

Dreaming fragments of a story has happened to me so many times now that I've taken to having a tablet and pen in my nightstand so I can write down everything I remember immediately after waking up. The longer I wait, the more chance I'll forget something that will drift back into the twilight, never to be grasped again. I never know when these pieces might become full-fledged stories. Sometimes it feels a lot like I'm making lemons into lemonade with these gifts from the ether, but isn't that the essence of what being a writer is?

Do you have a pen and paper by your bedside just in case you wake from a compelling dream and need to write it down fast, before it floats away? Leave a comment to tell me about it!

Find out more about Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series here:

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBJ7XP

Happy reading!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner

ChessieCon 2021

For the second year in a row, the Baltimore-area ChessieCon was held online instead of in person. (Not long before the scheduled date, we lost our hotel, which became a quarantine facility.) I was mildly anxious about the procedure for this con because it looked more complicated than last year's set-up, when members could just drop in to join a Zoom meeting anytime. This year, we had to register in advance for any session we wanted to "attend," and registration was locked when a panel began. To my relief, though, everything worked smoothly, easier than I'd expected. The system allowed me to sign up for my whole weekend's choices at once. Having registered, I received individual e-mails with the "room" link for each session, and it didn't matter if I started watching a few minutes into the time slot. It was only the registration itself that was "locked."

I always enjoy the musical events at ChessieCon. This year I watched two performances, Roberta Rogow (filk) and Bob and Sue Esty, formerly of the group Clam Chowder (mostly folk). I was especially glad Roberta Rogow sang one of my favorite of her standard pieces, "Schindler's List," which always brings me to tears.

Topics of panels I watched all or part of: Immortals in fiction; "A Century of Robots"; Native American mythology and lore in fantasy; pandemics in history and literature; creating gods for a fictional universe; portal stories. As one would expect from convention panels, many provocative questions were raised with no definitive answers reached. Fun! Panels also offer chances to learn about books one might not have read or even heard of.

Aside from the music, my favorite session was a lecture on mass extinctions—definition, types, consequences—delivered by Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist from the University of Maryland. He was an informative, lucid, and entertaining speaker, whose presentation included a lavish array of charts and colorful slides. I've bookmarked his name on YouTube to view some of his other videos in the future.

While I regret missing the live con weekend of yore, a virtual convention has advantages. No rushing around like decapitated chickens to get out of the house the day after Thanksgiving. (One year we unwisely left turkey soup simmering very low all weekend, asking one of our sons to drop by and check on it. We came home to a pot of charred bones. Never again.) No need to drive anywhere or spend money on hotel rooms, meals, and dog boarding. There's one odd negative consequence of watching a con on the computer, however. When I'm home, I can't avoid doing a lot of the chores and such I would do on an ordinary weekend, so I end up "attending" fewer panels and performances than I would in person. At the hotel, the weekend is all con, all the time.

Next year in person for sure, Lord willing!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

To Review Or Not To Review....

Apologies for the bathos to Hamlet and his existential question.

 

I once wrote a review for my dentist. Then, I felt that I had to ask him to take it down. Reviewing your doctors and dentists might open the door to HIPPA violations. Of course, via ever-on GPS, your smart phone (if you have one) probably tells Apple or Android and all the businesses who track you, --and whoever provides your doctor's or dentist's office free internet-- which health care providers you probably use, but why confirm it?

 

Apparently, you should never write a review of a hotel until you have checked out of your own free will. Angela Hoy of writersweekly reports on an astonishing allegation that a certain hotel affiliated with the chain famous (or not) for advertisements featuring a large, red-bearded wizard (also a large red-bearded wizard) allegedly called the police and evicted a guest in the middle of the night after she wrote a review that offended management.

 

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/grandmother-granddaughter-kicked-out-georgia-hotel-giving-bad-review

When traveling, I write my reviews in email and save them to Draft, if I have the time and motivation. Trip Advisor used to give hotel-review writers ranking and momentary fame for reviews, but it may not be worth the hassle any more.

 

I no longer write book reviews. As a published alien romance author, with thousands of Facebook friends (last time I looked, which might have been 10 years ago), the chances are 50/50 that Amazon might censor my genuine and honest review of someone else's paperback on the unwarranted suspicion that my integrity might have been suborned by a Facebook friendship. 

 

There is an allegation that Amazon has some very creepy ways, not just regarding censorship, but also regarding privacy.  No doubt, anyone who sells advertising cannot be trusted.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-privacy-lobbying/

 

When you write a review of a hotel or service or product or practice, your review becomes a part of their advertising. That is: advertising content that you provide free.

Legal blogger Kate Dunnigan for BBB National Programs Inc. offers a business perspective on the use of user-generated reviews, which is interesting for potential review-writers. It also contains good advice for authors who might be tempted to solicit reviews from readers, or to cherry pick the good parts of mixed reviews.

https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/blog-details/insights/2021/06/23/product-reviews-in-advertising

Apparently, if one requests a favorable review, and includes an offer such as inclusion in a sweepstakes for a valuable chance to win a prize, or a coupon valid against a future purchase, the existence of an incentive ought to be disclosed when publishing the glowing reviews.

 

All the best.

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™

http://www.spacesnark.com/

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday

 

Karen Wiesner: I Have Dreamed a Little Dream (Authors and Dream Inspiration), Part 3

I Have Dreamed a Little Dream, Part 3

by Karen Wiesner

"Believe in your dreams. They were given to you for a reason." ~Katrina Mayer

As a writer, the question I get most often is where my ideas come from a lot. While I can honestly say everywhere, more often than not, dreams play a huge role of my fiction writing. Something about that twilight between sleep and dreams is a veritable playground for imagination! Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is one of my series, in particular, in which many of the stories within it stemmed from a fragment of a dream that I was able to develop into a story. In the course of the next several posts, I'll be going over how these these nightmarish gifts from the ether came to me.

This is the third of four posts focusing on my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series and the vivid nightmares or ideas that inspired the titles.

Karen Wiesner's Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series

** Nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin is a small, secluded town called Bloodmoon Cove with volatile weather, suspicious folk…and newly awakened ghosts.

Don’t close your eyes… **

RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR, Book 4 {sequel to THE BLOODMOON CURSE, Book 2}

** Back into the mouth of hell… Daniel and Hannah are newly married with their first child on the way when Hannah is bequeathed Bloodmoon Manor. After a lifetime of poverty, the wealth associated with that house appeals to her despite that she’d barely escaped it last time with her life. Daniel’s worst fears are justified. They’ve been lured here deliberately, and the horrors that haunt the manor aren’t willing to let Hannah leave ever again… **

Late into the night, I was revising THE BLOODMOON COVE for reissue as Book 2 of my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series, and I had some pretty disturbing dreams. When I woke up, I knew I had to write the story of the secondary characters, Hannah and Daniel, from that book. The sequel, RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR, was born. I always adore stories where the characters are trapped in a location that lends itself to horror and fright.

Reviews and Honors for RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR:

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

5 star review from Huntress Reviews

5 star review from Readers Favorite

5 star review from author Barbara Raffin

REUNITED, Book 5

** Twyla has spent the last three years suffering under the hands of her husband Dominic. His death gives her a new lease on life: Freedom and the chance to fall in love with her old friend Gray, now the Erie County sheriff. But her happiness isn't meant to be. Dominic's vengeful ghost followed her home and he's determined to reunite them in death and the afterlife so she never again forgets who she belongs to… **

The idea of having an abused wife whose husband comes back from the dead to haunt her came to me first. After kicking the idea around inside my head for a few days, I got a lightbulb about how to blend this into the Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series. In Book 1 of the series, BOUND SPIRITS, the hero John Kotter has a cousin he hung out with in Bloodmoon Park (which belonged to his family). Then I wondered who would best help his cousin Twyla deal with her vengeful, dead husband. I’d already written a sheriff into BOUND SPIRITS and I decided to develop Graham "Gray" Mecham into the hero of this book. When I wrote the first draft, all these things were in place, setting up for REUNITED.

When it came time to write, the story took a turn for the very disturbing, but it works in this story so well. The dark content involved an aspect of life I hope to never be truly familiar with. Honestly, while researching and outlining this book, I didn't want to do too much research. I only did what was absolutely necessary and those few items didn't take me to places I could never erase from my own mind. This is my only book that actually has a content warning on it: Contains mature content that may not be suitable for sensitive audiences. 

