I wondered why this has come to pass. Is it because of the inefficiency in the regulated process, the bureaucracy, the backlog, the biased decision making – all factors that have sent people underground? Have we as buyers and sellers lost faith in the establishment? When governments and banks around the world start failing suddenly, as we have seen in alarming frequency since 2008, it’s no small wonder that people start looking after themselves first, on their own terms. And when governments keep saying that they want to be “less government,” then they are unconsciously signalling that they wish for less tax revenues.

Much of the regulated system is determined on the honour principle: the onus is on us as taxpayers and consumers to declare our incomes, our assets and how we obtained them, in order to be assessed fairly, and as faith in a regulated society wanes, and cheating the system becomes endemic and acceptable, and when governments renege on election promises, there is a strong compulsion to avoid declaring that hand. The black market becomes a sign of self-reliance without an interest in a public handout (or is that now called a bailout?)

Consider the flip side: would an economy – regulated and unregulated sectors combined – be as robust if everything was regulated? Would regulation kill creativity? Take the internet – the last bastion of unregulated enterprise it seems, or is it, with a battle raging today to muzzle and censor it? Would e-commerce have grown so rapidly had the internet been regulated from its inception? Would a regulated internet become just an information power grid and cease to be an incubator of new business models?

It seems to me that these two opposing market systems exist in a symbiotic relationship, each giving rise to the other’s existence, each taking pot shots at the other, each demanding the other to be creative. More regulation creates a black market and when these black markets get out of hand, that brings in more regulation. And the sum of the two is greater than the two halves.

Viewed from a historical context these two rivals have existed since trade began. Regulation was identified with those who were deemed to have legitimacy of government, however corrupt or immoral that government, from the time of ancient despotic kings to modern megalomaniacal dictators; both operate under the principles of “Might is Right.”

Makes one wonder whether the unregulated market is always wrong and the regulated one always right, or is it the other way around? Perhaps an economy split 50:50 between the two, scary though it sounds, may be best to keep these two sectors jostling each other and raising the wealth of nations as a result.

Therefore, do we need a black market? It seems so, if at least to keep the two halves of the economy honest. Ironic, isn’t it?

Make your world – by Linda LaRoche

This week I had a former student ask me if he could use the title of my book. I pointed out how as a native-English speaker, he could come up with his own title. I neglected to point out that I’ve had a copyright on it with the Library of Congress since 2008. As an exercise in my creative writing class on characterization, I read students a sample paragraph and asked them to write on the facial features of a character they know well. Some choose to use the same words in the same context I had read aloud. The problem is, we tend to be blind to our own mistakes — and without a teacher or an editor, we keep making the same ones over again!
According to the Global Language Monitor, published May 18, 2011, there are over one million words in the English language. And while I understand that many works of art are derivative, such as a blog, where we link to one another, commenting on something that has been said or done by someone else, adding our bit of wisdom, but borrowing from one another, I ask– where is original thought?
Art is a noble quest. I know a few writers who won’t read while they in are in a writing mode just so they can be assured that their words are uniquely their own. I’m a believer that as part of the race of man we share some of the same creative ideas on the spiritual plane. But how we choose to interpret what is in us makes us distinct and adds style. Good writing involves a love of language. Using your own words comes down to original thought. A thought is tied to a string of personal memories, biased and uniquely yours: original in every sense. And isn’t creativity whereby a person creates something new from what is inside them?
It takes work to reconsider what you are trying to say. It involves the need to improve the content of your material, looking for a whole new aspect of the issue, and in the end, to express it in a fresh way. The Creator has a Master Plan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVLS6muw1k

What is this zone? It’s a storehouse of memories and impressions created from any and all of the following occurrences: a moment of stress or loss, a change of scene, a thought provoking piece of art, a book, a movie or play, a song, a promotion, a demotion, a firing, an illness, a transgression, a relationship, a cataclysmic social event, a birth or a death. Sometimes, a hidden voice gives us something brand new, something we have never experienced, a bonus for our enjoyment; we like to call that imagination.

