Sally Ember's Blog, page 124

Vol. II, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, The Spanners Series, by Sally Ember, Ed.D.

Cover and logo art by Willowraven.

Cover reveal for Volume II: April 15, 2014

1st Serialized Excerpt, 3/16/14

About This Volume

Hello. I am Esperanza Enlaces, Chief Media Contact (CMC) for Dr. Clara Ackerman Branon, first liaison—Chief Communicator (CC)—between Earth and the Many Worlds Collective (MWC). Clara asks me to organize Volume II, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever (the one you’re now reading) in The Spanners Series. Since it needs some explaining, I’m the one to provide info.

Volume I, This Changes Everything‘s stories are all from the perspectives of the adults who actually are Spanners (except for me), but we also want Earth’s teens/ young adults and “new adults” (children and grandchildren of Spanners) to realize that we know how important your roles and perspectives are.

Earth’s Transition to membership in the Many Worlds Collective (MWC) affects everyone differently. Therefore, Volume II is composed of interviews I do with and personal stories from each of Clara’s nephews and nieces and her son, Zephyr Branon. Also, it is interlaced with Moran Ackerman’s stories.

Moran Ackerman, age 27 BPC [Before Public Contact] and in his mid-thirties by the end of Transition, is Clara’s nephew, Chief of the Psi-Warriors (PWs) and OverSeers covert and special Operations (OSOps). He frames the Transition with descriptions of his Excellent Skills Program training and personal stories of his family life.

Because of many requests, I also add a Chapter that tells of my first meeting with The Band, picking up right where Clara leaves off in Volume I, This Changes Everything, so that both of our perspectives can be “on record.” Even though everyone Accesses the vid a million times by now, I think readers/viewers want to know my personal responses, both before and after we shoot that first vid.

Clara reviews the draft and tells me it’s too “thin.” “People want more,” she says.”They won’t like it if you don’t give them more about me, about my life. Maybe you could add some things about my years before becoming the Chief Communicator [CC] and then give them some idea of what being the CC is like?”

I consider this and decide to interview her separately. From these, I insert “Snapshots” of Clara’s life at several key points prior to 2012 and then one for each year of the the Transition through 2018, alternating with these other Chapters. This puts more personal stories from Clara in this Volume. I ask a lot of questions about her early years and her daily life now so that we can accumulate a variety of stories and background. I then create fourteen Snapshots, starting when Clara is nine years old and ending last fall, one about every five years or so, that illustrate her circumstances, personal and professional activities and daily schedule. We also decide to put in at least one personal anecdote for almost every Snapshot.

Therefore, there are the Chapters with interviews, the Chapter Interludes that are narrated by Moran, and the Snapshots interspersed throughout this Volume. Unusual, but somehow, we think it works. Enjoy!

Stay tuned on Sally’s blogs on WordPress (which has all links) and Tumblr, and on The Spanners Series‘ pages on Facebook and Google+, for each of the upcoming Excerpts from Volume II from March 16 – April 18, about one/day.

4/18/14, Volume II becomes available for Pre-orders via Smashwords, Kobo, iBooks and nook for half-price: @$1.99, through June 8, 2014.

On 6/9/14, Vol. II goes LIVE everywhere ebooks are sold for $3.99.

#THESPANNERSSERIES #THISCHANGESMYFAMILYANDMYLIFEFOREVER #THISCHANGESEVERYTHING

Filed under: Serialized Excerpts, Serialized Excerpts, The Spanners, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, Volume II of The Spanners Tagged: Clara Branon, ebook, Esperanza Enlaces, Moran Ackerman, Sally Ember, Serialized Excerpts, The Spanners Series, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever

SFR Brigade Presents

Excerpt from Work-In-Progress (WIP), This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, Volume II, The Spanners Series, by Sally Ember, Ed.D.

from CHAPTER SNAPSHOT #9

Snapshots of Clara’s Daily Life: Fourteen Octobers, 1963 – 2017

October, 2012

I switch abruptly to full-on engagement mode, energetically zapping him. I ask, gently, to counterbalance the zap: “Do you love me?”