Reviews and Honors for REUNITED:

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

5 star review from Readers Favorite

4 star review from Huntress Reviews

HIDDEN, Book 6

** What you don't know can hurt you…

Sybilla marries her much older entrepreneur partner Tobias. Their publishing house produces a book series focused on unusual homes. After suffering memory loss about his past, Tobias inherits an isolated estate at the top of a mountain. Uncovering its mysteries becomes their next project.

The voice of a ghost urges, Find me, leading Syl to hidden rooms and the skeletons of a family desperate to escape its demons… **

HIDDEN is based on a scary dream I had over and over in the course of years, since I was a teenager. Kind of like the Vermeer's painting within a painting, in my dream the heroine has a recurring nightmare over the course of years about moving into a house where there are hidden rooms in which horrors have taken place. In this case, the house she's moving into is Howling Halls, which has been mentioned a few times in previous books in the series. It's one of the only two estates built on Bloodmoon Mountain. (The other was Bloodmoon Manor, featured in Books 1 and 4.)

In the dreams I'd had myself, we were moving into a brand new house, and as I'm unpacking, I realize that the house has so many more rooms than I remembered from when we were touring it in anticipation of buying the house. There's also a terrifying feeling of something evil in some of the new rooms. I also had some dreams about a ghostly child throwing temper tantrums and her grandmother trying to soothe her that I incorporated into this book.

I admit I was wary about writing this story. It’s the first one that I scared the crap out of myself while outlining it. I barely got any sleep those two weeks. It’s a horror, so it makes sense, but when I told my son this, he wanted to document how often horror writers actually scare themselves, lol. I figure, how can you scare anyone else if you can’t scare yourself? But in truth everyone has different levels of what scares them.

Review for HIDDEN:

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

Have you ever a recurring dream? Leave a comment to tell me about it!

Find out more about Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series here:

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBJ7XP

Happy reading!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner

Thanksgiving Day

Happy American Thanksgiving!

I recently watched a fascinating episode of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on PBS, about the Pilgrims' early years in Massachusetts, very enlightening in contrast to the simple narrative we were exposed to in elementary school. You can rent it to watch on Amazon Prime Video:

American Experience: The Pilgrims

On the opposite end of the Thanksgiving seriousness spectrum, of course there's the Charlie Brown special, celebrating all the familiar tropes from black hats with buckles to the courtship of Priscilla Alden. In the final scene, when they sing "Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother's House," Charlie Brown remarks that his grandma lives in a condo. When I was a kid, we stayed home for Thanksgiving but went to my grandmother's every year for Christmas day dinner. We rode in a car, of course, not a sleigh, and in our case the route went "along the highway and through the older neighborhoods of the city."

If you aren't familiar with Art Buchwald's hilarious column about explaining Thanksgiving to the French, which was reprinted annually for many years, take a look:

Explaining Thanksgiving to the French

As usual, ChessieCon will occur on Thanksgiving weekend. They planned on a live convention, but they lost their hotel (taken over as a quarantine facility) and couldn't arrange a new one in time. So, like last year's, this year's con will be strictly online. I'll report on it next week. They did a great job in 2020, so I trust this virtual con will be entertaining, too.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sex Toys In The Subway And Other Lowdown Delights

Immediate tease disclaimer: I blog about copyright-related issues. This is that.

Sex Toys for boys but not for girls?

How fair is that, in an advertising context, in the underground? Well, there was a law suit by Dame.com against the MTA. Apparently, the MTA's rules have or had no issue with advertisements targeting erectile dysfunctional males, but they drew the line at displaying inserts for ladies.

Among other things, Dame claimed:

“The MTA was disproportionately applying their anti sexually-oriented business clause to women’s pleasure advertisements, which is unconstitutional. They allowed erectile dysfunction advertisements to run while denying us…”

Legal blogger Jeff Greenbaum for the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC  offers legal analysis. It looks like the court may still be out (to coin a phrase) on whether MTA patrons will be treated to mind boggling illustrations of fun stuff for ladies anytime soon.  There appear to be illustrations on the fkks post.