How does one enter the zone? Although this storehouse comprises our personal collection of life experiences, we are not automatically granted access. There has to be a preparedness before the door opens, a willingness to go inward without holding back, with the Blackberry switched off, and with an acceptance that not all the artefacts within are necessarily pleasurable to handle.

What do we do with the contents of our inspiration zone? Not all can be shared, for not all will benefit mankind, therefore why share them? Besides, events need to be embellished, polished, sequenced and arranged so that they tell a coherent tale and yield a valuable lesson. This is the price for entering, for what is gathered needs to be deciphered and communicated. And this is not easy, for the moment this composition is out in the public domain it is subject to the slings, arrows and plaudits of an uncaring audience. This is sometimes like a road to Gethsemane with no reward in sight. The only reward is the inward journey that enriches the soul.

It is less painful to take the easy way out, to never open this door, and live the unexamined life. Some who take that route are known to have sudden heart attacks, suffer neuroses, jump off tall buildings, go on a rampage, or simply drink themselves into an early grave. Those who brave into the inspiration zone do not suffer any less, for they too are known to engage in self –destructive activities, but their demons are exposed to the world, and through the act of unburdening and sharing, healing may be expected, though not always granted. This latter category is usually labelled “writer.”

As 2012 dawns, the year in which great change is predicted from way back at the time of the Mayans, where do you want to play? Are you prepared to enter through the door into your inspiration zone or do you want to leave it for another generation to discover?

The year is almost over and it’s that time again of frantic shopping and binge merriment, of meeting people you haven’t seen since, well, last Christmas; a time of false camaraderie, of debt accumulation, of non-ending festive music, of crowds in malls and elevated blood pressure levels drowned out by copious quantities of eggnog and other spirits. Amidst this madness, I try to take stock each year of where we have come as a species and where we seem to be headed.

In 2011, the world rocked for a second time on the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility, with Western Europe descending into its deepest economic crisis since WWII. Even the mighty BRIC nations are beginning to feel the slowdown in this connected world. The stock market behaved like a manic depressive. In another part of the world, the rocking was physical, when a giant earthquake/tsunami devastated Japan and reduced real estate prices near any nuclear facility in the world to a fraction of their former glory (we weren’t immune even in our small town by a lake in Canada, ringed by nuclear plants). In the Middle East, dictators fell like nine pins, ousted by a populace drunk on freedom but with no plans for ordered democracy and growth. Equally directionless, mobs stormed Wall Street and other financial centres to occupy public parks and achieve nothing but to register their protest; they left after being ingloriously ejected for causing civil disturbances, trailing broken reputations and human detritus in their wake. The workplace began to look more like a Dickensian workhouse, replete with exploited labour, Scrooge-like capitalists and hyper-specialization reducing humans to robots. Traditional news organizations wrestled with scandals over phone spying, and leaked documents from corporations and governments were being dumped on the internet for public entertainment. The traditional publishing industry cracked wide open with online retailers grabbing bigger pieces of the pie. Oh my, what upheaval!

Are we nearing the end of days, as the pessimists and evangelists constantly remind us? Have we mismanaged all iterations of human progress and dragged ourselves down into the mud from whence we came? Is the dystopian picture in my novel After the Flood coming true?

Then I tried to look on the brighter side. Africa made a comeback after decades of war, drought, pestilence, genocide and famine to clinch the top spot for growth over the next decade. The PIIGS (the second I is for Italy) of Europe realized that taxes, if paid, collected and spent wisely, do make sense and provide for a better standard of living. Citizen journalism came of age when the quality of articles continued to improve, diversify and outpace content from traditional channels (my journalist friends will disagree with me here) and social media actually led to the fall of corrupt governments. Authors reclaimed ground by embracing direct publishing models and sticking it to gatekeepers. And our troops came home for Christmas after removing themselves from that absurd theatre war in Afghanistan. Small credits to balance this ledger from its sharp tilt towards the right.

Merry Christmas everyone! Now that you have read this, do return to your Christmas busyness, it helps keep the bogeyman at bay. And please remember to raise an extra glass for global enlightenment in 2012.

I’m going shopping!

Those who say “yes” have more fun – by Linda La Roche
August 11, 2011

How do we make that scary leap from thinking about writing to actually doing it?

Now, I cannot claim to be a total expert on this. There are many things that I’d like to do/am in the process of doing that may never fall under the done heading. Hiking in Nepal, taking flying lessons, and competing in a triathlon to name a few. However, I do have a decent track record of actually completing a good number of the seemingly improbable things that I set out to do. Here’s what has worked for me:

Write it down, and start mapping your path
A jump-start is by putting pen to paper as one of the best ways to make things happen. It’ll start to seem realistic when you look at it on paper. Taking it further helps even more; research, and start compiling the information that will bridge the gap between what’s inside your head and what’s not.

Blast it
Tell everybody about it! Anybody worth knowing will be excited for you and feed your enthusiasm. Also, you’ll be a less likely to back out of your plan because everyone you know will be asking you about it. Shame can be a great motivator.

Spend money on it
Most will be exponentially more likely to complete a goal that they spend money on. It’s a great step towards getting there.

Make it irreversible
Now that you’re making tendrils of progress, keep going. When you’re really serious about something and you know intuitively, that it’s the right choice, don’t allow yourself the luxury of a backup plan. I once bought a one-way, non-refundable ticket to Europe expecting to stay six months and instead it turned into three years. Be courageous! By putting yourself at the mercy of fate you are going to have so much fun!

Doing begets more doing
I’ve found that action begets more action. Once you’ve published your novella, you know that you are capable of moving to Hong Kong on your own, or learning to speak Hindi, and you can’t be deterred from starting an import business–all these things are totally doable, you go-getter, you!

Freelance writer, Linda LaRoche teaches Creative Writing and Blogging at College of Southern Nevada and continuing education classes at UNLV. Her last two multi-cultural novels and collection of short stories portray a heartfelt tale of liberation, desperation, and the grip of love.
Find out more by visiting: http://www.lindalaroche.com/blog
And join the discussion on her blog, the Quill.

No two ways about it
February 8, 2011
In my classes I was recently asked two questions, “When did you know you were a writer?” And, “Is that all you do, write?” They are identity questions, self-worth questions, fulfillment and personal freedom questions–a nascent creative soul’s penetrating questions. And loaded into the questions seem to be an underlining ground-zero that tethers the one asked to a primary sense of identity— something presumably more real, more acceptable, more common, much more stable. To be a loan officer, you apply for the job and show up every day for work; to be a writer, you have to know –via, perhaps, some mystical experience – that you’re a writer.

You are a writer when you are writing. I know it sounds simplistic, yet it is true. Do not roll your eyes, reader, as if I’ve heard that one before. As we evolve in our work lives, piecing together various kinds of employment to earn money, step-by-step nudging out the non-writing stuff and making the writing central (or at least that which is writing-related), I find it to be even more starkly true: I am not a writer when I am editing or critiquing someone else’s work, or composing social media articles. I am not a writer when I am nibbling on wine and cheese at a fashionable literary event. I am not a writer when I am teaching, i.e. talking about craft and helping others with theirs. I am not a writer when I am tweeting other writers or keeping up on my self-promotion, or reading literary blogs. I am not a writer when I am on a search for a new book to read or when I am drinking coffee in Starbucks leafing through the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com. I know I am a writer when I am writing. When I am working with words, when I am making ideas and characters come to life with written language. When I am laying out the pages on the desk and taking my blue sharpie to chunks of text that I know don’t work in the story, when I lose myself and forget basics like the hour, eating, brushing my hair, while typing a paragraph where something terrible, or euphoric, or quietly illuminating is happening. This may sound naïve but I feel strongly that I must be honest; I must be writing to be a writer. Otherwise, I feel like a fraud. Even if it’s just an hour because that’s all there’s time for, or even if I’ve been working on the same damn narrative arc problem in a short story for weeks, I know that I cannot stand in front of either my own mirror or even in front of you, dear inquirer, and exhort you to “show, don’t tell” or “up the emotional stakes” or instruct you to “live your passion” if I am not myself at the writing desk, messing with words, living in the trenches and heights of which I speak.

That is how it feels to be a writer; nothing more, nothing less. It’s a full-time job, anything else distracts from it. I’ve had my share of work that has taken me away from writing, and it may not be all I do, but it’s my priority in life, and the secret to being a writer is to not stop writing and to show up for work.

Freelance writer, Linda LaRoche teaches Creative Writing and Blogging at College of Southern Nevada and continuing education classes at UNLV. Her last two multi-cultural novels and collection of short stories portray a heartfelt tale of liberation, desperation, and the grip of love.
Find out more by visiting: http://www.lindalaroche.com/blog
And join the discussion on her blog, the Quill

I remember when I first “retired” from writing and moved abroad, in my early twenties, because at that time all the stories of my tender life experience had been written and I needed new fodder. I never thought that I would ever write again. I wanted to “do” not “dream.” The next 20 years of “doing” and screwing up gave me enough for a truckload of books and stories, but now that conduit too has slowed to a trickle. The time to hunt has begun again; the new harvest, or gathering, will have to follow at a later date. Life, it seems, full of new beginnings. What is the alternative? An ending? The END?

But now there are those reports of the “throwaway glass condos” springing up all over Toronto, buildings that are energy efficient yet not durable in the long term. Have I picked myself one of these lemons? Should I have stayed put in my cottage by the lake and buried my money under a mattress to escape the stock market’s never ending case of the hiccups? Am I suffering from buyer’s remorse? Am I scared of change, of the unknown? Isn’t life all about surprises? Couldn’t just the next medical check-up spring a surprise?

They say that growth happens on the edge, not in the comfort zone, and I am deliberately placing myself on the edge again I realize, hoping that it would bring me raw material for the next round of stories, whether that even includes personal loss. Unlike my last “retirement”, my life span is a lot shorter now, so I can’t afford another 20 years of “doing” before the next harvest of experiences. I am going to have to gather as I do and hope that the finished material falls into a coherent whole. Writing on the go will also help me deal with the fear of taking the plunge again.

Stepping off edges doesn’t get easier with age; on the contrary, it’s bloody scary, but exhilarating! What will I attempt next? Russian Roulette? Or bungee jumping off the CN Tower?

Success will depend on what value is provided. In the case of Amazon and Kobo, their original value proposition lay in their ability to provide the largest selection of books, globally, without the shopper having to leave the comfort of his home. In becoming a publisher, one has to be selective (also known by that dreaded term “editorial integrity”) and promote only “the selected.” This is a different stance from the presently held “come one, come all” position of these online retailers. So what would Amazon and Kobo do in their new roles as publishers? Provide two-tier distribution: a premium level for authors who self publish through them and a more basic level for all books coming from other publishers? Start a separate branded line for their own publishing streams of books? Cherry-pick the best-selling authors and offer lucrative one-shot deals? Or hire an army of interns to wade through miles of slush piles should every unpublished author want to self-publish through them? This new move is surely going to raise questions about the altered value propositions that these two players now bring to the reader, and to the author.

The danger when two or more bed mates jostle for elbow room on the same bed, especially if one has a lot of muscle, is that the muscular one gains at the expense of the others. The ones with less and less room, risk falling off the bed altogether and may leave to sleep elsewhere with other bedfellows. And there is no fun in sleeping in a bed with one big elephant – be that a major publisher, a retailer-turned publisher or a distributor turned one-stop-shop. In this incestuous game, many bed mates, each having equal space, is good – it’s also called competition, in case I was stirring orgiastic imagery in you!

The wild card for everyone is the technology that is making these moves possible. And technology, while enabling bigger and newer entrants to muzzle in for space, can also scuttle the best made plans plans. In this case, the new technology also allows the story-teller, (aka – the author) to reach his audience directly, for it is no big deal to publish a book these days, be it in trade book format or e-book format, if one is reasonably adept at word processing and has access to some conversion software. And it’s no bigger deal to distribute it directly from one’s website with no intermediary hand-offs. All the author needs is a facilitator who can help his audience find, sample and endorse him. The reader needs the facilitator too, to point him to good reading material. This facilitator role is the one going to be prized both by readers and writers in the future – not a big bully who keeps the lion’s share and offers poor quality in exchange, but a big brother who makes it happen for the writer and the reader.

I am keen to see whether Amazon and Kobo will truly transform into Big Brothers or lose both authors and readers because they ended up being Big Bullies.

How does one find an e-book that is readable on any device and purchasable universally? Not yet, is the answer, because this industry is so young, and its leaders are struggling for supremacy, just like VHS and Betamax duked it out once upon a time until one fell and left a lot of us holding redundant equipment. But what if the dust settles on perhaps two, or three e-book platforms, like it did in the software industry with Microsoft, Apple and Linux? Then, which one would you buy? Or would you just shrug and go back to buying a trusty old tree-book and let the electronic varieties kill each other off a bit more until only one is left standing (and hopefully not too bruised to also succumb shortly thereafter)?

Standards eventually evolve when an industry matures, and I was heartened when that proprietary behemoth Microsoft signalled a truce and ditched its .lit format and embraced what could be the industry standard, .epub. Will that other proprietary monolithic hold-out of the book industry, Amazon, also send the same signal, turf its kindle standard, embrace .epub and bring e-books into prime time? Time will tell. In the meantime, we wait and watch and buy platform-agnostic tablets, hedging our bets. And we desperately hope that a savvy middle-man, one who can marry the fragmented ends of supply and demand of this emerging channel, does not emerge to siphon away the bulk of the shrinking revenues, holding us all to ransom, just like history has played out in the past in other once-emergent industries.

This saga continues to evolve…by the hour…stay tuned.

This time however, I had the money, the patience and the time to explore a corner of Europe with my trusty backpack. I walked a lot, and the result was soul-enriching. I went primarily to get a feel for the major cities in the Alsace-Lorraine region where I have set my next novel, a historical piece taking place in the late eighteenth century. It was wise not to rely too much on Google and Wikipedia for my research; visiting a locale gives depth and texture to the research done on paper or on the Internet.

It was good to get up in the morning and see the Vosges mountains, just as my hero would have done two hundred years ago, to view their changing colour on the skyline at different times of the day. To walk older parts of the cities of Metz, Nancy, Strasbourg and Luxembourg and distinguish which buildings had been around in the eighteenth century vs. those that had been erected later but modeled in eighteenth century (or earlier) style. To imagine what it would have felt like wearing tunics and boots and riding down cobblestoned streets in horse drawn carriages at a time when the slightest shift in political wind could see one thrown into a dungeon or guillotined (execution still happens in some parts of the world even though the guillotine has gone out of fashion). It was refreshing to get wet in the early fall drizzle that came down every day and warm up with a generous goblet of wine later and know that one would not easily succumb to the consumption, thanks to the advent of antibiotics.

It was alarming to be reminded that “might is still right” however much we cloak the message in respectability and “position” it with modern media; the only redeeming feature is that modern megalomaniacs do not build such disproportionate edifices of self-aggrandizement like the cathedrals and palaces of Medieval Europe (except perhaps in some despotic dictatorships), many of which have become tourist attractions and museum pieces today. But it was good to be reminded of how far we have come in liberalism, how removed we have become from religion’s stifling cloak since the days of Inquisitions, and how far our politics has moved from Reigns of Terror (although these still happen in some parts of the world). It was also good to be reminded of how much leisure and the pursuit of art and culture is still appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic despite a globalizing society caught up in the instantaneous culture of the handheld PDA.

And what was most enlightening to me was the evidence of continual human migration. To set up camp in a different location periodically must lead to growth. The hero in my novel left this part of Europe to seek his fortune, and after travelling halfway around the world, landed in an island in the Indian Ocean. His progeny dispersed all over the world to seek theirs several generations later, some ending up in North America. And here was I, completing that circle and going back to the place where it had all begun, walking those same streets and asking the eternal question of the immigrant, the question asked in many of my novels and stories: “why?”