Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Strength





STRENGTH

by

Anthonystjoseph


You came for me slowly

It’s what you wanted to see

You said in him

I think the strength is plenty

I am what I am

I’m not what I’m not

Do not be mad

When you get what I got

It is strength I have

Forged by many

Yes it was painful

Yes it hurt

At times you could find me

Down in the dirt

I would pick myself up

And sometimes I’d crawl

I would fight through the laughter

Of one and of all

I finally won the battle

I finally won the war

I found my true strength

When I told them no more

By

Anthonystjoseph

All works copyrighted  and protected by law

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Self Publishing


 
SELF PUBLISHING

by

Anthonystjoseph


     For over twenty years since I started copyrighting various writing projects with The Library of Congress I have been courted and sought out by self-publishing companies and what is commonly called ‘Vanity’ Publishing.  These companies regularly check new copyrights recorded at the library of congress to try and find and scavenge amongst eager authors to get them to pay to have their own books published, hence the term Vanity Publishing.  It takes a certain level of vanity to feel that your work is good enough that you don’t need someone to okay it or say it’s good enough to be published and pay ‘you’, your ego just wants it out there so you can shed, share, and spread your thoughts no matter if a publisher wants to pay you or not; you will pay yourself.  This is not to say that self-publishing is not a way to go, it is just an avenue that should be well thought out and even more importantly, well researched.  One of the most popular books of our time, ‘The Celestine Prophecy’ by James Redfield was first self-published and went on to be a New York Times bestseller for years and spawned several sequels as well as a screenplay and movie.  I consider The Celestine Prophecy to be one of the most remarkable books that I’ve read as far as importance and actually read the book in two sittings.  James Redfield knew he had something remarkable to share and did not want to wait or play the modern day game of lazy literary agents who do not even read submissions and act like they are giving three ‘genie’ wishes when even determining to read your work…  I personally detest literary agents for their standoffish way of reviewing work or making themselves accessible to the writer or I should say not making themselves accessible to the writer.

     Now on to the art or practice of self-publishing which is a minefield of disappointments, opportunists, deceivers, and downright scams.  Back in the mid-nineties I was pursued by so many of these companies; but to name a couple I will name Dorrance Publishing and Vantage Press or something like that; I cannot find Vantage Press in any current search so I may have that name wrong.  I currently have several projects that I am in the process of getting published and happened to recently think about self-publishing one or two of the projects like James Redfield so I started searching online…  I was in Pittsburgh a while back and realized Dorrance Publishing was downtown Pittsburgh so you know I decided to do a drive-by with an unannounced visit! 

     I found the building downtown Pittsburgh that was listed as their office address and it was rundown and utilized a push button security system like you would find in a cheap apartment building with an intercom having a ‘buzz you in’ capability.  The guy answered the intercom as some homeless looking lady walked up and stood behind me who looked like Whoopi Goldberg in a bad wig and blue eye shadow waiting to get in.  She could tell with the psychic ‘step back’ vibes I was sending her that I was like, ‘you ain’t walking in with me baby’; she answered my skeptical look in her direction with an audible, “I’ll wait until you walk in and then I’ll buzz my party”.  I didn’t respond but felt pleased with her perception of my Doppler radar in her direction.  The person from Dorrance Publishing who answered the intercom sounded like he was guarding an open safe or more closely to the point, a shady business that could have disgruntled clients descend upon it at any time.  The Dorrance Publishing representative says to me over the intercom, “Who are you here to see, do you have an appointment?”  I explained that I was an author and was considering using their services.  He then explains to me that they only do business by email or phone; RUT ROW!  That’s some serious scam activity right there, FRAUD ALERT!  Well my powers of persuasion and gift of gab are much more than the average person so after a few more sentences, he buzzed me in and said he would meet me at the elevator.  He meets me at the elevator and he is dressed like a convenience store employee without a uniform and clearly has very poor hygiene practices.  I ask him for some literature on their services and he runs up the side stairs and comes back with a five by seven advertisement card of poor printing quality.  I then tactfully berate his reception and flat out tell him that I am very skeptical of his company at this point based on his reception alone to which he tells me he can take me upstairs.  I am then taken to an empty and cavernous office space waiting room which only has chairs and empty book shelves and introduced to one of their upper level representatives who is dressed in Wal-Mart clothes and Payless baby doll shoes with no socks or panty hose in the dead of WINTER!  I THINK she needed a BATH TOO!  Thank the Lord and my vision to do this unannounced drive by on this company!  I had a list of questions written down in my briefcase to ask this representative and I will tell you the main question I had.  ONE and TWO, do I maintain the rights to my work and do I maintain the film rights to my work!  Her answer was that I keep all rights and maintain all my rights myself!