“What?” His mouth gapes at me, looking with wide eyes, his nose scrunched up, disbelieving what he hears and sensing the energy surge. “‘Do I love you?’ You just told me aliens are coming and you’re going to be a central figure in some science-fiction drama, but the main thing you want me to respond to is ‘Do I love you?’? Are you insane?”

He stands up and starts pacing around the patio.”Are you drinking? Taking drugs? Off some medication I didn’t know you’re taking? What the hell is going on with you, Clara?”

I can’t help it. I start laughing. A few giggles, then guffaws, then uncontrollable, hysterical whooping. Tears are running down my cheeks and I almost pee my pants.

Fanio stops and stares at me as my hilarity escalates. He sits down to wait for it to subside, viewing me the way a doctor views a mental patient in residential care.

Probably wishes he had a straitjacket somewhere close by. The image of his running to get that and trying to put it on me makes me laugh even harder.

Finally, my amusement wanes. How do I convince him? “No, Fanio. I’m quite sane and unaltered. I swear. I know it sounds crazy. Believe me, I do. But, everything I am telling you is about to happen. It’s all true.”

I decide to try a different tactic.”Pretend for a few minutes that you could suspend your skepticism about my story and my sanity to answer my question. Do you love me?”

“How can I believe any of this, Clara? Really? Who would believe you?”

I shrug, I shake my head. “Everyone, Fanio, in about three weeks. I’m telling you, giving you a chance to be an ‘early adopter.’”

Cover reveal for Volume II on April 15.

Cover and logo art by Willowraven.

Pre-orders for Volume II start 4/18/14. Links on author’s site. On sale everywhere ebooks are sold June 9, 2014, $3.99. Volume I, This Changes Everything, already available everywhere. Buy links on author’s site.

http://www.sfrcontests.blogspot.com for more snippets of other SFR Brigade Members’ Works-in-Progress

Filed under: Writing

This week is heralded as the 25th anniversary of the roll-out of the World Wide Web (now known as the #Internet) for laypeople’s use. In commemoration of that, I want to give a belated shout-out to my first computer teachers, one long-time friend, unfortunately the late and very sorely missed Jaye Alper, and my long-time friend, Mario Cossa. Both were early users, smart and talented people who “got it” years before most people.

Mario ran a nonprofit at the time called The Children’s Performing Arts Center (CPAC). For this, he had the use of a tiny, front-room “office” on the first floor of a 100-year-old Victorian mansion on Court Street in Keene, New Hampshire. He had acquired an Apple IIe and a printer.

This beast took a long time to “boot up,” meaning, minutes. We’d turn it on, go do other things, come back and there it would be: green script, black/grey screen, blinking white cursor. No mouse. Instead, a DOS that required us to learn keyboard commands which Mario had posted on the wall and in a notebook. Floppy disks. No internet hook-up (hook-up to what?).

To see what we created, we had a dot matrix printer, loud and slow, that fed paper up through a slit in the bottom shelf of the new-fangled computer stand/desk or from the floor. It had to use specially designed computer paper that we had to pull out and separate at each perforated page ending and cut the edges off before using or it wouldn’t fit into manila file folders.

All files’ “back up” had to be done to the floppies, which Mario painstakingly labeled. IBM floppies and old Apples used very large, flexible diskettes that later became the harder, plastic diskettes that the “save” icon is modeled on.

With no other system for remembering, Mario invented and we kept a running log of each disk’s contents in a spiral notebook, with each disk’s name at the top of a page and its ever-increasing contents listed below, by file name and date updated (constantly changing). This was a system we continued to use through three more nonprofit incarnations and 15 more years!.

Meanwhile, Jaye was an early Apple adopter, also, and she had the first Macintosh I’d ever seen. In 1991, I got an LC because of her tutelage. I remember my many years of “tutoring” sessions with Jaye. I especially remember the earliest ones, in which she patiently and carefully tried to get me to understand “files,” “documents,” “folders,” “saving,” “save as,” “cut,” “paste,” “copy.” Without her help, all of Mario’s great notebooks would have gone for naught. Understanding needs to precede use. I was a slow learner in this area.

