Pirating is Wrong, Even if it Helps You Get the Word Out

I recently did an internet search for my book, Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them. It’s interesting to see who is using your work, and how. I often find references to it on sites for cancer patients, or quotes in speeches or sermons.

This time I found that a site I had never heard of is offering a pdf of it free. So apparently the entire book has been pirated. I have reported it to AndrewsMcMeel, the publisher. We’ll see what they are able to learn and do.

I’m caught in a dilemma, though. My purpose with that book was never to make money. I want to help cancer patients. It’s been successful at that. Just this week a university professor told me that she has been using the book for years not just with patients but in her research on how to lessen the long-term side effects on chemo patients. The late Paul K. Hamilton, Jr, MD, FAPC, the co-founder, with Lynn Ringer, of CanSurmount, called it “the best book by a cancer patient, for cancer patients, ever.” I hear regularly from patients who appreciate having the book as a companion on their cancer journey. I even had correspondence with a patient in the Czech Republic who had read the Czech translation and had enough English for us to write back and forth.

It’s a wonderful blessing to me to know that sharing my own cancer experience has helped others. I want to share with as many cancer patients, and with “those who love them,” as possible. It’s okay with me if I don’t make money from the book. But I realize that my sharing would never have been possible if AndrewsMcMeel doesn’t make money from the book, so that they can stay in business and keep publishing.

Most authors aren’t in it for the money. Very few of us depend upon writing income for our livelihood. We write because there are voices in our head that we have to get onto paper or a screen before they drive us crazy. But we also deserve the rewards, material and otherwise, that come from working, just as CEOs or garbage collectors deserve the rewards of their work.

So pirating is wrong, even if you wear an eyeshade instead of an eyepatch. Pirates don’t produce. If the people who do the producing don’t get rewarded, they can’t keep producing. The internet makes sharing possible. It also makes theft easier. Authors should search out their work from time to time to see if it is being misused.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

A Quote on Poetry from Robert Frost

Robert Frost said that each of his poems began with a lump in the throat.

Knucklers, Hummers, & Slow Curves-On Baseball Poems

A REVIEW: KNUCKLERS, HUMMERS, & SLOW CURVES: Contemporary Baseball Poems. Edited by Don Johnson. With a foreword by W.P. Kinsella.

It’s not that long ‘til spring training, and when you live where anything above zero is considered warm, it can’t come fast enough. In the meantime, you just have to read baseball poems, which I have been doing with this book edited by Don Johnson.

How can you review a book of over 100 poems? Aren’t some better than others? Well, yes. Some of these are better than others. After all, if you include Robert Penn Warren and Donald Hall and John Updike…

As I read, though, each poem gave me a faint, uneasy feeling, as when you are feeling nauseated but aren’t sure yet if you’ll throw up.

In the first place, they are too long. That, however, is minor. Many people like long poems. I like poems, though, that are short enough to memorize, so I can listen to them whenever I wish, like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

I finally figured out what it is that these poems share, and why I don’t really like this book: these poems are not really about baseball.

Uniformly, they use baseball as a front to talk about something else.

Well, isn’t that true about all poetry? Yes, but good poetry makes you think it is about only one thing while letting you experience two or more other layers at the same time.

“Casey at the Bat” is about more than a single at-bat by a famous player, and “Frosty and the Babe” obviously is, but neither Ernest Thayer nor I seemed to notice that as we wrote those poems. [1]

In a baseball poem, you need to smell the grass, taste the popcorn, hear the crowd and the crack of the bat before you move on to the relationship between a man and his son, or a girl trying to make a boys’ team, or what happens in a prison when the sun goes down.

Also there are too many poems about the Yankees!

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] The very nice “Baseball Attic” web site recently reprinted my “Frosty & the Babe” from the Baseball Almanac site, without my preface explaining that I wrote the poem for Robert Frost, since he had promised one to his friend, Albert Krymborg, but never got around to it. Baseball Attic readers speculated that the “Frosty” in the poem must have been Frosty the Snowman, despite all the references in the poem to “verse,” and “pen,” etc. So much for cultural literacy. http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in early 2015.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

SOME OF MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0  

Both a Start & a Full are good-a thought

I had an interesting discussion with a non-writer last night. I mentioned that sometimes a story, even novel-length, will appear to me completely done, from start to finish. He protested that one should write without knowing at the beginning what will happen, like life. Why one or the other? If you have only a start, start it. If you have the whole thing, complete it. 

JRMcF

What Ben Said

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin

Understanding vs Experience

“Understanding is the booby prize.” I don’t know who said it, but it’s true.

Good story-tellers go beyond understanding. They help us to experience.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.

I tweet as yooper1721.

BATHTUB FAMILIES

I went to the pharmacy. There was a sign noting that I did not have to wait for my prescription. They would text me when it was ready.

Apparently the pharmacy is trying to create writer’s block. Writers should not go off willy-nilly and wait for pharmacy texts. We should wander the aisles as we wait. Otherwise, we would not, like Billy Collins, discover “Bathtub Families,” those collections of cows and pigs and other families to keep you company in the bath, and if we do not make those discoveries, we cannot write marvelous poems about them.

Why is it that Billy Collins always discovers things like Bathtub Families before I do? No wonder I have nothing to poeticize about. Billy has already jumped on all the good trampolines for poems.

Billy and Michelangelo see with the same eyes. Michelangelo said he saw David trying to get out of that block of marble. All he had to do was chip away the parts of the block that were not David and put him into a museum in Florence. [Italy, not WI. Florence, WI, has a statue of an ice cream cone.] Billy sees a poem trying to get out of a bunch of bathtub animals. Anything he looks at, Billy sees a poem trying to get out.

Good writers see the stories trying to be told, in anything and everything. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, there is no such thing as writer’s block.

But Billy Collins,

In your fecundity,

Can’t you leave a little something

For my profundity?

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015. It tells of four homeless and handicapped Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write, once in a great while, Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0

If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml