Month: May 2016

Services

cropped-cropped-quill.5.6.16.pngI offer several services to new and existing clients, which are described below. But first, something about what we all want to know as early as possible: what will this cost?

FEES AND TERMS:

Please note that I do not have set prices for most assignmnents, simply because I need to fully understand the project first. Thus I will always ask to speak with you by phone, so that we may both be clear on the extent of the project. After that, we’ll discuss fees and costs.

Normally, I don’t ask for full payment up front, either. I say “normally” because some projects are so limited in scope – for example, a press release – that they’re easy to quote. But for most assignments I will typically ask for installments, the same way a building contractor would. A partial advance payment will be expected at the start of the project, then once that portion is finished and approved I will ask for the next payment before proceeding to the next portion, and so on. If you change your mind midway, the work product you’ve paid for up to that point belongs to you.

SERVICES OFFERED:

Copywriting

Copywriting comprises a wide range of services. Typically, it conveys a message to the public for marketing a product or service, but not always. It can be an internal corporate piece, such as a company newsletter. For this reason, a variety of writing styles is incorporated. For example, an email blast or short promo will read much differently from a position paper.

The following are the copywriting pieces I generally do:

  • blog articles
  • landing page content
  • short promos
  • email blasts
  • catalog content
  • brochures
  • newsletters
  • position papers
  • white papers
  • press releases
  • feature stories
  • reviews (books, movies)
  • book blurbs
  • speeches

Note that I often provide my own photography in conjunction with some pieces, such as brochures. For an example of my photography, click on Sample Brochure under the menu header Portfolio.

Ghostwriting

Ghostwriting is a whole different ball of wax. As the name suggests, the author of the project always remains anonymous, unless instructed otherwise. Many full-length books have been ghostwritten, from textbooks to autobiographies. Other typical ghostwritten pieces are blog posts, screenplays, speeches, reports, white papers, memoirs, even some fiction. Authoring credit is usually given to the client and not the ghostwriter. It’s lonely being a ghost, but also quite satisfying when the piece makes my client shine.

For obvious reasons, I do not share examples of my anonymous work. But you can get a pretty good idea about my style by looking at Why, Brother Why?, a memoir I wrote with Gerry Brewster. If interested, I can forward a sample from that book for your review.

Content Editing

There are two basic kinds of editors: copy editors and content editors. I edit copy, following AP Style. However, content editing is, admittedly, my forte. If you need help putting your paper, article, report, etc., in shape so that it reads concisely and nicely, without changing the general content and thrust, that’s what I’m here for.

Blog Posting

This is one of my favorites. Since I’ve written quite a variety of stuff over the years, I can honestly say I’m comfortable producing blog articles for most posting. Sports, law, the television and movie industry, music, human resources, horses, space and astronomy, travel – I’m not only comfortable with all of these subjects, I look forward to writing about them.

Check out my Portfolio, and then contact me via my Contact Me page in the menu, describing your need. I will get back to you promptly.

I look forward to discussing your project.

The Conjuring 2


The-Conjuring-2-2The Conjuring 2, which hits theaters June 10,  is the second entry in what could very well become a long-lived franchise, a la Paranormal Activity. For this reason, I think it deserves a preview.

Okay, I confess I’m also a fan of its hero and heroine, Ed and Lorraine Warren. For those not familiar, the Warrens were pioneers in the realm of paranormal investigation, two of the most famous and controversial ghost hunters and demon fighters of the sixties and seventies. Like their contemporaries, Hans Holzer and Cybil Leek, the Warrens believed a scientific approach to the phenomenon could only go so far, and that parapsychological methods were required to draw out and fight malevolent entities.

In the first Conjuring – a surprise box office hit a few years back – the Warrens came to the rescue of the Perron family after malevolent spirits targeted their young daughters. A somewhat dull and predictable spinoff, Annabelle, followed, but it had little to do with the Perron case. In Conjuring 2, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are back as Mr. and Mrs. Warren, and this time they travel to the London borough of Enfield to help another family in need. Though it’s been pointed out that the Warrens were not involved in the real case nearly as much as the movie suggests, for most moviegoers this fact won’t matter. The real stars of most haunted house films are the ones who get no billing: the ghosts themselves. It’s the same with every ghost hunting show on cable TV (and there are plenty of them these days). No one’s expected to know or care much about the people who suffer; only about what’s afflicting them.

