Guest Blog: Jane Genre

Literary Snobs? Get Over Yourselves

As a writer of commercial fiction, I’ve experienced my share of literary snobbery. I get a lot of prickly-pat reviews like this: “Although the novel is well-written and entertaining, it’s definitely not War and Peace.”

Once a friend even remarked to me, “Your books are fun but I know you’re capable of weightier work.”

Most people think writing commercial fiction is easy. They imagine genre writers dashing off their prose in a few afternoons (in between soap operas and game shows) while more serious writers spend years in windowless garrets, exchanging a pound of flesh for every word.

I think writers, like most artists, have a predilection towards a certain type of work. Sure, it would be grand to have my mug on cover of Poets and Writers, and to be reviewed by the New York Times, but I’m consistently called to write lighter works. When I’ve tried to get serious and literary, the results haven’t been pretty.

I am, however, determined to the best commercial writer I can be, so I recently enrolled in an MFA program. I was prepared to encounter some literary snobbery, but didn’t think I’d be consistently hit over the head with it.
During my first semester, certain instructors continually made unflattering and misguided comments about commercial fiction and the people who write it.

There was no subtlety about it and it definitely made me uncomfortable .

Having been in the pub biz for several years, I’ve developed a skin like a crocodile. Still it’s annoying to pay big bucks to have what you do continually dissed. Usually I get that sort of abuse free of charge.

I honestly considered quitting, but instead I forced myself to overlook the snobbery and learn something.
The program was informative and well-run. I’m sure I’ll be a better writer when I finish. Will I be the next PEN/Faulkner recipient when I graduate? Not likely. But that wasn’t my goal.

I hope my experience was some kind of freakish anomaly, and that literary snobbery doesn’t run rampant in most MFA programs. Why pit writers against writers? All writing, whether it’s commercial or literary takes tremendous skill. Not to mention few readers start out devouring Proust. Commercial fiction is often a gateway drug to more serious fiction. Certainly there’s value in that.

MFA programs are designed to create literary writers and that’s fine and dandy. But with the realities in the marketplace (literary mags closing their doors, short story markets drying up), it wouldn’t hurt to acknowledge that some lessons can be gleaned from commercial fiction (plotting, pacing). Additionally while many agents find literary novels tough sells, they are always looking for “upmarket fiction,” which is a hybrid of commercial and literary fiction.
I love the idea of commercial and literary fiction mating to create something wonderful. So here’s my message to the literary snobs of the world: Make love, not war. Recognize the worth and the skill that goes into all fiction.

Jane Genre is a pseudonym for an author of several commerical fiction novels.

Q and A with Dr. Jack Gresham
Author of 18 Billion

Tell us about your new book, 18 Billion.

18 Billion is the story of a nuclear threat against the United States by Afghan immigrants, who are Muslim. They plan to use the threat to rob the New York Federal Reserve Bank of its cash reserves and send that money to a Mohammed of Babylon, whom they believe to be the Mahdi. Mohammed, who is a proclaimed “man of peace” wants no part of terrorist activity and after receiving the money, seeks to return it to the United States without betraying the trust of his fellow Muslims. There is also the underlying plot of an international terrorist group that requires interdiction at multiple sites around the world, involving agencies of the United States government. At the end, Mohammed finds that he has used means of terror to combat terror. It leaves him in a quandary that he must somehow resolve by choosing one of two doors before him in the fulfilling of his life’s purpose.

What inspired you to write 18 Billion?

Islamic jihadists are a fact of life now as never before in American history. The book brings that home with a driving force. Yet, I am convinced that there are Muslims of noble character who are torn between allegiance to their faith and wanting to hold on to certain moral convictions not espoused by their kindred. This, among other things became a phenomenon to explore.

What sort of research went into writing this international thriller?

Primarily internet research of the banking industry, branches of government (both domestic and foreign), and media reports of terrorist incidents.

What is your process for planning out characters and events in your novels?

I primarily plan and document action scenes that will flow with the story; I then create characters that fit into these scenes. Many characters come from my own imagination; some characters are inspired (not portrayed) by people I have known and worked with over my lifetime. Into this flow, I often interject ancillary events and statements that are not necessarily associated with the story, but elaborate on a theme projected by the story.

Why did you choose 18 billion as the amount of money to be stolen from the United States Federal Reserve?

It is a sizeable, yet not astronomical amount. Also, there was the need to immediately transfer that physical cash accumulation overseas by air. It seemed reasonable. It was only after the book was published that a wise Jewish lady asked me the same question. My explanation did not satisfy her. She took a sheet of paper and wrote “18” and next to it wrote the two Hebrew characters that designated that number. She then told me that those two characters together could be literally translated as “life” with the parting remark, “I was sure that you knew.”

You mentioned that writing is your third life career, after being a pilot in the United States Air Force and an orthopedic surgeon. Was writing always an interest of yours or did it only come about after retirement?
I have, for as long as I can remember, been one to write down thoughts and experiences. I never thought of writing as a career or even for publication until recently, although the germinal seeds for this book surfaced in my life during my five-year stay in Saudi Arabia, 1980-85.

What tips can you give aspiring writers looking to create compelling fiction using real events?

Be careful to not portray a character of fiction as you might actually know someone to be. Do not be in a hurry to abandon a character in the heights of success or the throes of despair. Do not lose sight of the fact that what you are portraying must lie within the realm of possibilities.

Dr. Jack Gresham started his career as a jet pilot in the United States Air Force, before earning his degree at the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1961. He established a specialization in orthopedic surgery and spent five years in Saudi Arabia developing an orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation department in a local hospital. Before his retirement in 2004, Gresham went on numerous medical mission trips abroad to places such as the Ukraine, Brazil and Africa. He also recently completed a tour on the board of directors for the Learning Institute for Elders (LIFE) at the University of Central Florida. Gresham currently lives with his wife, Moena, in Orlando, Fla. For more information, please visit www.jackgresham.com.

What We Give Back
Peggy Webb
http://www.peggywebb.com/

I had intended to talk about some of my most interesting book signings, but last Saturday evening I changed my mind. While attending a charity fundraiser for the Northeast Mississippi Chapter of the American Red Cross, I had a chance to visit with a former student of mine. Viv is her name. She’s a lovely, vivacious woman who always came to class smiling.

“Class” was a six-week night course I taught last fall under the auspices of the Continuing Education Department of Itawamba Community College. I seldom take time from my own work to teach anything except the occasional hour-long writing workshop at conferences, but the time seemed right. After twenty-five years as a professional writer, I have a body of knowledge I wanted to share.

And so began my journey with twenty eager students, some of them young (in their twenties), some of them entering the golden years, and some of them full-fledged professors seeking a different creative outlet. I’m an off-the-cuff speaker, and I decided to teach the same way, first finding out the needs of my students and then tailoring my class to meet those specific needs.

All that sounds dull and technical, but let me tell you, it was anything but! I taught them as one writer to another. We learned and shared and laughed a lot. In fact, we laughed so much the custodian whose job it was to close the building at nine after our class often hovered in the hall so he could eavesdrop. He had so much fun with us that he not only made a pot of coffee for our breaks but came into the class to serve it!

I loved my students. Their eagerness and hope and talent – some lovely and raw, some already well-honed - energized me. I wanted to take them all home with me, sit on the front porch and talk about writing for days on end.

My students gave me phone numbers, crayfish (I’m not kidding), invitations to dine, offers to help (Travis, I still have your number in case I get stranded in the Atlanta airport again!), and a glorious sense of giving something back.

Through the years I’ve had a wonderful support group, from booksellers to fellow writers to family and friends. It felt wonderful to turn my dreams around and let them flow back into the community that helped me make them come true. I’m certain there is a more sophisticated way of saying that, but this blog is not about sophistication and sounding erudite. It’s about sharing hope. It’s about giving back. It’s about having a former student come to me at a charity event and say, “You turned my life around.”

Viv told how my students eagerly awaited each class, how it was the “highpoint” of their week, how they appreciated being treated with respect and how I helped them learn to love writing. Her praise was better than all the writing awards hanging on my office wall.
I’m sure many of you have experienced this same satisfaction, either as a teacher or a student. I’ve love to hear from you.

