Sunoasis.com

Beginning a New Year

2006-02-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly one year since I posted anything on this blog. I took it off the web page and let it simmer for awhile. I notice every comment I get on it is spam. That's something I noted would plague this thing. "If it's too good to be true then it probably is."

I notice my posts on this are sincere and not too shabby. I have more blogs over at Type Pad.

I don't sense my enthusiasm for this medium waning but it is one huge freaking mess and won't clean itself up. The writer should be prudent on this thing, test it, probe it, keep his or her own self-interest uppermost. The ones who have made money from it are 'C' writers so it makes you wonder.

They call'm files, I prefer pages.....

2005-02-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

Yes, we re-designed the jobs page a bit. Change is good, it creates a spot of adrenaline.

I also improved the Writer
Resource page. The old page was getting too crowded and I wanted a nice graphic to highlight the page.

There are over 800 pages at Sunoasis.com. They call them files but I prefer pages because they need the same care and attention that printed material have for their pages. Each page means something. Each page carries its own weight.

We stll love simplicity and keep it as a guiding principle.

I am using High Beam Research now and it helps in preparing Sunoasis X 2005.

For writers, the Net is a wonderment we have yet to fathom. It has its stink side no question. Writers have to learn to be more resourceful, to cut through alienation, cut through resistence to business, and write at supreme levels.

Don't let the culture take you down.

It makes me feel kind of old to say that but I say it. The young will produce great legacies on the beast.

Blogs, ideas, and stories

2005-02-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

I've been told, "blogs are not essays!" I like to think they are what the writer makes them to be. The writer has that right and the people have the right to choose what they want. For blogs to be an art though, the writer must know everything he has not said, everything that should be said, communicate it without saying anything, and
still say something.

Blogs then would be a form of poetry or cut-up prose rather than a kind of romanticism that projects egotism against the page.

Sometimes writing is simply a clump of sod torn out of the hairy Earth and sprinkled on the hand to see what shape it takes.

Do writers struggle to "make something out of an idea," as Thomas Mann suggested? If you define idea as anything that is possible and all that is impossible I would say yes. If a dream has shown us a possibility it is
an idea even if the intention on the part of the unconscious is something else.

There are ideas and then there are ideas. I have an idea for a greeting card. Is that equal to an idea on how the people of Iraq will have a democracy?

Well, equality has nothing to do with it. The ideas have their constituents and should pursue their ideas with passion.

Passion is a good term and can mean any number of things. It's certainly associated with a few acts. I suppose it is ardent belief that this is true, that this is right.

I recommended to a young woman that if she wanted
a promotion in a magazine she show passion for her magazine, for the magazine industry, and for the position she wants to move into. In other words, if this is what she wants her passion will take her there.

If it doesn't then she reflects at some point and comes to the realization that, after all, she is interested in something else. She was passionate about getting out of her old job perhaps and projected it into a new one.

One of the great human dramas occurs when passion confronts disillusionment.

On that note we will stop and reflect on the nature of ideas and stories that emerge from them.

The New Year

2005-01-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

Ah, the New Year! I remember from my readings in anthropology
that ancient peoples used to ritually destroy the previous year and all its stupidity, tragedy, hopelessness in a kind of drunken orgy of mass hypnotism. They would literally kill off the old memories and re-initiate themselves back into the pristine state by calling on the gods to teach them, once more, how to do even the simplest things.

One thing that will continue is the Q and A
portion of Sunoasis.com.

Over the past three years we've received thousands of questions and tried to answer them as completely as possible.

Some of the more memorable questions came from an editor in NY City, hired to a new magazine, and wondering if she was being low-balled in her salary negotiations. She was. Or the weatherman on a TV news program who wanted to be a freelance writer. Or the woman from India whose son had written
"the next Harry Potter," and "what should I do next?" Or the Dutch woman relocating to New York and wondering if she would be able to find a job comparable to the job she was leaving.

Recently, we've received some questions about self-publishing. This is a favorite subject of ours and there are excellent spirits dedicated to explain these things.
The best are the Ross's, Tom and Marilyn, whose Complete Guide to Self-Publishing is the "bible," in my opinion. It's a good read, even if you don't plan on self-publishing,
to get inside knowledge of what happens in book publishing.

It's interesting to speculate what will happen when anyone who wants to publish will be able to. Will it cheapen the idea of publishing? Will there be fiercer barriers to the upper reaches of publishing to keep the masses out?

My view has been that the Web will become the publisher of first order and the vast majority of written material will jet along new channels of distribution in the digital system.

And like most phenonmena today, writing will be consumed and perish quickly. However, gems will appear that have long-lasting value and those will be converted into hard
bound books. So, in the front end of the system will be digital publishing but at the back-end, the value-laden end, will be print publishing. And the book, then, will regain its place as a cultural icon, a rare thing, a significant thing.

Most writers, including myself, are introverts. We avoid messes. We avoid the necessary tasks. This is a prime habit in the life of writers. In too many cases self-publishing is seen as an end around all the drudgery of finding a publisher or agent and dealing with people who know more about the system than oneself.

But, self-publishing is much more arduous a prospect than trying to connect with a publisher or agent. Not only must the writer deal with many different people and do things she normally doesn't do, but they can not sit on their hands hoping the book promotes itself.

Every month on Sunoasis we do try and provide links to stories of those who are self-publishing labors of love. Go ahead and subscribe.

It's free.

Good jobs

2004-12-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

What is a good job? That depends, of course, on who you ask and what stage of development they happen to be in. Generally, a good job is one that challenges
the full potential of the person, stretching him or herself past the point they thought they could go and giving them more responsibility for the success of the operation.

There are moments, of course, when any job is a good job. And I was always taught that any job is a good one; there are no such things as bad jobs. And that is true as long as one continually moves in the direction of his or her deepest intention.

For instance, I think of the jobs I had when younger and how bad they seemed to me.

But, looking back I can see each job taught me something very valuable and introduced me to people who I hadn't known before.

Sunoasis.com has always been about resource, that rich sounding word that means to enable someone to do something.

Once people figure out they are here to do things
and to find that which enables them to do it well, they are off in the right direction.

Without introducing politics we can make this example. Had President Bush availed himself of the resources that indicated how hard it would be to sustain peace in Iraq he could have, at least, planned differently. The absense of the resource disabled him in that sense.

So, a job notice is a great enabler or potentially so, as is the information that will permit
you to get to the next step. These allow for the enabling acts that make us free and whole.

The internet is supreme precisely because it enables on a high and rich level. From the very first time I got on the net in early 1996 I knew that it was made for editors.

It would turn writers into editors, since writers possess resource. It would turn librarians into editors. So, we happily pluck out the best resources for the moment and open door and windows that would stay shut in many lives.

We do have a couple of good jobs fresh on Sunoasis
Jobs.

One is from Stanford University and the others from QVC. These jobs can be career makers.

Thoughts about Journalism:

2004-12-14T13:19:00.000-08:00

Journalism is a public art, not poetry. It is part of "the literary system," that includes book publishing, reviewing, bookstores and other forms of distribution, writers, and readers. The public has a fairly dim view of journalists, putting them behind auto mechanics for honesty. This should
shake the effects of delusive wine that has stirred some to think that journalism will be reformed by the "citizen journalist."

The "citizens" themselves are not exactly credible either. Look at the pop culture they support; porn, gambling, violence, propaganda, hysterical claims, conspiracy, and many other weird fantasies of the putative "free people."
Surely the journalists jest when they think they can, out of that motley group, produce a "we media" of some sort.

In some ways its comparable to making Iraq a democracy. Well, when
the people are prepared for such a thing, maybe. Start with the democratic person and then proceed.

Journalism works when a trained person is able to make a livlihood by researching, interviewing, writing, fact-checking stories that his or her editor says to do.

Nonetheless, "we media" and blogging are all part of a fascinating new adventure we can term "the remaking of the literary system."

So, we are supportive of it; weary and skeptical of the claims we've heard elsewhere, in other years.

Stephen King's experiment with e-books excited everyone but it didn't really transform anything.

Yet, the transformation will take place through time.

The exciting thing is that in this new digital literary system, the writer will have a major role. It will not simply be the art of communication but the art of editing.

What else is a great storehouse of information and knowledge but a pleasure palace for the editor?

Blogging

2004-12-13T18:35:00.000-08:00

The blogging universe is a continually fascinating one with a lot of talents, a lot of energy. It has lifted off from where the web was in 1997 or so and continues the main principles that was so prevelant during that time. Free-ranging mind and
spirit in the midst of the crowded, dirty, dangerous world. The colonists with nothing in the midle of the Empire and its army of dark wraiths. The rag-tag revolutionaries ducking behind rocks and bridges as the trained, austere, cold-blooded troops mass in front of the village green. It's all that has been good and human about America.

The assistance to freed slaves; the schooling to the illiterate immigrant. It can be at any rate. It's a lot of hype as well.

It reminds me that amatuers, dedicated and devoted, are the ones who usually start the new science. We might like to think it's the "system" but it rarely is. The "system" comes in later and imposes the new order on everything.

And I'm certain that kiddies will learn blogging in elementary school if they aren't already.

False hierarchies are already being established. Bloggers are in conflict over whether they are in-training for the big-leagues or a new game in town.

The American Journalism Review, which is better than the Columbia Journalism Review, always says something about blogging. Journalists are envious and fascinated and encourage the bloggers to develop resources that the real journalists can use.

One thing to note: The vast public knows little about blogging, could care less, wouldn't know how to use blogs, and see the internet as, at best, a portal into AOL so they can retrieve e-mail. Even subscribers to Sunoasis have written to me, "what's all this blog thing?"

So, you have the same phenomena as occured in the early stages of both the computer and internet innovations: A group of people adapting very quickly to the innovation, making a beachhead, then rolled over by time as the institutions and general public catch up.

Ignore the false hierarchies, the false channels that now impose themselves by fiat because no one is competing with them.

Why would the blogs escape the fate of all other good things the net has served up?

The book, "We Media," is getting a lot of reviews I notice. I've read a few chapters in it and it's worth looking through. However, I have a hard time seeing armies of citizen-journalists out there working on a daily basis to improve the lot of the community. I do see pr types, marketers, conmen, and other low-lifes using the blogs or "we media" as a way to cast nets further into the community. When I got online
usenet was the big thing; what is being said about blogs was said about usenet. And that, last I looked, has fallen to the very bottom of the barrel of porn and con. Next on the list were the mailing lists. Mailing lists that are maintained in a strict environment and monitored are still ok. But many have gone by the wayside because of their misuse.

E-mail is in the middle of a titanic struggle against spam and virus's. E-mail has become a necessity for many but it is in danger of going the way of usenet. RSS feeds are touted
because they by-pass e-mail. Why blogs will have a different fate is beyond me. The serious, literate, original blogs will be marginalized; the spam, porn blogs will crowd
everything out and get the money. And instead of delivering a new medium that creates a perfect democracy you will have the perfect demonstration of mob rule. The internet will be utterly destroyed as a populist medium and be fully controlled by corporations.

That I believe is the sorry fate.

However, we go on. And do our best. And try to point a few things out. And be honest.

And funny. And rational.

News from the Writing Front:

2004-12-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

I read an article the other day about how hard it is to get journalists to write about business. Business editors are in demand. That should give anyone who is struggling with a sense of direction a hint as to what to do. Business is not compelling and, in fact, many journalists are skeptical, wary, and downright hostile to business. I know I have been
from time to time. The business ethic says, "the pornographer shall make millions and the investigative journalists shall make peanuts." Who can trust such a system?

It's more complicated than that of course. Business is all about intrigue, transaction, statistics, deals, formal trade talks and the rest of it. I would suggest anyone interested to read the Peter Druker books, even the 1940's volume he wrote on the corporation.

There is much more vitality in the job market, especially for college grads. It's not quite at '99 levels but much better than the past three, dismal years. Journalism is not on top of the wave. It seems that journalism always attracts a lot of people who don't care what pay they get. I think people are very
attracted to the "soft power" of journalism, see themselves working on metro's or big-city magazines and are excited by the prospect.