To “get” a file in the new world wide web to “live” on my computer’s hard drive, I had to learn a complicated FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and “write” the code language for it to download. To help me and because Jaye was very busy, I took workshops in Hypercard programming language, Filemaker Pro, Microsoft Works and then Word, databases and spreadsheets. Fifteen years later, I taught computer user classes to beginners, in a “great circle of life” moment.

Learning software programs for graphics in the days when there were no “snap to grid” options, all graphics had to be hand-drawn and positioned.This now seems hilarious, but then: what a pain. And, believe me, I am no artist.

The first time I decided to copy a file from a floppy disk to my hard drive, I didn’t know the “rule”: THE MOVING FILE WINS! Whatever is being dragged or introduced takes precedence over what it’s moved to when they have the same file name. Rookie mistake: I lost all my updates, edits and improvements. Lesson learned.

Very excited to have a “mouse” with my Mac LC and not have to remember (or look up) all the commands. But, I still use a lot of the keyboard commands (they haven’t changed much over the decades, luckily). Having “menus” was novel and exciting, a huge time-saver.

First modem: very loud, long time to get connected, many failures and restarts needed. Took minutes for one page to appear on the screen and often only part of it would appear. “Refresh” meant waiting many more minutes each time. Also, “surfing the web” took just a few minutes because besides American Online (AOL) and a few other locations, there were almost no pages to visit, yet. Individuals, businesses, government and other entities had no web presence.

For grant-writing and research, I had to go physically, in person, and use the library’s no-circulating grants compendia, photocopy machines. I had to take notes, use snail mail and keep paper copies of what I sent or, amazingly (for the time), faxed. In the 1980s, fax machines were just beginning to appear in ordinary business offices and homes, using that thin, fragile paper.

When my 97-year-old grandfather was close to dying in 1998, we were talking about all the changes he’d witnessed. Suddenly, he said to me: “One thing I don’t understand: fax machines.” I laughed and said I didn’t understand them, either. Still don’t.

Thirty-one years after that Apple IIe, having worked on both PCs and Macs and now using a PC, being all over the internet with social media and research, uploading and downloading with relative ease, the days of rampant confusion, frustration, modem noises and waiting many minutes for a page to appear seem distantly in the past.

Gratitude to all the programmers, creators, builders, thinkers, teachers, leaders and early adopters, especially my friends, Jaye and Mario, for bringing me into the computer age. I hope you all enjoy the fruits of these people’s and your own tutors’/teachers’ labors as you read this post.

image from blog.wefeelsecure.com

Filed under: Gratitude, Personal stories Tagged: computers, Mac, Macintosh, modem, PC, Sally Ember, world wide web

The Spanners Series by Sally Ember Ed.D., is proud to announce: Vol I, This Changes Everything, is soon to be joined by Volume II, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, specially suited for new and young adults as well as adults.

Excerpts from Volume II, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, of The Spanners Series, on author’s website (link below) as well as Wattpad, Authomony and FaceBook and Google+ Series’ pages starting 3/16/14.

Vol II begins pre-orders via Smashwords, Kobo, iBooks, nook, April 18 and releases June 9 on those and Amazon and all Smashwords affiliate sites.

Vol. II BLURB: This Changes My Family and My Life Forever is the story of the first five years After Public Contact with the Many Worlds Collective (2013-2018), “The Transition” to full membership for Earth. Many of the changes, reactions, struggles and circumstances accompanying these years are related from the points of view of the main character, Dr. Clara Branon’s, adult son and his cousins as well as some of those cousins’ children. One of Clara’s nephews in particular, Moran Ackerman, who becomes Chief of the Psi-Warriors and all OverSeers, tells of his experiences and training in assuming those roles for Earth after having been a Rabbi and teacher of middle school. TCMF&MLF‘s content is edited/curated and also partly narrated by Esperanza Enlaces, Clara’s Chief Media Contact, a contemporary of her son’s, so some of her story and many parts of Clara’s are included as well.