     So I get back to my hotel room and decide that I am going to investigate this ‘Dorrance’ company a little further.  The Lord is my Savior, my angels are my protectors, and one of my angels is named GOOGLE!  I googled Dorrance Publishing and the word ‘SCAM’ automatically followed the first two words of ‘Dorrance’ & ‘Publishing’; I clicked on the full ‘scam’ thingy and learned everything I needed to know!  When someone else publishes your work, THEY maintain the film rights and THEY decide IF, and WHAT, they want to pay you because the rights belong to whomever obtain the ISBN number which is the ‘International Standard Book Number’ and no book can be sold without it.  There is also an eISBN number for eBooks and kindle sales.  You would find me on CNN if someone maneuvered my film rights from me and it would not be good press and it would involve S.W.A.T. teams and the National Guard.  You know I have problems with people abusing or stealing from people.  I cannot take it!

     So I did more research and there is one of these self-publishing companies who claims to be linked to Simon & Schuster and promotes that fact all over their website.  We all know Simon & Schuster is a reputable company so the common observer may be taken in by this fact.  When you read further they explain that if they like your work they will recommend the book to Simon & Schuster and then they later go on to say that “Simon & Schuster does NOT take their recommendations into consideration”…  A madhouse!

     So I am researching all the self-publishing information and horror stories online and then I find a great article which recommends Bookprinting.com out of Minnesota where I happened to be born so I think it’s a good sign.  Bookprinting.com also says they will get the ISBN number and eISBN number in YOUR name if that’s what you want.  So I decide to publish either a children’s book that I have finished or a short story that Disney would love through them as I have available funds to take on a venture like that at present.  I receive a call back from a gentlemen at Bookprinting.com while I am shopping so I am out of breath pushing aside old ladies and handicapped people to get the best sale items during the holidays.  I am sure I sound a little scattered to the guy as I am all over the place with my questions because he doesn’t understand that I am ready to do a few of these projects right now but I am skeptical of the process.  He then refers me to their other subsidiary company which is a company having a name that came up on my scam alert search!  Oh Lord!  They aren’t any good either.  Bookprinting.com sounded so good on paper but I detected the same ‘lala’ I felt from the others websites.  The guy was a dilettante.

     I read such horror stories online like one research and investigative group that submitted a manuscript to one ‘self-publishing’ company of the SAME thirty pages printed over and over again ‘back to back’ to see if they even read the manuscript and this research group received a letter back saying their manuscript was MAGNIFICENT and they had written a book that would help a lot of people and the self-publishing company was thrilled to publish it!  The research group was told they had written a book that would help a lot of people just as I and others had been told the same thing, “You have written a book that will help a lot of people”.  Just send the check to us and we will start printing and distributing it right away!  They had not even read the book!  Some companies print these self-published books with so many mistakes that some of the authors believed the mistakes were done intentionally in order to charge for reprints…  The list of horror stories went on and on.

     One of the main reasons I myself have such an aversion to self-publishing or ‘vanity’ publishing is due to the fact that Vanity is one of the seven deadly sins and I have a solid history with that.  I was a bit of an ugly duckling story in my youth because as a child I felt ugly and for some reason when I got out of the army after three years of finally working out and removing baby fat from my face, I had blossomed into quite the attractive person.  I would actually walk into a room in Los Angeles and people would stop talking and stare.  I did a few print modeling jobs in California and a runway fashion show that almost obliterated my ego because I could not take on that runway persona of ‘I am fabulous, stare at me!’  That was not me.   But I had come into the fact that I was a looker, so much so, that when my publisher gave me my own magazine column I told him the title of the column would be ‘Vain’ and it was.  It was a social commentary biweekly column that dabbled in Hollywood gossip.  I would meet people at clubs and they would say, “YOU write THAT column!  I LOVE that column.”  God had led me to my path and my first pulpit!  My publisher started to get angry at the direction my column was taking and informed me that not all of his readers were ready to jump on my political bandwagons…  Makes me proud to this day.  Later in life is when I learned that Vanity was one of the seven deadly sins and that I probably needed to make amends for some of my behavior in California.  I had become too much and I was ashamed of some of my feelings towards others and about myself.  Whether God liked my actions or not, I did not, and as I have always been a person who wanted to help and heal the world and myself, I was going to change the behavior patterns that made me what I was becoming.  When I learned that subsidy publishing or self-publishing was alluded to as ‘vanity’ publishing I told God right then and there, “God, if you want my words to reach the people then you will get them there, I will show you that I am not ‘vain’ and not force my words on people with my own dollars or better yet; waste my dollars and prove my vanity by paying someone to print useless books!”  I did self-produce my album but I did not promote it so to speak and told God again, “If you want people to hear the album then YOU will make it happen and get me a distribution deal.”  This is the same as just typing a manuscript.  You haven’t heard my album have YOU!

     My thoughts, lessons, studies, and answers are a work in progress as my soul is with God, which is why I recently rethought the self-publishing decision but I will remain with God at the wheel as far as my publishing is concerned and publish some stories on my blog, free of charge, although COPYRIGHTED!  One day you will see my books, whether posthumous or not that is left to be seen; there will be stories by ANTHONYSTJOSEPH!  All of this is for a reason…  I have stories that are written that you do not know of that still tear emotion of beauty and depth from my heart when I reread them.  It may be on my deathbed that I finally hit ‘send’ and share them or it will be some worthy literary agent who takes a chance and decides to listen, but for now you can find beauty on my blog and in my words as there are some very incredible stories available here for you to read.  There is also some master craftsmanship of poetry available here for you to peruse…   I am a wordsmith.  I am born under a mercurial sign during the year of the rabbit who is tied into the universe and deigned by God to live a life for you and to share with you for this life is not mine and I have come to be comfortable with that fact and accept it in its entirety and enjoy all of it including its sadness and joy.  Mark Twain was born the week Halley’s Comet passed by our planet and seventy six years later in the week when Halley’s Comet returned he passed away.  Modesty aside, I am like a comet that was sent and will also pass.  You heard it here first.  Is ‘ego’ a deadly sin as well; I do not care at this point.  I have suffered in this life to share these stories and understand their meanings and bring them to you.  I also feel my comet is coming, although that holds no immediate significance since I have felt my comet coming my entire life.  My comet awaits.  Just two days ago the constellation Orion appeared on my visor in sparkling stars while I was driving during the day.  I realized that it was the reflection from my diamond ring.  I pulled my ring away and held it to the sun again to make sure I was seeing truth and consistency and there it was, Orion’s belt and all his appendages reflected from ‘my’ ring that God has put in ‘my’ life; you see, God and my angels tell me daily and sometimes hourly in the strangest and most beautifully majestic ways that they are here with me and all the pain is not for nothing and to keep my faith.  All shall be revealed in the end.  The strange thing is, the Orion reflected from my ring is as if you were looking at Orion from the opposite side of the Universe.  Here is a picture of the reflection from my ring:
By

Anthonystjoseph

All works copyrighted copyright.jpg and protected by law    

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Abortion


 
ABORTION

by

Anthonystjoseph


     Throughout the entire animal kingdom including humans themselves, born and unborn offspring alike are considered unwanted when not desired or for various reasons deemed undesirable.  The topic and word abortion has troubled and will trouble us humans for a long time to come as it should trouble us.  The taking of a life should be thoroughly discussed and talked about as taking a life should actually rarely be done for any reasons in my opinion.  If you take the life of a murderer, all you do is release him or her from his or her own self-imposed prison of becoming a life taker.  If you want to take the life of an unborn child then the only thing stopping that life from becoming a true oxygen breathing life form is your decision to stop it and ‘take’ it.  The difficulty in the topic and act of abortion is that mother’s know more than we do and all throughout the animal kingdom this proves to be true on many counts.  A mother bird will throw a baby bird out of the nest who seems to us to be fully healthy…  I think that mother bird knows the outcome of that baby bird and knows more than us.  A female dog who gives birth will not allow a runt or damaged puppy that she deems unfit to suckle at her breasts thereby allowing more food for her pups she considers more viable.  It is for these reasons that I know that I do not know what a mother knows and it is for this reason that although I myself do not believe in abortion, I myself know and accept that it is not my choice to make.

     As a young child a close female member of my family told me of a dear friend of hers who was faced with an unwanted pregnancy during a time when abortions were illegal or hard to come by.  This female member of my family told me she came home to find her unconscious friend in a bathtub with a blood stained hangar and a dead fetus in the bath tub.  The woman could not face the pregnancy that she did not want for reasons unknown to me but the woman resorted to a recourse that she and she herself alone sought just like the mama bird.  This is what happens when you try and take a mama bird’s choice away and this is why I feel we must leave that choice in the hands of the mama birds.  Again, I do not agree or believe in abortion but at the same time I know it is not my choice to make or my place to try and make their choice. 

     Even with this childhood story rolling around in my brain I still did not care to heavily dissect this occurrence of human mama birds throwing human baby birds out of the nest for various reasons.  I did not heavily dissect and truly think about this issue until years later after a young female friend who looked up to me sought me out for my opinion on her own mama bird decision.  I was a very successful salesman in Los Angeles and a young woman knew that I was one of the best and admired me for this and also looked up to me for my intelligence.  This young mama bird would always look at me with eyes of adoration and respect and tell me how wonderful she thought I was at my craft and as a person.  One afternoon this adoring mama bird told me very sincerely that she had something important she wanted to talk to me about.  I off handedly said, “sure”, as all salesman floating on their own egos do.  My young friend and mama bird told me she was pregnant and she didn’t know what to do.  She explained that she barely knew the young man and that the baby would interfere in her college plans.  I so candidly and quickly said after a quick moment of thought and in not quite these terms, ‘if you want to throw the baby out the nest, then throw the baby out the nest; you need to work on building your own nest first’.  This advice, and my words which at the time, in truth, did not use nest or bird but basically told her it was her choice and I understood her college dreams; this advice affected me deeply later in life as I am sure that all abortions affect human mama birds later in life.  Had words that I had said given this woman the okay to take a life.  Had words that I had said swayed this mama bird to throw a baby bird out of the nest.  And worst of all, did her adoration and respect for me help lean her decision in a certain way…  After much thought I again came to the conclusion that I do not agree in abortion but I know that it is not my choice to make.  If my momentary and slight conversation with this human mama bird weighs on my mind and conscious so heavily then we can only imagine how much it weighs on a true human mama birds conscious so we must conclude that having an abortion is not an easy decision to make and we must stay out of that decision otherwise we will lead more human mama birds to bathtubs and hangars.  We do not know what the mama birds know.

     I address the idea and act of abortion in a poem on my album and I shall leave you with those words:

ABORTED

by

Anthonystjoseph

There once was a Savior

They called him Christ

He told them then

The Messiah comes twice

Just think if when he’s sent

And He’s from God’s mint

But some young girl

Took Him to the abortion clinic

He would be aborted

And so would the mission

Until we get together

And change this death condition

On with the mission

It’s only his condition

Thou shall not kill

By

Anthonystjoseph

All works copyrighted copyright.jpg and protected by law