Any Given Day: My Personal E-Novel Conversion by Andy Straka

You can hardly scan the headlines these days without seeing some reference to Apple's announcement of its soon-to-come iPad and online iBook store. That is if you could tear yourself away from the many articles and discussions about Google, Amazon, the Kindle, and the future of e-book pricing.

Does anyone really know what all these developments portend for the future of book publishing?

I don’t have much in the way of answers, but recently I had an experience that might begin to shed some glimmer of light on the subject. More than just the future of publishing may be at stake. It's the future of reading.

I made this discovery while sitting on an abnormally cold Florida beach wrapped in an abnormal number of towels and sweatshirts the first week in January enjoying a great book—Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. Reading The Given Day last month amounted to a Rubicon moment for me. Not because the novel is such a powerful story (though it is) but because of the means of my reading it. I had purchased the book as an e-book file downloaded from the Amazon Kindle store, magically transformed into pixilated words and read via The Amazon Kindle Store Apple “app” on the three and half inch screen of my wife's touch iPod.

Impossible, I would have said just a few short weeks ago.

No way would you ever find me reading an entire book, let alone Lehane’s latest (that weighs in at 700 pages in paperback) on some puny little piece of plastic and glass no matter how sophisticated and easy to use Steve Jobs and his disciples have managed to make it. I’m an old school English Major book guy after all, who in his fifty odd years has probably read a couple of thousand books, all of them, in one way or another, professionally and sometimes even beautifully laid out and printed with quality ink on fine paper with attractive covers. Yet there I was freezing at the beach in Florida reading and actually enjoying an entire e-novel.

Here’s how it happened.

On the flight down to Florida from Virginia, the first few pages of reading on the iPod screen were painful. The screen only held a portion of each page of the novel with no page numbers in sight, it was sometimes difficult to orient myself within the novel—was I still at the beginning? Had I missed or skipped a chapter or page? I almost gave up and decided to stop by a good old brick-and-mortar bookstore and pick up a hard copy of the novel. I was doing this for pleasure after all. Who needed the aggravation? But I chose to persevere, and along about the beginning of Chapter Two something magical happened. The iPod disappeared.

Not physically, of course. But I had become so drawn in to Lehane’s story, so seduced by the power of his words that the physical means of reading them ceased to matter anymore. In other words, the small iPod screen with its touch-flash turning of pages, once I became accustomed to it, lost all significance in comparison to the story.

I’m sure I’m far from the first to have had this experience. Conversely, others may not find their attempts at reading e-books so ultimately enjoyable. But for a reader like me, learning to enjoy reading a novel on a screen was a revolutionary development. And I’m only one reader. If it can happen to me, could it also happen in fairly short order to millions of others?

I’m now actually looking forward to getting my hands on an iPad. Does this mean I plan to stop buying printed novels? Of course not. But now I have another option, another viable means of enjoying fiction. I’ve also thought long and hard about my reading of The Given Day. Was it just the fact I was reading Lehane that sold me on the new reading medium or might it just as well have been any other quality book on the market today? In an e-book marketplace do certain types of books inherently have an advantage over others?

I’ll leave the detailed prognostications and hand-wringing about such questions as well as other issues such as rights, royalties, and piracy to others far more qualified than I to assess.

It’s reading after all and not publishing that is the true life blood of writers. Reading in all its beauty, all its glory, and all its madness. Maybe there is only one question we should really be asking ourselves. Where will reading take us next?

All I know is that as far as I’m concerned we writers now have another vital tool to help get our stories into the hands of readers. And from where I sit that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.

Andy Straka is the author of the Shamus Award-winning and Anthony and Agatha Award-nominated Frank Pavlicek novels. A licensed falconer and co-founder of thepopular Crime Wave at the annual Virginia Festival of the Book, Andy is also the author of Record Of Wrongs, which Mystery Scene magazine calls "a first-rate thriller." The latest book in the Pavlicek series is titled Kitty Hitter (ISBN 1594148120 Cengage/Five Star $25.95).

www.andystraka.com

Steel and feathers by Sonny Brewer

January 28 was sixty-one years ago that my mama, a girl of seventeen then, grabbed a handful of feather bedding and bore down with a holler on a cold January morning and pushed me out for a breath of good Alabama air. Right there in my maternal grandfather’s house in Cross Roads community, down the road a piece from Millport, and just across the line from Columbus, Mississippi. And, I don’t know what better birthday present a man could have had (unless it’s that I’ve lived to do a blog post in the year twenty-ten) than to get some really good news that day, which I’m about to share.

