Category: winning

Where To Swear Your Oath

As a sort of minor and mildly entertaining footnote to Tuesday’s Congressional election in Alabama, there was a CNN interview where the spokesperson for the Republican candidate made a spirited argument that Muslim politicians should not be allowed in Congress because they’d be required to swear on a Christian bible.

The CNN host went on to utterly decimate the spokesperson’s assertion by letting him know that not only is it not required to swear on a bible, if you are swearing an oath of office, you can technically swear on anything.

Something about that pesky separation of church and state, I suppose.

Look, I’m not here to wade into political waters. What I am here for is to wade into this debate:

If you became an elected official, upon which book would you swear your oath of office?

As a lover of books, this question intrigues me. One might suggest that the book used for an oath of office would have some meaning, some gravity. Something that matters to you.

So where to start? I mean, what are the books that made me who I am today? That have, to me anyway, a sacred meaning. Something upon which an oath would really matter?

Okay, I’ve had a noodle on this, and decided that here would be my top five picks, in no particular order:

  1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry


    This is the book that made me want to be a writer. It’s seminal to my creative life and had particular meaning for me years ago to read an author from the west write the west (and not some east coaster’s idea of the west, I’m looking at you Cormac). This book is in my DNA and it’s the perfect book upon which to swear, because Gus and Call do an awful lot of swearing in the story.

  2. Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford


    When I was a kid, my mom suggested I read this book and I am so glad she did. I’ve opined plenty on this book, and it’s perfect for swearing an oath because this was the first book to make me feel like it was not only okay, but pretty damn cool, to be a New Mexican. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s no one knew where or what New Mexico was, nor cared. Heisenberg putting us in the media spotlight was years away. This book is me and I am this book, I give you my oath on that.

  3. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff by Christopher Moore


    The story of the Son of God, as told by his best friend Biff. It’s historical and hysterical. This book will make you laugh right out loud as our man Biff pulls his somewhat clueless friend Jesus out of scrape after scrape. It’s outright blasphemy which makes it the most logical choice to swear my oath of office.

  4. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

    As noted before on this blog, Las Vegas is something well woven into the fabric of my life. I got my start in life there and spent an awful lot of time there as a kid. I have a much different view of Vegas than most. It’s a strange sort of indescribable thing. This book is on my list because, uh, it’s Hunter S. Thompson. What better FU to the whole swearing an oath to the government?

    But mainly, it’s because of this part:

    “A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years. Some people say they like it — but then some people voted for Nixon, too. He would have made a perfect mayor for this town…” — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

    C’mon! This is the perfect oath of office swearing in book.

  5. Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, or maybe Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, or possibly Ball Four by Jim Bouton, or, or, or… It’s a long list.


    The right choice for swearing in because baseball is my religion.

Okay, now that the book question is sorted, the next item to tackle is what music is going to be played at my swearing in? I’m going to assume I will be elected to a low-level office with no budgets for live acts. So, assume a bumpin’ sound system. Who gets to warble under my swearing? Ooooh, that’s a good one…..

If you have a mind to, holler at me here or on any of the social medias and tell me what book you want to swear your own oath on. I’d love to cuss and discuss.

———————




The exact moment where the one on the right realized his whole argument was just verbally punched to the ground


Story source.





Good Things Come In Twos

A two pack of good news! No, not Tupac, may he rest in peace, but a jam-packed, happy, good thing, ain’t-it-grand, times two!

I have been waiting a REALLY long time to share the news that over the summer two of my stories were accepted for publication.

Now both are finally published and out there in the world, flapping their little wings and taking flight.

I am SUPER proud!

Here’s the details:

You can find the magazine cover and link to each of the stories in the first column on the right side of this page.

Or…

I’ll just tell you.

The first is a story called “When Opportunity Knocks You Down” and it’s published in The Griffin Literary Journal, 2015 edition.

I wrote this story over fifteen years ago and I have always just loved and truly believed in it. The words capture a lot of what I was feeling in those first years living in the Bay Area and prowling the streets of vibrant San Francisco.

I have edited and shopped and polished and shopped this story for so long, determined to find that one person who got what I was trying to say.

Turns out it was the editor of The Griffin, Dr. Donna Allego, who was the one I’ve been waiting for. Seeing this story finally make it into print is just beyond my wildest dreams.

It’s a real testament to tenacity and accepting that a story will get a lot of no’s (like about 150 of them) and can still eventually find a yes.

Whew!

Here’s where you can go to read the story

Or go to the The Griffin Literary Journal main page for the link to download the entire edition.

Yay!






The second story is a little bit of a surprise. It’s such a quirky little tale that even as I was submitting it to a lot of magazines, I was just sure no one would pick it up.

To my utter shock, it was quickly snapped up on it’s first round of submissions by Ragazine.cc, The Global Online Magazine of Arts, Information & Entertainment.

This acceptance process was a one eighty-degree turn from the one above. Sometimes that one quirky story is just in the right place at the right time.

The story is called “The Seal” and the genre is a bit of a departure for me. It was written for the final round of the 2014 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Contest. I loved the story and really believed it would do well in the final round of the contest.

We were just twenty writers who made it through to the final round, whittled down from a starting number of about 1,500. My odds were good.

Turns out this little story didn’t even place in the top ten. I was irked. There and then I decided that the best revenge for that stinging loss was to have the story published. A royal eff you to those judges.

I just had no idea it would be accepted so quickly! Double eff you! LOL!

I had a lot of fun writing my story about the Inuit god of icebergs and I hope you have as much fun reading it!

You can find the story here.

While you are there, poke around the other corners of Ragazine.cc, it’s a really cool place.




So yay! Give ’em a both read when you have a moment.

I’ll be over in the corner celebrating times two!





Winning Is Like…Better Than Losing

Now that I have been a member of the photography club at my place of employment for just over a year, and have been attending meetings and listening hard, I think I maybe kind of sort of have earned a teeny tiny bit of respect.

Because this month, both of my submissions for the monthly photo contest made the cut. BOTH!

The rules each month are that you get to submit two photos. We review and critique all the photos in our monthly meetings and then there is an anonymous voting app we use. When votes are tallied, the top four vote getters are published internally at the company.

So yeah baby! I have had one of my photos make the cut before, but never both. It is a little unprecedented. Woo hoo!

The theme this month was double exposure and my two prize winning photos are below for your perusal.

The first one feels really special to me. I took both of the photos in the image while I was in Dublin. It was at the end of my one lone day of tourist time after an intense week of work, and I had walked for miles. I was exhausted and it was raining like it only can in Ireland.

Tired and soaked to the bone, I was bound and determined to find this sculpture of Oscar Wilde. This was after I had stood in a very long line (in the pouring rain, a nice lady shared her umbrella) at Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. That exhibit was exhausting in itself. Way too many people jostling around.

The park where Oscar resides is about half a mile from Trinity college and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. It was driving rain and windy and I was so tired that a nice warm cab looked like a good idea. I stopped to rest twice on the short journey, but forced myself to keep going and once I arrived at the park I was glad I did.

The small, lush, green Merrion Square park was silent as I stood there getting drenched looking at this remarkable statue of Oscar Wilde. A small tour group came by and the tour guide said the artist sourced these incredible and colorful stones from all around the world. It is a beautiful statue and so unique as it reclines on a rock.

When it came time to figure out something to use for double exposure, I thought of this statue and of the very old books I had seen at the Trinity College library (I had watched a video about the method used to bound the tomes and was endlessly fascinated).

Using some tools I had learned in a recent photography class about overlay for textures, I fiddled around in Photoshop and came up with this:

Title: Author


Photograph Copyright © 2014, Karen Fayeth



I was unsure if the photographers in the club would find the image too discordant. It’s almost jarring, but I love it. It’s hard to photograph a statue and have it be anything more interesting than a photograph of a statue. This to me brings depth and texture to the photo and I am so happy with the results.

The other photo I submitted was something I had been visualizing for quite some time.

As I continue to hear all of the news reports about the drought here in California, I was pleasantly surprised that the lack of rain didn’t halt the springtime explosion of California wildflowers. I am mildly obsessed with California Poppies (the state flower) and I love the yellows, reds and purples of other flowers growing in medians, between sidewalk cracks and at the edges of yards.

I picked several of the flowers and shot them using a technique I learned from photography master Harold Davis. Then I took a free stock image of textural dry and cracked ground and combined it with my flower photo. When I look at it, I think of many things I could (and should) go back and tweak, but so far this photo is garnering nice attention.

Title: Drought


Photograph Copyright © 2014, Karen Fayeth


When submitting both of these photos, I wasn’t sure how my surly team of scientists would respond. Both of these photos are kind of arty, but they also show I have some Photoshop chops, and I think they liked that. They had a lot of questions for me on technique since I used a different approach for each photo.

Also, I think the club as a whole struggled with the idea of double exposure. It’s too messy for their orderly minds. I had a film camera in high school that I liked for making double exposures. It can either look weird or really cool. Doing a double exposure in Photoshop gives me more control over how the two photos overlap and how the double exposure looks, and I like it.

Anyhow, thought I’d share my winning photos with you.

Next up, travel to Amsterdam. Wonder what treasures I can find to photograph there?






Both images, Copyright © 2014, Karen Fayeth. Shot with a Canon G10 and combined in Photoshop. Stock image of dry ground from Free Stock Textures.