Lexology link:  

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ab7aa941-372e-48cb-8c8e-538b29d576a8

Original link: 

https://advertisinglaw.fkks.com/post/102hbky/selling-sexual-pleasure-on-the-subway

 

The Illogic of tracking-based advertising.

Upon reading Seth Zawila's legal blog for the UK-based law firm Robins Kaplan LLP about how the UK's supreme court blocks a multi-billion class action suit, this writer's mind wandered to a personal peeve.

Lexology link: 

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c7fe7d8e-992e-4a63-a9d4-48e534c982c2

 

Original Link:  

https://www.robinskaplan.com/resources/blog-posts/2021/11/united-kingdom-supreme-court-blocks-multi-billion-dollar-class-action-suit-against-google

"The claimants alleged that Google misused the data of millions of iPhone users under the DPA by tracking user internet usage even when users were assured in notices that they would be opted out of such tracking by default."

Apparently, to pass the smell test of the supreme court in the UK (and no doubt in other supereme courts) one has to show actual, provable financial harm, not merely annoyance or exposure to the risks of identity theft.

It seems to me, the wrong people were suing.

How often have you purchased a product online (happily, voluntarily, without clicking on anyone’s ad), only to be bombarded later with adverts for the exact same product?  Where is the return on investment for whoever makes Origins Bar Pulls in paying AdNonsense to show ads to a client who has no further interest in buying more of what they already bought? 

Once one has made a purchase, paid reminders are a waste of the producer’s budget. They can lawfully and appropriately email the customer directly.

Why not further personalize the obvious result of purchaser-stalking by posting “Thank you, Rowena Cherry, for buying 30 of these exact bar pulls. We hope you don’t return them! (As you did the Glide-Rites).”

It would have made more sense if Celeste had stalked me with ads in the footer of an online newsletter.

I wonder whether authors who pay Facebook and their like for pay per view targeted ads are wasting their marketing budget in similar fashion? Perhaps one should pay for click-throughs, and not for "impressions". 

Bar pulls, by the way are not sex toys. In no way do they resemble a Prince Albert piercing.... but one simply had to get that (link) in.  One will do it again. 

https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/27/prince-albert-piercing-7502229/

Does mentioning a couple of products make this writer an influencer?  Highly doubtful! For a start, one is not being paid, and one receives no perquisites.

Bad??? Influencers:

https://www.squirepattonboggs.com/-/media/files/insights/publications/2021/11/brands-influencer-marketing-practices-in-regulators-crosshairs-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic/brandsinfluencermarketingpracticesbrocure.pdf

An international ensemble cast at Squire Patton Boggs has developed an 8-page .pdf about the influence of influencers, and on what regulators are cracking down. Or should that be "down on what regulators are cracking"?  That sounds too Yoda to be natural.

The lawyerly writers on influence peddling of the marketing kind are Marisol C. Clark, Daniel Carlton, Alan L. Fricl, Rosa Barcelo, Kyle R. Dull, Natasha Marie (none of whom to my knowledge have anything to do with anything seamy-/sex toy-/or subway-related other than a familiarity with what is in the regulators crosshairs). For businesses they dryly and most professionally recommend a comprehensive review of online advertising practices.  (One agrees.)

Problems with regulators mostly result from misleading advertisements or claims, or from misleading by omission.

Writing as a questionable logomanic, this writer would say that almost ALL advertisements by their very nature meet the definition quoted by Squire Patton Boggs lawyers of causing the average consumer to take a transactional decision that they would not otherwise have taken.

Weaselly words and claims abound on television.  So, too, does execrable grammar. More of that another time.  A great deal of good would be done for literacy and education if advertisements were required to be copy-edited by a grammarian. Moreover, for the sake of critical thinking, rather than the government suing advertisers, there ought to be community service spots parsing some of the adverts. It would be far more amusing.

For instance, ranting a tad here, if a new Medicare Part C program offered crowns, caps, implants, bridges, deep root scaling and/or planing, they would surely say so.

Thus when a very attractive nonogenarian male croons at you about fillings, extractions and dentures, and so much more, you should realize that you are getting Amish level dental coverage free with your seductive-sounding plan.

On the other hand, some of these FRRRREEEEE  programs being advertised with benefits varying by zip code appear to be very thinly veiled income redistribution program. Color me critical.