Which is why The Conjuring 2 should do well at the box office. It’s another hair raiser, promising moody backlighting and ghouls popping up in mirror shots and dark bedroom corners. This is a Hollywood production, after all, and Hollywood seldom deviates from a tried-and-true formula, even when it stretches the truth. The studios know what works: suspenseful buildups followed by a sudden gotcha. Ghost movies rely almost entirely on mood for scares, because ghosty things don’t typically run around wearing ugly masks and carrying chain saws.

But The Conjuring series seems designed for more than cheap scares. The trailers I’ve seen focus on the ghost hunters more than anything else. For the first time, the ghost hunters are the stars. Moreover, they accurately portray the Warrens as the ordinary couple next door that they were, and not otherworldly in their own right. Though Lorraine has a psychic gift (Lorraine is still living; Ed died in 2006), the couple are in Enfield only to discover what manner of vermin infests this house and chase it off. Ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances.

It’s a refreshing change from the old-style flicks where, if there were paranormal researchers involved at all, more than likely they were accomplices with a hidden agenda – or just plain weirdos – than anything else. Hollywood didn’t take ghost chasers any more seriously than the rest of us. (The Legend of Hell House (1973), Poltergeist (1982) and The House on Haunted Hill (1999) come to mind.) But in the new millennia the mysterious and eccentric ghost chaser doesn’t work anymore, and there’s good reason for that. In an age where all things seem not only possible but provable, including spirits and Bigfoot and little gray men from outer space, we view paranormal investigators more as sincere truth seekers, even quasi-scientists, instead of the charlatans and fruitbats they were once considered. Which is why so many  so-called “reality” shows are devoted to the investigation of the paranormal and cryptozoology nowadays. The “reality” isn’t the mysterious objects of investigation – the jury’s still out on that. The reality part is the investigators and their work. They’re genuine, even if we’re not entirely convinced their ghost boxes and voice recorders really pick up anything but static and radio interference. Our attitude is that they’re at least brave enough to seek the truth. And that’s enough.

Which brings me to the Enfield haunting itself. The real events took place from 1977-1979, and like most poltergeist cases, it involved two adolescent girls. It began with something Exorcist-ish like bed shaking, and furniture moving by itself. Soon there was knocking, and later on, levitation and disembodied voices. A prank put on by two mischievous young girls? Some thought so. In fact, many thought so, and for the next couple of years people came from far and wide to witness the longest poltergeist haunting in history.

Two camps quickly formed: the believers and the non-believers. The non-believers included a magician, who claimed that every incident could be explained as mere sleight of hand. Other skeptics said they actually witnessed the girls trying to fool observers. But others, like a woman police officer, swore they saw furniture levitate and witnessed bricks and other objects fly across the room. Of course there were natural explanations for these phenomena, too, said the skeptics. And maybe there were, at least for some of them. For instance, some witnesses swore that one of the girls purposely sprang off the bed to make it appear she was being tossed about by an unseen force. Is it possible the girl felt she had to put on a show when observers showed up? Who knows what goes through an adolescent girl’s mind when she’s under pressure to perform.

The point is, even if there was some sleight of hand, that doesn’t mean the whole thing was a hoax. That’s the trouble with trying to prove the existence of something most people can’t experience with the five senses. Sooner or later someone decides, for whatever reason, to see if they can put one past us, like that photo of the Loch Ness Monster taken in 1934 that turned out to be a toy mockup. A lot of crop circles are almost certainly man-made, and it stands to reason that those Bigfoot videos feature a fair number of ordinary men dressed in ordinary gorilla suits, or bears walking on their hind legs. It’s going to happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that ghosts (and demons, for that matter) can’t exist. As I pointed out in my novel, Sumner Island, if three or four centuries ago you had claimed pictures could be instantly transmitted through the air to a little screen thousands of miles away, you would have risked being burned at the stake.

It’s possible that spirits are as real and as common as us fleshies, yet we just haven’t figured out what they are and how to communicate with them in a meaningful way. For now, we “nonsensitives” who’ve never experienced a real ghost, but still believe there has to be something to the phenomena, will have to go on studying other people’s experiences. For us, the Enfield poltergeist is a real gem. It’s been written about in numerous books and analyzed in television documentaries. Though it occurred back in the late seventies, for poltergeist believers it remains one of the more popular case studies. And there’s a whole lot of information out there to study. You might call it the Amityville Horror of Britain – a paranormal case that still attracts plenty of interest, in spite of the skepticism.

Now, it’s been made into a major motion picture. And the Warrens are the stars of not one but two films about paranormal investigation. Never mind that the phenomena they encounter in the movie version will probably be exaggerated, wildly perhaps. What the popularity of the Conjuring franchise suggests is that people are warming to the idea that ghost hunters are empathetic movie heroes. They have a job to do, a valid one, and they take it seriously. So should we. Not necessarily because Hollywood can be trusted to depict what they do and experience in a realistic way, but because we know there’s something to this whole ghost thing, psychological or not. And, to borrow a phrase, the truth is out there. But we’ll never prove that truth, one way or the other, without investigation and, ultimately, exposure. For this reason, The Conjuring 2 is a major achievement, even before it hits the theaters.

By Michael Cormier

Go Set A Watchman

One More Look at…

GO SET A WATCHMAN, by Harper Lee

12---Promo_imageLast year’s biggest literary event was the appearance of Harper Lee’s first novel in over half a century, Go Set a Watchman (HarperCollins). It’s been analyzed, theorized and criticized more than Donald Trump’s combover, but I think it bears one more look under the microscope now that it’s had a chance to age a few months.

Like so many other baby boomers, the name Harper Lee was burned into my psyche in high school. Back then her 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was required reading. The story of a sleepy southern town torn apart by racism during the Great Depression had been around a decade and a half by then. I don’t recall being struck so much by the subject matter – in the years since its publication America had progressed through desegregation, the Civil Rights Act, even the bussing controversy. What did leave an impression were the two main characters: Scout Finch and her father Atticus.

To Kill A Mockingbird is narrated by Scout (a/k/a Jean Louise) as an adult recalling two childhood years that left a mark on her. A headstrong and irascible tomboy, Scout took us gently by the hand and walked us through two sultry summers spent chasing after the phantom Boo Radley. Her brother Jem, and friend Dill, accompanied us, but it was Scout’s innocent words and deeds that kept us so entertained.

And then there was Atticus.

If ever there was a genuine literary and cinematic hero (Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for his portrayal in the 1962 movie), it’s Atticus Finch. Atticus is the embodiment of the quietly dignified man standing up for what he believes is right in the face of overwhelming opposition. He’s the father figure we all long for and aspire to be. In his quiet way he taught us about human dignity. Since then, the name Atticus has become practically a household word. It conjures up the best things in human nature, things we strive for in our quieter moments, when life’s pressures aren’t pushing our darker buttons.

But Atticus isn’t real.

Atticus never was real. To Kill A Mockingbird and the trial of Tom Robinson aren’t real. They may be based on real people to some extent, sure. But this is fiction, and Harper Lee never intended for us to believe Atticus really existed. And therein lies the source of the anguish experienced by so many upon reading her second novel, Go Set A Watchman.

The book takes place twenty years after To Kill A Mockingbird. Jean Louise (as she now prefers) is a young woman with a career in New York. She has come back to Maycomb, Alabama, for a visit with her father and a handful of older relatives, as well as her would-be suitor, Henry. Jem is gone, having died a couple of years before, and Dill is off somewhere in the world pursuing his own life away from Maycomb. That leaves Jean Louise and Atticus to catch up on what’s going on in their lives.

At this point the story is classic Harper Lee. Jean Louise, we discover, hasn’t changed much. Though far more worldly than Scout, all the dresses and makeup can’t hide the independent, outspoken, rule-bending personality she never lost. We delight in her exploits that get the town gossiping. We cheer her on as she decides for herself whether Henry is right for her, rather than caving in to everyone else’s opinion. Here’s our Scout at it again!

As Watchman chugs along, and we wrap ourselves in warm reminiscences from Jean Louise’s childhood that would easily have fit into Mockingbird, our destination seems predictable. This is just another going home story; or more accurately, a you-can never-go-home story. Like all such stories, it preys on our longing for the simple little places and events of our childhood. Then wham! We crash into a wall of realization that those places never were and those events didn’t happen that way.

Only, in the case of Watchman, the wall Jean Louise encounters is built of racial slurs and racist attitudes that would make any civilized person of the twenty-first century cringe. And who is right in the thick of it? Dear Lord, not him!

Our reaction is much like Jean Louise’s: sickening shock followed by anger. Apparently some readers – people who grew up loving Atticus Finch almost to the point of worship – have felt something more, something stronger: resentment. Not necessarily toward Atticus, but toward the author herself. How could she do this, how could she turn this perfect man into a racist? How could she take everything we had come to believe about him, and what his good character said about the rest of us, and turn it into a lie?

This is where the controversy erupted last summer over the very existence of the book. It was a sellout, some whined. The author’s last-minute effort to make a huge pile of money in her twilight years. The book never should have come to light. Granted, Watchman was written back in the fifties, possibly before Lee even wrote Mockingbird, but she should have made a choice between the two and stuck with it. And that choice, they opined indignantly, should have been To Kill A Mockingbird.

I admit to being one of those who put the book down after finishing it, scratching my head, and wondering what Miss Lee was up to. If she had just left well enough alone then Atticus’s legacy would have lived on forever, a beacon of goodness and light in a world of dark corruption. But now his legacy was stained. It was like she’d just told us Jesus himself was a racist. Setting aside the financial theory (which I still refuse to believe), I wondered why any writer would do it? What purpose could she have had in building a legend in one book, only to tear it down in another?

This irked me for a day or two before the simple truth finally hit me. She had to do it.

Like a Greek tragedy, Atticus had grown too big for his breeches and had to be brought down a notch. The old Atticus couldn’t stay relevant in a society that no longer believes in much of anything. A society that hides behind sloganeering and little flag pins on lapels, politically correct phrases and the invocation of God in the face of declining church attendance. A world in which we are so imperfect, yet expect so much of ourselves that we can’t help but fail.

If Harper Lee had kept quiet we could have all gone on viewing Atticus Finch as representative of the perfection we pretend to strive for. But then he would be about as useful as all the sloganeering and politically-correct phrasing. Just as we’re not going to, for example, “make America great again” (how do you even define “great,” and when did America stop being great?), Atticus was never really that beacon of light guiding us toward righteousness. We forget that Atticus is a fictional depiction of a human, not a god. And all humans are flawed.

It seems what Harper Lee meant to do in Watchman is bring Atticus back down to earth. To tell us (apologies to Paul Harvey) the “rest of the story.” Mockingbird, it turns out, was merely a snapshot taken during a small portion of a man’s life, as observed by a young girl. During that short time, Atticus Finch, a product of a racist southern-town upbringing, gathered up all of his courage and conviction and defended a black man despite the backlash he knew it would cause. It was his finest hour. But it couldn’t last. Because Atticus Finch, like the rest of us, is only human.

And, like the rest of us, part of Atticus’s human frailty festers in the deepest recesses of his mind. Yes Atticus, it turns out, is a racist. That doesn’t make him evil, and it doesn’t make him poison for the rest of us. It makes him flawed. And that’s why Watchman is a remarkable achievement, if not a remarkable novel. What Harper Lee does is remind us that we can all rise to the level Atticus achieved during the Tom Robinson trial, but we shouldn’t expect to rise that high all the time. Most of all, just because we can’t doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Atticus is still one of my all-time heroes. He deserves it. His explanation to Jean Louise of his point of view in Watchman is so like the thinking of that time period, it makes him more real. And what changed Jim Crow and segregation and every ugly, shameful thing this country once stood for was ordinary, flawed people rising at the right time and taking on the status quo. Atticus doesn’t do that in Watchman. But you get the feeling he could. More important, you’re hopeful that someday he will again.

By Michael Cormier