Ron Carey’s successor

A big, burly, bearded Brooklynite UPS worker named Tim Sylvester inherited the late Ron Carey’s prestigious mantle as the rank and file reformer of Teamsters Local 804 in an election triumph on Dec. 3 that can only be described as breathtaking.
Sylvester won the presidency of Local 804 with his Members United Slate ousting the incumbents by a vote of 2,348-1091, a margin of more than two to one. Local 804 has 8,000 members and covers UPS’ crucial New York market.
While his victory was stunning, it came not by chance, but by building a movement in Local 804 to oppose concessionary contracts and to demand the local’s officers keep the membership informed instead of in the dark about negotiations—reflecting the philosophy of rank and file participation espoused by the ever-militant Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Sylvester and Jim Reynolds, his partner in transforming Local 804 are affiliated with TDU. Reynolds was elected Local 804’s secretary-treasurer on the Members United Slate.
Carey’s career can be broken into three shining rank and file reform moments: his election to the presidency of Local 804 in 1967; his election as General President of International Brotherhood of Teamsters with crucial support from TDU in 1991; and the great victory over UPS on the picket lines and at the bargaining table in 1999, again with the backing of TDU in an era when most unions were fearful of striking.
The 52-year-old Sylvester, who has been a Teamster and a UPS worker for 30 years, matched Carey’s 1967 achievement in ousting the current administration from Local 804, now headed by Howie Redmond, a long-time an ally of Carey who transferred his allegiance wholeheartedly to James P. Hoffa when he won the general president’s seat in 1999. Hoffa came to power after Carey was dumped from office on corruption charges—later proven to be untrue. Ousting an incumbent local Teamsters administration is the equivalent of defeating a sitting Member of Congress; it can be done, but not easily.
Whether Sylvester blossoms into a candidate for General President of the Teamsters will depend on luck and his performance as the top officer of Local 804. The next election for General President of the Teamsters will be in 2011—not much time for Sylvester to jell into a star with a national reputation for leadership.
But the next candidate backed by TDU to run against Hoffa and his allies in Washington will have to be someone just like Tim Sylvester, a Teamster leader up from the rank and file with a hunger to craft an activist union.

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.

Shingles aftermath forever?

Two weeks ago, for the first time in 14 months I felt the aftermath of shingles receding. There was the slightest sensation just above the right corner of my left eye. The shingles aftermath was still there, but barely. In the morning, I awoke to the full fledged, unpleasant presence of the shingles aftermath: swelling, itching, aching, all-around unpleasantness. It hasn't abated since. I wonder how long this will go on? Perhaps for the rest of my life. Along with the day-long and night-long discomfort, there is the exhaustion factor. I get fatigued very easily, sometimes painfully so.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY
by James Welch
I had to push myself through THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY (Harper & Row/1979). This was Welch's third novel and a pretty shabby work in comparison to what he would produce in the future (meaning FOOL CROWS and THE HEARTSONG OF CHARGING ELK). I consider Welch one of the best writers I have read. The protagonist, Jim Loney, is a loser from the outset, who in the end is shot to death by an Indian policeman for a killing which was accidental. The novel is primarily a character study of the low-lifes around an Indian reservation in Montana. Loney is a half breed, torn between two cultures, and is an uneducated, aimless wino. He has a sister, who wants to rescue him as does his attractive girlfriend, a white school teacher from Texas. He doesn't want to be saved because of the emptiness of his soul. He has never recovered from being abandoned, along with his sister, by his reckless mother and his drunken father. Had this been the first Welch book I read, I would have skipped the others at a great loss to myself since his later books are wonders to be treasured.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

New Indie-author outlet

Like most Indie authors I am always on the outlook to expand the distribution network of my novels, for sale and for free. Recently, I discovered obooko, a year-old free eBook site based in Great Britain. The process of uploading your book onto obooko is very simple indeed. Obooko distributes novels, nonfiction, and poetry worldwide on the PDF platform so that the potential audience needs only a computer rather than an eBook or Kindle-type device.
Adding to the pleasure of finding obooko onto which I loaded my novels, THE DREAM DANCER and THE JYNX, I discovered a link to BookCoverPro, which sells modestly-priced programs to rather easily create your own book covers. I went through some agony in the past trying to figure out a means of designing book covers transferable to the web for full-cover paperbacks and front cover eBooks. I failed to find any that would do the job for a reasonable cost.
BookCoverPro was the answer to my cover-creating crisis. Like most authors, my computer skills are limited. I spent a couple of weeks struggling through the process of the first cover. I did the second cover in half an hour. I bought the program with the intention of doing covers for six novels so the price didn’t put me off: there are two BookCoverPro programs, the standard for $97 and the deluxe for $187.
In a future blog, I will provide my guide for the Indie-author with limited computer skills, like me, to put together a cover with the BookCoverPro program.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

THE ONLY MONARCH

On the eve of fall, Sept. 21, 2009, my wife Rae spotted a Monarch Butterfly on the Buddleia Butterfly Bush in our backyard on Long Island. She immediately called me to share the wonder of seeing the only Monarch we have seen this summer, and this on the last day of summer.
In the past we have always seen Monarchs, plenty of them, in August at our local town park and in our backyard. This year, we saw very few butterflies of any sort in either place—normally we see many. This summer, we spotted a couple of Black Swallowtails and Eastern Tiger Swallowtails.
I read that the wet, cold spring of 2009 had damaged the butterfly population. Our experience seems to be proof of that. Or, is Global Warming at play in diminishing the butterfly numbers?

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

A Year of Shingles

On Sept. 15, 2009, I completed a full year of affliction with shingles centered on my left eye. There have been times just in the past week for very brief spans when I would say my eye and the area around was feeling neutral—usually in the first closing of my eyes to sleep. Then the pressure or the itching or the distant ache return would return.
I am now writing for two hours a day—that is, two one-hour segments. I can read newspapers and books again, but for limited spans. And, I can watch TV, but with my left eye mostly closed.
TV watching with the left eye seems to provoke my shingles.
One affliction that hasn’t abated is fatigue. After a curtailed daily exercise (stretching, 25 sit-ups, walking a mile and three-quarters, a brief tai chi routine), followed by breakfast, and then writing for an hour, I am at the very least tired and sometimes exhausted. So I lay down for an hour to listen to WNYC or a book on CD, often falling asleep.
I get tired quickly even doing any light physical work like cutting a small section of the lawn or raking a few bags of leaves.
My great hope is that the shingles finally is diminishing to a lesser presence. As I type this, I feel a very light pressure on a corner of my left eye. On the scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst, I would say my eye is at a 1, mostly it is a 3.
Friends and relatives ask: Why can’t the doctor do something for you? My answer is: If he could, he would.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

THE RUINS by Scott Smith

X THE RUINS by Scott Smith
Read by Patrick Wilson, who has a nice, clear voice.
(Simon & Schuster Audio)July 2006
Scott Smith goes far beyond the usual horror story in THE RUINS. The book came across to me as a metaphor for global warming as six tourists on a day trip to an archeological site in a Mexican jungle stumble into the jaws of a pitiless adversary.
Smith presents us with six clearly defined characters including a flighty woman, a serious woman, a male weakling, two very strong, resourceful men, and a happy Greek, who doesn’t speak English so he can’t communicate with his companions. In addition there is a language gap between the day trippers and Mayan villagers who try, but fail to warn them of the awful danger awaiting them.
I found myself saying: “This is what I would do” to escape the tangle in which the characters have fallen. That is the mark of a worthwhile author, who draw the reader (or in this case the listener)that far into the story.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.