'Twas born of a misconstrution, as my friend Whitney Cadwell would say. In early November, John Evans (owner of Lemuria Books) and I sat in the Bulldog Grill in Jackson MS waiting on a cheeseburger and over the noise he asked me what I was working on. I told him I was working on a memoir about all the day jobs I'd had in my writer's life (I was a pants folder at Tom & Huck Togs in Columbus MS, that I was lead singer in a band for three years, six nights a week, and a longish list of other day jobs). John didn't hear me say memoir. Damn good idea, he said. Asked if the pieces had to be from living writers. And before I could correct him that I'm very much alive, he said, Because it would be cool if Richard Howorth (mayor of Oxford and owner of Square Books) would write about Larry Brown the fire chief and ex-marine before he was crowned a God of Southern Lit.

I didn't hear anything else John said as my mind cranked up to about a thousand miles an hour, running by ideas like William Gay writing about hanging sheetrock in the hills of Tennessee (William said he'll write about working at the pinball factory), Silas House about delivering the mail on Kentucky backroads, Lee Smith doing hair at the Kroger's, George Singleton driving a garbage truck, Pat Conroy teaching school in the low country, Rick Bragg breaking down truck tires...all the sketches with a heavy writerly twist, how such day jobs informed their lives as writers.

I asked Winston Groom to write about being a soldier under fire in Viet Nam. Matt Teague, native of the Mississippi Delta, to write about never having had a job other than writing (he writes for National Geographic). On and on. Barb Johnson is writing about her thirty years' work as a carpenter in New Orleans before asking at UNO if she could get into a writer's class and then selling her collection to Harper Collins and winning a grant to complete her first novel. Alabama boy and New York Times writer Warren St. John is writing about a summer he spent mowing grass and doing yard maintenance, which he said changed his life.

First, I'll say thank you to all the writers who agreed to throw in on a collection of essays about Southern writers and their day jobs, work they were advised not to give up. Clocking in at the culture factory, as William Gay put it, generally won’t pay the bills.

But then WB Yeats wrote a poem called The Choice, and warned us:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

So I’m fairly bustin’ to tell you that last Thursday on my birthday we sealed the deal on a home for our anthology, because, otherwise, all our raging would be in the dark.

The news will hit Publishers Lunch with a working title from Howard Bahr’s THE RAILROAD AS ART, the first essay to land in my email inbox, after ten o’clock two nights before Christmas. It’s got steel and feathers in it—time clocks and dreams. And while it’s exemplary of the conceit we want from the pieces—write a nose, not an ear, say—no two noses are alike. I’m thinking now of the philosopher who said show him a man’s nose and from that view he could reconstruct the whole person and all his intellect.

THE RAILROAD AS ART: Southern Writers and Day Jobs, then, will be published by MP Publishing, based in the city of Douglas on the Isle of Man but with an international reach. Our book will come out first in the US, simultaneously as a hardcover and an e-book. It will be published in the UK soon after.

Mark Pearce, our publisher, has a day job himself. He’s an architect and has made a good enough pile of money to found MP Publishing. I met him at BEA in New York in June and took a quick liking to the man, impressed by his intelligence, passion and enthusiasm. He is an eBook entrepreneur. He also loves real books and told me at Commerce café in Greenwich Village how someday he’d find the right book for his initiation into traditional ink and paper publishing. Mark came to Fairhope to see me, and, on a barstool at McSharry’s Irish Pub, he and I agreed THE RAILROAD AS ART is that book. (He’s actually already published two other hardcover books in the UK, and will release my novel, THE POET OF TOLSTOY PARK in hardcover there in 2011.) RAILROAD will lay the tracks—I couldn’t resist—for six other books MP will publish in the US this fall. He’s even going to spend money marketing our book—what a concept!—beginning with having me over to the London Book Fair in April to announce it to the world.

Following is a list of writers who’ll be included in THE RAILROAD AS ART: Southern Writers and Day Jobs

John Grisham
Pat Conroy
Rick Bragg
Cassandra King
Winston Groom
William Gay
Howard Bahr
Tom Franklin
Barb Johnson
Silas House
Connie May Fowler
Daniel Wallace
Beth Ann Fennelly
George Singleton
Matt Teague
Warren St. John
Jill Conner Browne
Jack Pendarvis
Joshilyn Jackson
Suzanne Hudson
Frank Turner Hollon
Lee Smith
Brad Watson
Michelle Richmond
Richard Howorth on Larry Brown
Clay Risen
And I'm waiting to hear back from Tim Gautreaux

This will be the best anthology I’ve ever done, making that comparison against the Stories from the Blue Moon Café series, books truly squeezed from my heart, an idea born in my driveway during a full moon, a blue moon, and on a night when Alabama was underneath a magical meteor shower that went on for hours. And when I say THE RAILROAD AS ART will be a better anthology, it’s a big deal for me.

All the contributors, to a person, "get" our anthology, understand its value as a compendium of contemporary Southern culture, an important view of its art and its workplace. They realize that these essays—memoir sketches, really—collected in one volume will actually be a kind of history of the modern South. Our South, peculiar and particular, between the covers of a good-looking book that we hope all readers will enjoy, and that Southerners will be proud of.

Sign on to my Facebook Fan Page, and I'll keep you posted...

Guest Blog: Jessica Handler

You’re at your desk, you’ve got your writing game on, and you are not writing. (I can’t see you, I’m just projecting my own weak moments.) You’re surfing the web, which is why you’re reading me now. Or maybe you’re at a coffee shop, intending to write, but you don’t have the good table and chair yet. So you’re doing something else until what’s known at my local coffee shop as “the CEO desk” vacates.

Congratulate yourself. You’re not procrastinating. What you’re really doing is building community. Almost. The ‘web is one way to build community. Others ways involve your feet (for getting to events involving writers) your voice (for speaking up) and your charming personality, for making friends.

Writers need community because writing is grueling, isolating, work. It’s work that not enough people in your immediate life understand. Seriously, how many of you have had otherwise beloved friends and family members say things like “oh, it must be so relaxing to write all day,” or “if I had free time like you do, I could write something, too.”

Show of hands? Thought so.

Writers need other writers in their lives because we need folks like us who “get it.” We write alone, in the company of our characters, but we desperately love what we do. We want to talk about it ideas, commiserate when the going’s rough, and celebrate when we feel like we’ve struck a little bit of gold.
Now that I’ve passed the six-month mark of publication of my first book, I hereby crown myself a near-expert in how community helps writers. Community gets the word out about your book, before and after publication. If you don’t have a book, that same community pumps you up about your writing.

So, here are my five tips for building community among writers.

1. Read the work of writers you know. Maybe they’re your teachers, your friends, or friends of friends. Read writers who have been recommended to you. You’ll get a better understanding of what’s on their minds, and what’s in their worlds. Check their websites and find out where they’ll be doing author events. Some authors have blogs (hmmm, like the authors here at “A Good Blog Is Hard to Find.”) Read their blogs. Think about what you’d like to blog about on your writing blog.

PS. You don’t have a blog or a website? Start one. A little visibility goes a long way toward being reachable by other writers. Use social media sites, too.

PPS. A caveat here. Do not let social media eat your writing time. One hundred and forty characters isn’t writing, it’s passing notes in class. Use social media to connect with your growing community and to identify yourself to the world as a writer, a reader, and someone interested in writing. Then go write and read for real.

2. Like someone’s work? Let them know! Drop a writer a short message electronically or by that old fashioned technique, mail. You’re not being sycophantic (maybe you are, I haven’t seen your note), you’re just being nice.

3. Get off the computer (no, not this minute) and get out into the world. Attend readings in your area. Yes, the big names, but also the emerging writers. Listen and take notes if something the author says strikes you. And buy the book! While you’re there, look around the room. You’ll recognize folks you know. You might be surprised. Say hello. Get to know your local indie bookstores, coffee shops, colleges, libraries, arts centers… these places host readings, too.

4. Befriend your indie bookstores. Even if you just buy a magnet or some greeting cards, support them, because they support writers. Ask if they have a mailing list. Get on it.

5. Be a mensch. (Yiddish: literally “person,” but in practice, “an admirable person.”) Introduce people to each other. Invite friends to readings. Host a reading or a salon yourself. Start a writers’ group with like-minded people. Send thank you notes.

I guess we could call this post The Golden Rule for writers’ communities. Read the work of writers in your area of interest and in your geographical area. Go to readings. Buy books. Say ‘hello.’ Bring more people, one by one. Say ‘hello’ some more.

Hello! If I see you at a reading, introduce yourself. You’ll help make our community just got a little bigger.

Jessica Handler is the author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009), which was recently named one of the “Eight Great Southern Books in 2009” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached at http://www.jessicahandler.com

How an editor helped me take my writing to the next level

By Karen Harrington, authorJANEOLOGY

When I was little, my mother had a silver dressing table mirror. It featured a normal mirror on one side and a 5x magnified mirror on the other side. Me and my sister liked to make funny faces into it, seeing how big our lips looked, viewing our tonsils at the back of our throats. Even, dare I say, looking up our noses. For us, looking into this mirror was amusing. Of course, for my mother, it was a beauty tool.

As I've entered my 40s, I see the value of this kind of mirror, although it’s no longer as amusing. Well, sometimes it is, but not for the same reasons. No one likes to hold up a mirror to their flaws. But often it’s helpful to see the finest, smallest details in sharp focus. Dare I say, it reveals things you didn’t even know were there and promise to God were not there yesterday!

In some respects, it wasn’t until I put my sentences in front of a 5x magnification tool that I really took my writing up to the next level. The tool I used wasn’t a mirror, but an editor. A damn good one. And now that I’ve magnified the writing, viewed the small details and imperfections, can I ever go back to writing as before?

What happened was that I’d written my second novel. I’d given it to valued readers for critique, revised it and written several drafts. Only then did I think it was ready to go out into the world. I sent out query after query to agents and publishers. To no avail, I received a tidy stack of rejections. Then one day I happened upon a website that offered a free, five-page critique and edit of one's novel.

I sent in my pages. In two days, they were returned with edits, comments and suggestions. The editor read the first 15 pages of the manuscript and gave comments on my writing style in general.

After reading through the edits, I pictured what the entire manuscript would read like should she go over every sentence. I held the image of my novel as a purse. Her edits would create the draw-string at the top, tightening and pulling it together.

I scraped together the funds for her fee and sent off my novel for her full edit. What I got back was overwhelming. Deletion here. Rewrites there. Notes that I’d taken a paragraph one sentence too far. Highlights on inconsistencies and verb tense. A notation that I’d given two characters “thin, wiry hands.” A whole chapter towards the end of the book had a cruel X mark through it that just said “No.” Gulp! “And I PAID for this!

She told me to go through the book a little at a time, taking on a few pages a day. I followed her advice. By the time I got to the chapter marked X, I fully agreed that it had to go.

In two months, I’d completed the edits. By subjecting my writing to an uber-magnification via an editor, I’d taken not only the novel, but my writing to the next level. The horrible “chapter X” was replaced by a satisfying scene which brought the entire story into sharp focus and added extra urgency near the book’s end.

I geared up to resubmit the new and improved manuscript. In two months, I had two offers of publication. The result is my debut - JANEOLOGY.

I love telling people this story because it reminds me of the value of another set of super objective eyes. And I’m now able to put a magnified mirror on my writing, putting on my own editor’s hat. The edited draft became the basis of a personal editing checklist, which I use to this day. I’m not afraid to put a giant X over a section or chapter. Only through thorough objective editing can I see the finest, smallest details of my writing.

If you want to know, I worked on my upcoming novel with this same editor. We worked through it thoroughly, again taking a great story and bringing it up several levels. In the process I told her “This edit seems so much slower, much more challenging. I’m questioning EVERYTHING.” She replied, “For some reason, the better the novel the harder the edit. Plus, you’ve raised the bar on yourself. You know you have to do better. You know you can do better.”

She’s right. Now that I choose to put my writing in front of a 5x magnified mirror, I can see the finest, smallest details in sharp focus with my own eyes. And it’s all because I invested in an editor. A damn good one. And that, my friends, is how I took my writing up to the next level.

Visit me http://www.karenharringtonbooks.com/ or http://www.scobberlotch.blogspot.com/