Critical thinking is a valuable defense against the dark arts of advertising.

By the way, SFWA and AG are probably still offering LIG Insurance consultations to SFWA members.

https://www.ligmembers.com/sfwa/

Parting word:

Delightful word of the day: logorrhea

If you know someone who likes both words and poop jokes, pass it on.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Karen Wiesner: I Have Dreamed a Little Dream (Authors and Dream Inspiration), Part 2

I Have Dreamed a Little Dream, Part 2

by Karen Wiesner

"Believe in your dreams. They were given to you for a reason." ~Katrina Mayer

As a writer, the question I get most often is where my ideas come from a lot. While I can honestly say everywhere, more often than not, dreams play a huge role of my fiction writing. Something about that twilight between sleep and dreams is a veritable playground for imagination! Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is one of my series, in particular, in which many of the stories within it stemmed from a fragment of a dream that I was able to develop into a story. In the course of the next several posts, I'll be going over how these these nightmarish gifts from the ether came to me.

This is the second of four posts focusing on my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series and the vivid nightmares or ideas that inspired the titles.

Karen Wiesner's Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series

** Nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin is a small, secluded town called Bloodmoon Cove with volatile weather, suspicious folk…and newly awakened ghosts.

Don’t close your eyes… **

BOUND SPIRITS, Book 1

** As a child, Esme was kidnapped and locked in a cold, dark basement. Her friends were rodents, insects, and the changeable terror that held her hostage. The only thing that kept her sane those nightmare years were her books. She’s been on the run since her escape a few months ago, never expecting to find another bound spirit come back to life. **

I’d wanted to write a ghost story for a long time—inspired after reading THE WOMAN IN BLACK and THE MAN IN THE PICTURE by Susan Hill (actually, nearly any ghost story written by her). I love that atmospheric kind of story with almost a gothic horror edge. After brainstorming over the course of many months, I came up with the idea of having the ghost story in a very unlikely place—a campground/county park. As soon as the setting was established, I thought, In fiction, what is a ghost but a bound spirit? Well, that gave me a great idea about having a heroine who’d been kidnapped as a child and held captive for most of her life until her escape. So…another bound spirit.

Reviews and Honors for BOUND SPIRITS:

5 star review and Reviewer's Top Pick from Readers Favorite

5 star review from Huntress Reviews

5 star review from Harriet Klausner

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

5 star review from author Jenna Whittaker

5 star review from author Barbara Custer

4 star review from RT Book Reviews

4 star review from The Romance Reviews

4 star review from author Marilyn Byerly

THE BLOODMOON CURSE, Book 2

** An unsuspecting nurse is lured to an ancient family mansion said to hold both ghosts and horrifying secrets in order to care for three orphaned children. Amberlyn was brought to Bloodmoon Manor to uphold the family legacy. Either she finds a way to escape with the children…or she becomes the next bloodmoon bride. **

Way back when I first got the idea for writing this book, my intention was to write a “modern gothic”. Everyone laughed at this because it’s like an oxymoron. But I wanted to write something with the palpable atmosphere you find in old fashioned gothics, only I wanted to put it in a more modern setting. I also loved the idea of putting the heroine in a place where she was basically trapped, no way in or out.

Reviews and Honors for THE BLOODMOON CURSE:

2006 Dream Realm Award Finalist

2006 eCataromance Reviewer’s Choice Award Nominee

2015 BTS Red Carpet Reader's Choice Award Nominee

5 star review from Huntress Reviews

5 star review from Fallen Angel Reviews

Fallen Angel Reviews Recommended Read Award

5 star review from EuroReviews

5 star review from Sime~Gen

5 star review from eCataromance

5 star review from Gotta Write Network

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

5 star review from The Romance Reviews

4 1/2 star review from Once Upon a Romance

4 1/2 star review from The Romance Studio

4 star review from BTSemag

CROOKED HOUSE, Book 3

** Some doors, once opened, can never be closed again… Corinne has become the heir of her dead husband's family estate. Crooked House lives up to its disturbing name, as does the last of the line who disappears so often she could believe he's a ghost. But to believe is to accept the claims of ghost hunter, Rafe Yager: The longer she stays in Crooked House, the less chance she'll ever leave. **

