Let’s Talk… Wage Gap
A little while ago, I saw a picture someone had posted on social media and it said: Amount a man makes (it was a dollar bill) and then it said amount a woman makes (it was a bunch of change that when added up equaled a dollar). I shook my head and removed myself from the internet for awhile. When I came back, I saw a woman had posted a response about the meme not being funny – I was exuberant. Then the man responded: educate yourself followed by a WSJ (Wall Street Journal) opinion piece on why the difference in the wages existed; the piece was the classic argument: women take jobs in sectors that don’t pay as much. So, when I decided I would jump into the public forum, I knew I needed something that was from a source that would be reputable (and luckily I had a subscription to the WSJ, so I knew they had many non-opinion based pieces on the wage gap). I came across my weapon: an infographic built on census backed data which controlled for career path. By choosing a visualization based on census data, I removed the classic argument about choosing positions that pay less. (Check the infographic here: http://graphics.wsj.com/gender-pay-gap/ or click [Read More] for my analysis).
Read MoreHaiku – Competing Flowers
Spring, petals invite
They float through the air, butterflies
please visit… none do
~Theodore Maestranzi
Read MoreMeet Sparkles
I own a cat… I know I am the quintessential writer; I sit in my ivory tower spitting prose and petting my kitty. I do that sometimes, only when the tower is available, but I didn’t get a cat because of some arbitrary stereotype. In fact, I got a kitten because I wanted evolution’s best weapon living in my home. Yes, she is fuzzy and does goofy things, but I’ve watched her take bats down as they flew through my apartment. I’m not kidding, multiple times my cat has taken a bat out of the air and then proceeded to “play” with it for hours (I will discuss my bat problem at a different time). So this post isn’t about why cats are great, it is why my cat is great – click “Read More” to meet Sparkles.
Read MoreNot a Poet – Hiatus on Some Haikus
I believe that my strength exists in writing novels. The format allows me to really spread my wings as a writer; I am a tangented person, so it is nice not having a limit – other than the story’s needs (I believe in the writer is a medium approach to aesthetics). But, I really enjoy the struggle of writing a haiku. It is the poetry form I choose because of my love for nature and the hardened structure surrounding it. My goal is to be a novelist, mostly because I tend to like writing novels more than writing short stories. However, I write short stories as a sort of experiment – testing the waters to prove that a theory I have works and I can apply it to a novel. Now, I have begun writing short fiction to get published so I can better my chances of finding an agent.
But that is too much about me and not why I am making this post… while cruising around the internet to find some magazines who were looking for some short fiction, I came across a magazine asking for haikus. Normally, I wouldn’t share my haikus because I don’t feel they are all that magical. But then I realized, why not? If someone else found beauty in them, then I should share them (this thought is what started my push to publish haikus on my website). The issue with my submitting my haikus to a magazine… I can’t publish them on the website until they are rejected (or accepted, stay positive… stay positive… stay positive). So, there are some really good ones (that I like) but I can’t share them with you until the submission is over – which means you are going to get the ones I don’t feel are superb. I believe I will be notified of my success or failure in July. If any are accepted, expect me to plug the magazine and then post the haiku three months later.
Read MoreOne of my Real Fears
My process for writing fiction is probably one of those things that other writers do but something I don’t know about. For me, I need to live in my universe/world before I can create it. I visualize everything and place myself there before I begin writing about it. My short fiction tends to suffer because I don’t perform this task in as much detail as I would for a novel. However, my novels are places I’ve lived in for many days, weeks, months, and some have even been there for years. Since I was a kid, I loved teleporting myself into a world of my own creation before bed. I would live there for some of my day and then rejoin those on Earth. It was a trick, I could disappear and do whatever I wanted. Yet, that ability, to vividly create something and believe you were there also has a downside. [Click “Read More” to go on a philosophical journey]
Read More