The overwhelming evidence is that employers are much more impresed with clips than with grades. Get clips! If you don't get clips in school what does that tell a hiring editor? It says, "he was so bored or turned off to writing he didn't even bother to write for the school paper or magazine!" Bad impression.

Lax and Lapses

2004-12-09T13:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's been awhile since I have written in this space. Chalk it up to post-election blues or holiday blues; the persistence of
something blue among all this red. And red is my favorite color.

The official opinions are over on
Sunoasis Opinion. Here I see a way to try and convey the overall picture of Sunoasis.com. It's always being rattled by the chains of necessity. We are merely humble indentured servants obeying the dictates of our superiors. Thank you.

We finished the newsletters. This month the focus was on
marketing, a word that is dreaded by most writers. It's a lousy word. I wish it didn't exist. I wish I had never heard of it. But, there it is. It reminds me of the guy I used to pass on entering Shakespeares Bookstore in Berkeley, California.

The guy was selling copies of his self-published book of poems. They were dreadful poems but I was intrigued by the idea that a guy would stand outside a bookstore and sell them. "Why do you stand here selling your poems?" He looked at me a bit pained. Yes, closer up I could see he was one of the wounded. "This,
man, is where the action is." And now it makes sense to me. A person standing outside a bookstore with a book to sell is going to attract much more attention than a lousy book of poems placed inside a bookstore with thousands of other morsels.

No, I dislike the whole concept of marketing. After all, the market did not lead me to my discoveries as a young person in those bookstores and libraries of fabled Berkeley. In fact, if I remember right, I was running away from the market.

At any rate, the internet has given writers and others of the creative tribe an unprecendented opportunity. The barrier to marketing has come down a bit.

It's worth studying the rudiments and understand the system through which your precious work will move. I've read a good deal about it but I still don't understand it and don't trust the decisions of the market.

I've been reading a little book written by Edith Wharton on writing novels. It reminded me that at one time I had wanted to write novels. I read them voraciously as young people do. More life in novels than this putrid thing around is! That is the great seduction of novels. The whole form took a nose-dive in the 60's and 70's because of the cultural shift from language
to sight and sound. This is why my father still reads enormously but my brothers read hardly anything. They watch and listen. It says a lot. Ha.

But, as someone commented, without great audiences there can't be great novels. I believe that is so. The novel has to believe in itself, believe that it is the great thing going. It has to be written by those who Orwell termed are, "not frightened."

I'm always impressed by the quality of short stories I receive at
C/Oasis. Some wonderful talents show up with strange tales.

For those who blog make sure you read the link on Sunoasis to the article about blogging and advertising. Something has been started that will not end for awhile.

Comments From The Daily Blotto:

2004-09-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

Comments From The Daily Blotto:

A story out of Michigan about the town where the murdered
engineer, Eugene Armstrong came from. A very illuminating portrait of people who are, understandably, distressed by the beheading of Mr. Armstrong. One thing comes through, however, that is rather disturbing in itself and that is how disconnected the good people are from "what happens." Things are not as black and white as these good people portray it. Our own government has killed tens of thousands of innocent people in the pursuit of terrorists. And that has to be factored into the calculus of going to war. It explains to one who comes from a blue state, in a very blue area why President Bush may get re-elected. The American people don't want to see what is done in their name. And in no small measure does that go towards what the barbaric terrorists do. It doesn't excuse it. And they have forced our hand. But we need to be much more alert in this world. We can't afford to be ignorant or think that "we" are pure and "they" are dark. I can't think of any more important time for the American people to keep alert in the world and not fall asleep in front of the TV.

An odd bitterness in a story about a Lewis and Clark enactment.

And, in a bizarre sense, it replicated everything about the expedition, including the hostility from the natives. Twenty-five or so stopped the enactment in protest saying that Lewis and Clark started the downfall of the native civilization. In some ways I have sympathy with this view, in other ways I think it is utterly naive. Having travelled through the western part of the continent I can vouch for how devastated the native people's are. However, it was inevitable that they would meet "modern civilization,"
at some time. If not the 19th, then the 20th centuries. The
Europeans who came here did exactly what the natives did. They migrated, they scouted, they homesteaded but they did so with a more organized economy, superior technology, and more population. They were like the Aztecs in that sense. Well, the confrontation between the Europeans and natives is a primary story. One where the guilt and the shame and the anger should be done with.

Reverend Falwell has boasted that Evangelical
Christians are, "by far the largest constituency" in the Republican Party.

Reverend, pride goeth before the fall.

Evangelicals and other stubborn constituencies simply assure that the "nation" as a whole will not go beyond a certain level of development. And by putting incompetents in office like President Bush, assured that another "60's" like period will break wildly out sometime in the 21st Century. Hasn't anybody yet figured out that Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have more in common with fundamentalist Moslems than they do with the people
who founded this nation? Is this just apparent to me? The
"nation" Falwell would want already exists. It's called Iran. Americans have yet to fathom that, within themselves, they need to separate belief from practical affairs. And in practical affairs you need a rational point of view, an objective view, a learned view, and not one that shakes venomous snakes around on some smoky mountain.

oh, the places we've been......

2004-08-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

I am having fun going over the logs for Sunoasis.com. They detail what goes on any given day, week, month, or year and are necessary to see what people are doing, exactly, when they use Sunoasis.com. I always enjoy looking over
the various countries that have clicked to Sunoasis.com for one reason or another. Recently three people or one person three different times clicked in from the Principality of Andorra. Now, it could have been a traveller at some cyber cafe but I would prefer the local poet at the local college logging into C/Oasis.

And we got just as many clicks from Papua New Guinea. Which is one less than Kenya and Macedonia.

I wish people from these countries would drop a little note to tell me why they've come to the site.

Ok- this one gets me. Cocos (Keeling) Islands. I'll have to take my map out or do a google search. Eight clicks from Tunsia. Seven from Bahrain. Twenty-three from the Seychelles.

Outside of the the U.S., the most generous audiences are United Kingdom, Japan, Netherlands, Canada, Germany, and Australia. I used to get some extraordinary avant-garde poetry from Japan.

I assume the large number that come from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia come from U.S. military forces. I think they do a great job and deserve every bit of support whatever we think of the politics.

If anyone knows where Niue is please tell me.

In all, at least one hundred different places are represented in my logs. From my correspondence I'm surprised Pakistan and India aren't higher on the list.

Back in the saddle again.......

2004-07-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was down for a few days with a viral infection.
Sickness can be very instructive. There is a kind
of wisdom to it and then the happy moment when
you realize things are getting better.

At the Job Log there's a story about Business 2.0 and how they have shipped half their freelance jobs to India for the August issue. The editor doesn't believe it will be
a factor for a long-time and freelance writers should
not worry but I'm not sure about that. Certain types
of writing that depend on local flavor, sure. They
are not going to be shipped off-shore. But many types
of writing that are descriptions, how-to, information
extracted from reports and interviews, and so on
are vulnerable to all of this.

Read an article in the Boston Globe about poets who believe that publishing contests are rigged.

Someone has created a site called Foetry to deal with this. I know as an editor of a literary webzine that submissions can be hard to deal with. I know nothing about contests since we don't run any at
C/Oasis.

I was a judge for the Austin International
Poetry Festival but the reading was blind.

I'm running into new search engines. They seem to proliferate like insects during the summer heat. A couple that look promising are A9.com and Mooter.

Have fun!

The long week-end

2004-07-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

The long week-end comes to an end. It's interesting to see what
the mood of a nation is during 4th of July. Sometimes it appears
absolutely right to celebrate the great nation in an exhuberant,
corny way. Other times, it's seems more appropriate to get quiet
somewhere and read, again, the Constitution.

The spirit of democracy is the thing of beauty. I'm reminded that
in all cultures, America included, it's always a fight between
evil, nihilism, destructive energies and constructive, good
energies that attempt to assert the very best of a culture at
the center of itself.

The mood is less sure of itself this time around but not in
despair at least. After Vietnam and Watergate this nation was
broken, in spirit, and it had a palling effect for some time.
It can never get so demoralized that it forgets how to make
things, how to build things, how to sacrifice for the future,
how to put value at the core of the thing built, devil take
the hindmost.

At any rate, we go back to work. The magazine is up next.
Sunoasis X 2004 was fairly good and we continue to look how
to improve it. I think the best thing we've done at Sunoasis Jobs
is to have a fairly comprehensive joblog that tries to monitor
some of the things going on in the writing world.

I read the news today, o boy.....

2004-06-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

I'm never entertained by murder, mayhem, beheading,
cries from huge crowds, squeals from teen-age girls
over rock stars, cruelty to animals or other strange
happenings of the now.

The greatest entertainment is listening
to old men tell their tales. Or, a fine dream in which
an old girl friend or wife shows up, prettier than
she was and hungry for you.

The act of decapitation is a strange one that we
have no formal experience with in the modern West. It's a
form of humiliation, a form of possession and occurs
when there is furious repression as happens in old,
primitive cultures. Or cultures on the warpath.

I can remember, as a kid, my friends and I were
fascinated by the report that the beautiful actress
Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in a car accident.
The report turned out to be false but we would talk
and talk about that and try to picture what it must
have looked like. Such is the imaginations of boys.

The ferocity of the world is too real.

And then there is employment...it's improving but, as
we note on the joblog more people, including retired folk and
stay-at-home mom's are entering the work force.

We've had inquiries from attorneys who want to change
professions. And yesterday posted a good job for a
legal editor in the northeast. Transitions from one profession
to another are normal but require some thinking through.

The beginning of a week

2004-06-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

The blog as habit; it's like getting used to opening
e-mail first thing in the morning or checking a
link sent by a subscriber or filling out, once again,
invoices to late-payers.

...am answering a question from a young woman who just
graduated from Loyola University. She wants to do some
freelance editing work. Now, for one thing there are two
types of editors. There are editor, editors and there
are copy editors. And both can be done freelance as long
as the freelancer admits to themselves that they are in
business.

The free-agent nation is the nice phrase for the sort
of thing I see constantly. It's much more difficult than
it appears. If becoming a "free-agent" is simply a ruse
to escape confronting the work-world or mean people or
stupid people, don't worry; you will not escape them.

Another great phrase that I use on the newsletter is,
"remaking of the literary system..."

I picked that up from a female scholar and her comparisons
between the French Revolution and what was occurring on
the Net.

The incentives for the writing class are great; the tasks
arduous. The arduous tasks are ultimately worth it.

The pause that refreshes

2004-06-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

After sending out the Sunoasis
newsletter we take a few days off and enjoy the
emerging summer. We're not encouraged by some of the
reports on employment and will monitor that carefully.
There has been a spurt of hiring on the editorial
side of late but that seems to be slacking off.

I think the lag in economy at this point is "consumer
confidence." People are worried about the outcome in
Iraq and the election in November. We cover these
items at
Sunoasis Opinion.

And if the consumer is not buying
the advertiser won't stick ads all over the place and
there is a lack of incentive to hire in the publishing world.

That's a very general view of course.

Many of the questions we get at Sunoasis Q & A
are from people who feel stuck in their jobs and want to
leap out into the writing game. This is a fine instinct and
we applaud them but they have to approach writing like any
other profession and target their intention. Once they grasp
the intention, they can look at their skills and see which
ones they need to add, then they can start that long,
exasperating process of finding the job or starting that
freelance career.

My opinions about writing, publishing, and the Net have
been formed the past seven years. Epublishing has had its fits
and starts. The most exciting prospect, the living prospect
in our time is that the writer can migrate to the Net,
establish a colony, and start getting more from her own
efforts than from the publisher. And who knows, one of these
days the colonies will band together and overthrow the old,
rotting Empire.

We dream and it is pleasant to do.

The last day of May

2004-05-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

And so it is. It has not been a particularly good month.
I'm always waiting for that transformative month that
will make up for all the bad ones. We could throw in some
years and decades for that matter.

What one learns, finally, is that there
is, at all times, a blending of the bad and the good.
Fine, lead us to that perfect blend of good and bad
and let us drink our red wine.

Everything at Sunoasis.com is aimed toward the end of
the month and the publishing of the newsletters. Will
blogs make the enewsletter obsolete? No, but much of
what we have done on Sunoasis newsletters are blogs.
I felt it was necessary for experienced writers, with
some knowledge to leap into the abysmal mouth of the
beast and find a channel of resource to bedazzle the
mind back to some ripeness.

As a young guy I had a terrible suspicion that modern
life, with its whining machinery, had killed off the
mind and made BRAIN supreme. Therefore, life would
become a predictable affair and all attempt to lift out
of that state would bring on hostility.

That's not quite the way it is but the Net seemed to
me to hold out the possibility of mind getting the upperhand.
To this pipedream we do dedicate ourselves so!

Two of the best links I've put on Sunoasis this month
have to do with a professor at the University of Washington who
says that people are so overloaded with information they
need to organize psychic space and quiet time.

On top of that a survey by MediaPost says
media addiction is "like an eating disorder..."

The young will drink at the fount until their brains are
saturated in the fat of the world. Let's hope they find
wisdom at that point.

Anecdotes

2004-05-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

Any job I've had always resulted in incidents, stories,
and characters found no place else. I was thinking of
the time I worked for the Census Bureau. The government
had rented out one whole floor of a new corporate building
about twenty miles east of San Francisco. It shared space
with a radio station. For all the look of a corporation
inside it was government issue all the way, including the
cardboard desks that we made do with.

One day I got to work and the place was buzzing with
excitement. The fabled Wolfman Jack was going to go to
a promotion party at the radio station adjacent to the
census bureau. I was probably the only one in the very
large office disinterested in the whole deal. That was
all anyone talked about.

The day arrived. Two of the more colorful characters came
to work drunker than usual in anticipation, I suppose,
of meeting the famed Mr. Jack.

At noon, a large black limousine pulled into the service
area of the building and everyone was lined up, pressing
their noses against the windows, straining to get a view of
the stupendous Wolfman. Something emerged from the car and
was hustled into the building.

And soon enough all the people in the Census Bureau were
anticipating partying with the Wolfman. Even the supervisors
were excited.

I, who had no interest in this affair, ended up with the last
laugh. For at the entrance to the radio station was a hand-
painted sign with thick black lettering saying, "No Census
Bureau employees permitted!!!!!!"

I did not laugh outloud.

Do you have a workplace anecdote? If it's fun and clean or
nearly so, we'll publish it in the blog. Send it to:
sunoasisjobs@earthlink.net with "job anecdote" in the subject line.

Thanks!

2004-05-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

We've been getting some very good job postings of late,
such as the one from the BEA in Washington D.C.

Students and young people need to know that even pursuing
writing careers they need to be aggressive and have a strategy.

Learn how to research places you want
to work at and carry that information with you to the
interview. Even if you don't have a chance to use the
information, the good interviewer always knows you have it.

Don't rely on ads alone!

Most jobs are never posted in ads. Target the publications
you want to work for, research them, get your resume and
cover letter in front of the person who will, hopefully,
be your boss.

Freelancing

2004-05-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

I started out wanting to be a freelance writer. My first
job came as a result of answering a small, classified ad
in the local paper. And it turned out to be a very large
project and paid very well. So, it's always good to check
things out.

We can run down dead-end streets.

I think I experienced what every freelance writer experiences;
bills pile up and no assignments are coming in. It's not
as simple as answering little classifieds one finds out. And
eventually I had to give up freelance writing to work in
hospitals and computer companies. The result of that was
I turned my attention to literary writing and gave up
professional writing for that part of my life.

I think the Net really makes a difference. That's why we
prepare the Sunoasis X 2004 newsletter.

We try to focus as much attention on the real needs of the
writer, professional or not. And over seven years we've learned
a thing or two. I felt that was one way to use the resources
and experience I had picked up over the years.

The writing market is filled with an astonishing array of
subjects for the writer to plunge into. We ran a list of
markets for pets and animals on Sunoasis X last month.
Whenever young writers write to me about
freelancing, I tell them to write down the two or three
most interesting subjects they care about. "Those are what
you write about, plunge down into, investigate, talk about,
read about, turn over and over like a good garden."

Request

2004-05-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

So the day unfolds. I look at correspondence first
and it's almost always related to the jobs board.

This morning Nicholas writes, "I work for one
of the largest newspapers in America, but in a bureau in
Nairobi-Kenya..." He goes on and asks for help in improving
his skills as a writer so he can upgrade his career.

I've jotted down a few notes and will develop this
correspondence for awhile. If anyone who reads this
has insight into the Kenya writing market, let me know.

I think it's fantastic the way people around the globe
connect with Sunoasis.com. We've run articles from writers
in Australia, Ghana, Israel, India, Costa Rica among other
locales. We've gotten correspondence from every continent.
We received a short story from Syria that wasn't bad at all.

The only problem is if the copy has to be cleaned up too much
we don't bother.

We're having problems with that from a physicist in Russia
who sent a query.

Preparing C/Oasis

2004-05-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

As we prepare for another issue of C/Oasis I'm taken
back through the five and a half years we've been doing
it. We started with very high hopes. We believed then
and we believe now, that writing and literature are empowered
on the Net. And we have picked through carefully to find
the plums.

When we started I never felt we'd get the excellent, global
response that we have. That has been very satisfying. And
thank you to those in Istanbul, Israel, and that little town
in India who have invited me to visit them. Someday perhaps.

We're going to publish an essay by William Stimson who writes
about some of the satisfactions he gets from writing.

The most difficult part of a literary magazine is handling
the enormous amount of stuff that comes in, all of it hopeful
and with more than a bit of talent. I've tried to develop
a decent system for dealing with it all but it's hard.

It's going to be difficult this month because we've had to
deal with a foul-up with checks sent to Sunoasis Jobs by
eastern establishment companies. The New Yorkers love to
apply pressure when they can. It's a sport with them and I
accept it. After one year of being online I was threatened
by a large, old media company in New York. That scared the
wit out me for a few days. Then I found their webmaster
dissing my site in a public forum and called him out on it
and notified the company that that may be actionable and
oh, they were so nice, so ready to call off the dirty dogs
they were ready to unleash on me. So it goes.

I have a modest bookshelf and thumbing through it the two
books I took down as still interesting to me were Tom Sawyer
and Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche. I love Tom Sawyer
because there is nothing more important than imaging the life
of childhood the way Twain did. It's the natural thing and
full of nectar and clean water. Nietzsche took on the
implications that are still with us. He still speaks to

the modern person or post-modern person. He misses the mark

a lot of the times but the fact he draws the bow is enough
in my book. Courage in philosophy is as important as
courage on the battlefield.

And if you want to know what we think of the goings-on in Iraq
check out Sunoasis
Opinion.

We believe, as all reasonable people believe, that success in war is directly tied into good leadership and we have the wrong people in positions of leadership. That's the bottom-line. Whether Senator Kerry will help or not is another question. Don't ever politicize war; it will do you no good. Think objectively and what is in the best interests of all parties involved.

America will not emerge from this smelling sweet and wonderful.

Introduction

2004-05-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

I actually started to blog around the end of 1996, when I
started a little newsletter called Cyber Oasis. That was intended to offer up as much resource as could be wrung from the neck of the beast, for the writing community.

We now publish Sunoasis Xand Sunoasis 2004, among other
publications at Sunoasis.com.

This blog gives me a chance to connect with people who might
be interested in what we're doing at Sunoasis.com.

So, I'll be listing new stuff here, new stories and essays at C/Oasis, new jobs, new career development stuff, new writings of my own and so forth.

Over the past five years we've published hundreds of wonderful writers and always look for good writers. So, check out the guidelines!

Sunoasis.com is divided into:

My name is David Eide and I've been operating Sunoasis.com
for the past five years. Sometimes a string or a piece of straw
keeps it together but we've done some surprising things. We've been listed in all the writing books and Web Sites and have a very interesting audience.

At any rate, hope you return to this and check what we're doing
at Sunoasis.com!