Pre-order period for Vol. II, 4/18 – 6/8/14, offers the special discounted price of $1.99 for Volume II on all sites. Starting 6/9/14, Volume II will sell for $3.99.

Vol. I, This Changes Everything , BLURB: Dr. Clara Ackerman Branon, Ph.D., 58, is having the first of many home visits from holographic representations of five beings from the Many Worlds Collective (MWC), a consortium of planet and star systems all around the multiverse, over a thirty-year, increasingly Utopian period. Earth is being invited to join, formally, and the December, 2012, visit is the first one allowed to be made public. Making the existence of the MWC public means many Earthers have to adjust our beliefs and ideas about life, religion, culture, identity and, well, everything we think and are. Clara becomes the liaison for Earth, the Chief Communicator, between Earth and the MWC. This Changes Everything relates the events partly from her point of view, partly from records of meetings of varying groups of the MWC governing bodies, and partly from her Media Contact, Esperanza Enlaces, employing humor, poignancy, a love story, family issues, MWC’s mistakes and blunders, history, politics, paranormalcy and hope.

Cover reveal for Volume II on April 15!

Cover and logo art by Willowraven:

willowraven-illustration.blogspot.com/

All links on http://www.sallyember.com

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/376197

Amazon, for all countries: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HFELTG8?tag=viewbookat0e-20

Amazon Author page: amazon.com/author/sallyember

Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/this-changes-everything-3

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/this-changes-everything/id746840776?mt=11&ls=1

Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/this-changes-everything-sally-ember-edd/1117473726?ean=2940045417921&isbn=2940045417921

Facebook Series Page: https://www.facebook.com/TheSpannersSeriesbySallyEmber

Google+ Series Page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/115730970500394047116/115730970500394047116/about

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/sallyember

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/sallyemberedd

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18772075-this-changes-everything

Filed under: Writing

sallyember:

I aspire to understand all of this some day. The best part: “The negative square root solution outisde the horizon represents another Universe….The inhabitants [of the two Universes] can meet… and soon meet with regularity.”

Originally posted on The Seven Worlds:

The Schwarzschild metric admits negative square root as well as positive square root solutions for the geometry.

White Holes and Wormholes

By Andrew Hamilton, 2001

Schwarzschild wormhole

The complete Schwarzschild geometry consists of a black hole, a white hole, and two Universes connected at their horizons by a wormhole.

The negative square root solution inside the horizon represents a white hole. A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out.

View original 1,062 more words

Filed under: Writing

sallyember:

This project and its songs were pivotal in my life as a woman, teacher, camp counselor, mother, group leader for teens and pre-teens, educator/teacher trainer, leadership developer for women and girls. Thanks to “Free to Be You and Me”!

Originally posted on TIME:

It was only a giggle and five words, but it told us our work was cut out for us.

The year was 1974, and my friend, producer Carole Hart, and I were deep into creating a TV special based on our children’s LP that celebrated gender and racial equality. Filled with songs and stories and poems, the project encouraged kids to realize that their dreams were not only boundless, but achievable. Our title for the project: Free to Be…You and Me.

For one scene in the special, we’d decided to interview children about how they envisioned their lives one day. This segment, we felt, would underscore that people had to be taught to be sexist; and that little children had not yet been socialized with gender stereotypes.

“What would you like to be when you grow up?” we asked one precious, curly-headed preschooler, the tape rolling as we waited…

View original 915 more words

Filed under: Writing

Subtitle: Why everyone who has ever been in a writer’s life should be afraid, VERY afraid!

Writers who invent characters claim they work harder than the rest of us whose characters are drawn from “real” life. How accurate is this claim? Let’s examine the pros and cons of lending actual people’s bios to fictional characters. Then, YOU decide which writers work harder!

Originally posted 3/11/14 in Science-Fiction/Romance Brigade: http://www.sfrcontests.blogspot.co.uk/

PROS:

1. Actual people already have an appearance, so we can describe instead of straining our imaginations to create features, saving time and energy for generating original plot points and conflicts.

2. Instead of starting from scratch, we can get a head start on character development by using the people we already know. Then, take whatever liberties we want with their biographies, attitudes, styles, intentions, relationships, even ages, inventing or exaggerating in whatever ways suit our stories.

3. Some people will feel honored, flattered, amused or intrigued when we let them know we are basing a character on them. Try to choose those people to “borrow” heavily from and not those who would object!

4. When we put our constellations of former and current relatives, lovers, friends, bosses, colleagues, fellow students, politicians, celebrities and other famous sorts into the skylines of our stories, we can create street riots by having them act out our psychological fantasies, desires, dreams and yearnings without our actually engaging with these people.

5. Cheaper than therapy, safer than revenge, more satisfying than almost any other way we legally can acquire to work through whatever issues we have with these actual people: write them into our stories. Especially popular is making someone we despised or who betrayed us into a villain or victim. My favorite is to give the heroine or hero a great romance with someone I secretly covet. One murder mystery author’s usual victims or villains are the same type of man…. I wonder which guy pissed her off?

CONS:

1. Make sure to make the drafted characters mostly unrecognizable to avoid the range of possible consequences, from hurt feelings to lawsuits.

2. Getting permissions can be difficult to obtain, so choose carefully and disguise well.

3. Even when we make the fictional characters “better” than the originals, the originals may not be happy with our versions. Be prepared.

4. Keeping straight in the writer’s mind who is who requires a pseudonyms list. Try to avoid calling your actual people by their characters’ names in public.

5. Changing key details, relationships, and/or circumstances can feel like “cheating,” but may be necessary for everything to work well. If you give the murderer one child because your murderer’s counterpart has one but you need your murderer to have two for a plot point, give him two and REMEMBER than you did. Maintain a spreadsheet of important dates, alterations to “actual” characters’ events, and other changes or you run the risk of causing yourself and possibly your readers undue confusion.

Those who start with “real” and then expand into fictional characters must be sharply focused and spend extra time to keep it all clear. Therefore, I declare the winner of the harder working among writers to be US!

Be careful and have fun!

Bio:

Sally Ember, Ed.D., is a published nonfiction author and produced playwright whose sci-fi/ romance/speculative/utopian/paranormal/multiverse fiction for YA, New Adult and Adults, The Spanners Series, has two Volumes available by June 9, 2014, and eight more to come. Sally also has had short stories and articles published and has co-written, edited, and proofread multiple media. Sally was raised Jewish and is a practicing Buddhist meditator. She is also an almost-daily swimmer, a mediocre singer/pianist, avid feminist, dreamer, and devoted mother/ sister/ aunt/ daughter/ cousin/ friend. Sally has worked as an educator and upper-level, nonprofit manager in colleges, universities and private nonprofits for over thirty-five years in New England (every state), New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area (where she now lives). Sally has a BA in Elementary Education, a Master’s (M.Ed.) and a doctorate in education (Ed.D.).

This Changes Everything, Vol. I, The Spanners Series by Sally Ember, Ed.D.

Dr. Clara Ackerman Branon, Ph.D., 58, is having the first of many home visits from holographic representations of five beings from the Many Worlds Collective (MWC), a consortium of planet and star systems all around the multiverse, over a thirty-year, increasingly Utopian period. Earth is being invited to join, formally, and the December, 2012, visit is the first one allowed to be made public. Making the existence of the MWC public means many Earthers have to adjust our beliefs and ideas about life, religion, culture, identity and, well, everything we think and are. Clara becomes the liaison— the Chief Communicator—between Earth and the MWC. This Changes Everything relates the events partly from her point of view, partly from records of meetings of varying groups of the MWC governing bodies, and partly from her Media Contact, Esperanza Enlaces, employing humor, poignancy, a love story, family issues, MWC’s mistakes and blunders, history, politics, paranormalcy and hope.

COVER ART BY WILLOWRAVEN: http://willowraven-illustration.blogspot.com

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/376197

download excerpts free at Smashwords (or sites below), read more about author or watch author readings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTupok4wCN8

Available for $3.99 on Smashwords (any format), iBooks, nook, Kobo, Amazon/Kindle and many other sites worldwide. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HFELTG8?tag=viewbookat0e-20

Read reviews and leave one of your own on any of the above sites and also

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18772075-this-changes-everything and http://www.shelfari.com/books/37044452/This-Changes-Everything-(The-Spanners-Series) and http://booklikes.com/book/5125922/this-changes-everything-volume-i-the-spanners-series-sally-ember-ed-d-

#FF (FOLLOW) Sally on Twitter: @sallyemberedd http://www.twitter.com/sallyemberedd

#FF and comment her website, which includes blog: http://www.sallyember.com and http://sallyember.tumblr.com/

LIKE and #FF The Spanners Series by Sally Ember page on Facebook or Google + and leave a comment. Add Sally to Google+ Circles: [email protected] https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/115730970500394047116/115730970500394047116/about and https://www.facebook.com/TheSpannersSeriesBySallyEmber

#FF Sally’s Boards on Pinterest! Repin! http://www.pinterest.com/sallyember

Listen to archived one-hour interview with Sally on Blog Talk Radio’s Indie Books show hosted by Will Wilson from 12/27/13 for free: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/indiebooks/2013/12/27/indie-books-show-15 with other interviews and reviews links available via Sally’s website.

This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, Vol. II, The Spanners Series by Sally Ember, Ed.D., goes into Pre-orders via Smashwords, Kobo, iBooks and nook April 15-18, 2014 and releases everywhere, including Amazon, June 9, 2014.

Seeking reviewers for Volume II starting March 15, 2014, and Volume I, any time. Please contact Sally if you’d like to do a review of either Volume I or Volume II. For a FREE ebook download coupon: be a reviewer, belong to a Book Club or be a teacher/student in a class that wishes to utilize TCE or any other of the future volumes of The Spanners Series for discussion/study. Discussion questions/curricula and author SKYPE or visits available upon request. Contact Sally: [email protected]

Filed under: All Volumes, The Spanners, Writing Tagged: characters, fiction, paranormal, romance, science fiction, speculative fiction, Writers, writing

sallyember:

I hope I get to see the full-length film when it is available. This is the story of my life and that of many parents who are artists, writers, composers, musicians, especially (in this culture) women. Great trailer. Wish the women were named, though.

Originally posted on Live to Write - Write to Live:

Welcome to this Saturday Edition in which I share a little of 

what I’m up to with my writing (when I’m not here)

 and 

what I’m reading (between the covers and around the web)

. I’ll also pull back the curtain a little on 

my version of the writing life

View original

Filed under: Writing

“Follow My (Book) Blog” Friday

http://www.sallyember.com/feed

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

If you’d like to join, follow these rules!

(Required) Follow our Featured Bloggers (Parajunkee and Allison Can Read are the Hosts, so everything is on their sites)

Put your Blog name & URL in the Linky thing, above. You can also grab the code if you would like to insert it into your posts.

Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say “hi” in your comments and that they are now following you.

If you are using WordPress or another CMS that doesn’t have GFC (Google Friends Connect) state in your posts how you would like to be followed

Please follow Sally Ember, Ed.D. using RSS Feed since I am on a free WordPress site.

Follow Follow Follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don’t just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don’t say “HI”

If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the Love…and the followers

If you’re new to the follow Friday hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

Best to you all!

Filed under: Blogging and others' content Tagged: followers, Sally Ember, Writers

“Execnote” “Nimble” “Commun.it” “Pocket”

If these sound like foreign terms, you’re not alone. Indie authors and many others doing our own marketing and outreach are inundated with tasks, content, tweets, posts, blogs, podcasts and videos until we’re ready to explode.

We have to get our social media to be more manageable, don’t we?

Let Andrew Jenkins explain and provide reasons for you to learn about and start using these social media management tools!

Thanks, Andrew!

\

http://arcompany.co/10-tools-to-make-your-social-media-management-easier/

Filed under: Blogging and others' content, Indie or Self-Publishing, Marketing, Social Media Tagged: indie authors, marketing, self-publishing, social media, Writers