The basis of CROOKED HOUSE, Book 3 of my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series, was formed when, in a dream, I saw a woman visiting some obscure relative of her brand-new husband. The house was weird and creepy, to say the least. When I woke up, I decided to merge bits of this with an idea I'd been toying with them about having the hero's sister in THE BLOODMOON CURSE be the heroine in another “modern gothic”. I was going to send Janine to some obscure relative, kind of like in Naomi A. Hintze’s novel YOU'LL LIKE MY MOTHER, a favorite story when I was a teenager. I’d planned to name it THE FAMILY or CROOKED HOUSE, both of which inspire something menacing in the right genre. I was also playing a horror video game around that time that gave me some ideas about getting stuck in a house inhabited with ghosts and other menacing supernatural creatures sucking out human physical energy.

CROOKED HOUSE has a lot of the classic elements of a ghost story--vengeful ghost, haunted house, tough-guy hero and vulnerable heroine--with some unique twists and turns in the form of a cursed ring, a novice white-witch best friend who literally has no idea what she's doing, a ramshackle house in Bloodmoon Cove serving as a portal into the spirit world, along with a reluctant ghost hunter that's one of the last descendants of the (fictional) Mino-Miskwi Native American tribe whose elders disappeared during a ritual at their sacred place at the top of Bloodmoon Mountain a hundred years ago. That ritual ripped a hole in the mountain and let loose a flood of spirits that haunt Erie County.

This is funny and a little creepy real life event, but I live in an old Dutch Colonial style house (think “Amityville Horror”). Since we moved in this house, we've had what we call demon flies (which are something I wrote into CROOKED HOUSE). Literally, we’ll kill one and another one…or a dozen…will appear a second later. I once closed myself into our small sunroom, closed all the windows, and put towels under the door to prevent the flies from escaping. Then I proceed to kill them one right after the other. This went on for ten minutes or so, and I must have had a hundred dead flies in the room with me. I suddenly got freaked out because this was completely unnatural and terrifying. I fled the room and didn’t go back into it for a long time afterward. Incidentally, we're said to live in the most haunted house in our town and the unexplained spirit(s) that keeps messing with our electronics could be the reason why. I'm only mostly joking there.

Reviews and Honors:

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

4 star review from Readers Favorite

4 star review from Huntress Reviews

Have you ever been in a house reputed to be haunted? Leave a comment to tell me about it!

Find out more about Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series here:

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBJ7XP

Happy reading!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner

Bird Brains

Research published in the journal SCIENCE in 2020 raises the possibility that crows have mental abilities formerly thought of as restricted to our species and other higher primates:

Crows Are Self-Aware

It's been known for a while that corvids (crows, ravens, jays, etc.), like monkeys and apes, use tools and recognize faces. These birds bring gifts to people they like and never forget people who injure or offend them. Experiments show, however, that they also apparently think about their own thoughts. A brain structure called the pallium, performing the same function as the cerebral cortex in mammals, holds densely packed neurons in greater quantity than in even some much larger animals such as elephants. This arrangement makes up for the smaller body and brain size of birds. The firing of neurons in the crows' brains during the experiment described in the article suggests that crows think about problems in somewhat the same way we do.

Parrots are highly intelligent, too. They don't just "parrot" human speech but often utter words in the proper context, such as asking for what they want or saying "Hello" when people arrive but not when they leave. As the famous African Grey named Alex demonstrated, parrots can work with numbers, too. They also pass some intelligence tests on the same level as five-year-old children:

Parrots Pass Classic Test of Intelligence

Here's a Wikipedia article on bird intelligence:

Bird Intelligence

For me, one exciting implication of these facts is that we now realize an animal doesn't require a large brain to be intelligent. Sapient aliens on other planets wouldn't have to resemble us in size or shape. Imagine a world dominated by brainy birds. With wings instead of arms, birds have limitations on their ability to use tools. What if they evolved with six limbs, though, like all the higher animals in the manga series A CENTAUR'S LIFE? Birds on a planet where the standard higher-life-form body plan includes six limbs rather than four could have legs, wings, and hands. Thus they could develop a civilization with material artifacts recognizable to us as products of higher intellect.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt