Writing tips by George Orwell

Fiction writing tips

Good words to use

Edify: verb tr.: To instruct in order to improve the mind or character. Via French from Latin aedificare (to build), from aedis (building) + facere (make). Earliest documented use: 1340.

Devolve:  To transfer or be passed (duties, rights, powers, etc.) on to another. verb intr.: To deteriorate or degenerate.  From Latin devolvere (to roll down), from de- (down) + volvere (to roll). Ultimately from the Indo-European root wel- (to turn or roll), which also gave us waltz, revolve, valley, walk, vault, volume, wallet, helix, and voluble. Earliest documented use: 1420.

Terrestrial: relating to the earth or its inhabitants, iving or growing on land, belonging to a class of planets that are like the earth (as in density and silicate composition)

 Terriers, terrariums, terraces and Terra firm all derive from the Latin root terra, which means "earth."

Heimisch or heimish or haimish: adjective: Homely; unpretentious. From Yiddish heymish (domestic), from Old High German heim (home). Ultimately from the Indo-European root tkei- (to settle or dwell), which also gave us home, haunt, hangar, site, situate, and hamlet.

This is the prayer I grew up with. I keep a copy of it in my wallet and another on my desk.I thought you might enjoy reading it

 Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; 

Where there is hatred, let me sow love; 

Where there is injury, pardon; 

Where there is discord, harmony; 

Where there is error, truth; 

Where there is doubt, faith; 

Where there is despair, hope; 

Where there is darkness, light; And where there is sadness, joy. 

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

6 Signs That a Passion or Calling is "True"

You need to know what to look for, and here's a primer

Post published by Gregg Levoy on May 06, 2015 in Passion!

I used to do a lot of stone sculpting, and when you want to find out whether a stone is “true,” you bang on it with a hammer. If it gives off a dull tone, that means the stone has faults running through it that are likely to crack it apart when you work on it. But if it gives off a clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, that means the stone is “true,” has “integrity,” and most importantly, will hold up under repeated blows.

This is exactly the information you need to know about your passions and callings. You need to know they ring true, have integrity, and are going to hold up under repeated blows—the kind the world specializes in, the kind you’re going to encounter the moment you take your passions, calls, commitments, and convictions out into the world where they’re going to get banged on.

One of the best ways to find out whether they’re “true” is to get into the habit of continually tapping in and listening to yourself with what Saint Benedict called “the ear of the heart.” It’s the core of what spiritual traditions refer to as discernment, of clarifying your calls, and it sometimes requires not just pick-and-shovel work, but patience on the order of years.

It also helps if you know what to look for—what characterizes “integrity” in a passion or calling.

It’s one of the questions I routinely asked the people I interviewed for the Callings book: How did you know it was a true call? How did you figure out that you were on the right path, or that you were the right person? How did you know whether the call came from soul/God/passion, or whether it came from ego/ wishful thinking/the desire for financial security/the desire to show the bastards?

The responses people gave me were so consistent, I can list them for you. Here are six signs that a passion or calling is “true”:

1) It keeps coming back, no matter how much you ignore it. A poet named Francis Thompson once wrote a poem called Hound of Heaven, which is about God. He referred to God as a hound-dog because of what hound dogs are famous for, which is tracking people down. They can get one whiff of you and follow you for a hundred miles. In other words, our passions and callings may be “still small voices,” but the true ones have staying power. It’s the blessing and the curse of them—the search party doesn’t retire.

2) The true calls tend to come at you from multiple directions—gifts, talents, dreams both day and night, body symptoms, synchronicities, the books that mysteriously make their way onto your nighttable, the way events and opportunities unfold in your life. In other words, there’s a clustering effect, and you’ve got to connect the dots.

3) There’s a feeling of rightness about it. It just feels right. You may not be able to explain it, but you can’t deny it either.

4) Your enthusiasm for it tends to sustain itself over time, and doesn’t just peter out after a few weeks or months or semesters. You even feel a kind of affinity or affection for all the mundane tasks involved in bringing these passions to fruition, and they all have them. No matter how exalted, every passion or calling has its version of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, making cold calls and tacking posters up on telephone poles.

Author Malcolm Gladwell calculates that mastery in most endeavors requires at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice—the math: 90 minutes a day for 20 years—and anyone who’s ever been in a play or a band knows that the amount of time they spend rehearsing compared to performing is something like 90-10. But it’s passion that largely explains people’s willingness to put up with that equation. to practice the same lines or lyrics for thousands of hours for the chance to go public with it barely a tenth of the time.

5) It will scare you. Some people even told me that they figured if a call felt safe, it probably wasn’t the right path, but if it scared them, it probably was, because it meant they were close to something vital.

I’m always amused by a bumper sticker campaign I see all around the country on my travels. I think it’s for a clothing company, but it says, “No Fear.” And I don’t buy it. Fear is a biological imperative—it’s hardwired in us. The fight-or-flight mechanism is a perfect example. I think what can happen sometimes is that something else becomes more important to you than the fear you feel, and then you act with real courage and conviction. But no fear? I don’t think so. In fact, I saw one of these bumper stickers in Arizona a few years back. Same sticker, but with a slight alteration made in it, I think in the name of credibility. It said, “Some Fear.”

6) The truth or falseness of a passion or calling is ultimately in the results. In other words, you’ve got to be willing to try it out, to experiment, to go down the path a little ways—even if you’re not sure it’s the path—and take field notes.

What you do is take a step toward some passion and look at the feedback your life gives you. Take a step and see if your energy expands or contracts. Take another step and see if you feel more awake or more asleep. Another step—what do your dreams at night tell you? Another step—what does your body tell you? Another step—what do your friends tell you? It’s the old gospel criteria: by their fruits you shall know them.

To kill freedom, kill the writers first

(From CNN) The attack on bloggers critical of Islam have taken on a disturbing regularity in Bangladesh with yet another writer hacked to death today.

Ananta Bijoy Das was killed as he left his home on his way to work at a bank, police in the northeastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet said.

Four masked men attacked him, hacking him to death with cleavers, said Sylhet Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kamrul Ahsan.

The men then ran away. Because of the time of the morning when the attack happened, there were few witnesses. But police said they are following up on interviewing the few people who saw the incident.

Das was in his 30s, Ahsan said. He couldn't provide an exact age.

Texas Neighbors ‘Pay It Forward’ After Cashier’s Act Of Kindness

Robbie Owens

FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) – What is the cost of kindness? For a North Fort Worth cashier, it  was $6.

“So, I’m walking up to pay for my goods,” recalls customer Karridy Askenasy, “and he’s apologizing, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, this lady’s running out to her car to get some money .’ I looked outside, and I’m like: ‘the lady that’s driving away?'”

Askenasy, who was at the store to pick up a prescription, says the cashier, later identified as Christian Griffan, looked disappointed for barely a moment, before reaching into his wallet.

Initially discouraging the cashier Askenasy said, “I’m like ‘you’re gonna pay for that? You shouldn’t pay for it… you’ve got cameras, get her plates and get her back here to pay for it!’ And he was like, ‘nah, she had formula.’”

Enough said.

Askenasy was so impressed with the young man’s compassion that he shared his story on NextDoor, a neighborhood social media  site and Facebook. And you can guess what happened next. Forget the prescription—the kindness was contagious! The story has been shared hundreds of times and garnered several thousand likes.

Neighbors began showing up to reimburse him the cost of the baby formula—but, others, familiar with the friendly clerk, wanted to do even more. “Before I knew it, I had $200 and people coming to me to give me money,” says Askenasy. “What’s so cool is that I didn’t solicit it. I just wanted to give neighbors an opportunity to recognize this young man.”

So easy going cashier Christian Griffan was in for a surprise—the next gift card he rang up wouldn’t be going very far. “I slid it back to him and said ‘no, that’s yours—that’s from your neighbors, we appreciate you.’”

Needless to say, he was stunned… telling Askenasy, “Are you for real? No man, really?”

Paying it forward, was pure pleasure. “It took me a moment to convince him that it was his,” says Askenasy, “really nice to shake his hand.”

Follow me @cbs11Robbie

Good words to have and use

Futilitarian 1. Devoted to futile pursuits. 2. Holding the belief that human striving is useless.

noun:

1. A person devoted to futile pursuits.

2. One who believes that human striving is useless.

A blend of futile and utilitarian. Earliest documented use: 1827.

I drive out to West Virginia every so often and I love it, beautiful place

 

An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty

New York Times

Income in adulthood for children whose families moved to a better place

By David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox and Claire Cain Miller

In the wake of the Los Angeles riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could study the effects.

The results were deeply disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable.

Now, however, a large new study is about to overturn the findings of Moving to Opportunity. Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.

The feelings heard across Baltimore’s recent protests — of being trapped in poverty — seem to be backed up by the new data. Among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore, the study found.

The city is especially harsh for boys: Low-income boys who grew up there in recent decades make roughly 25 percent less as adults than similar low-income boys who were born in the city and moved as small children to an average place.

Beyond Baltimore, economists say the study offers perhaps the most detailed portrait yet of upward mobility — and the lack of it. The findings suggest that geography does not merely separate rich from poor but also plays a large role in determining which poor children achieve the so-called American dream.

How neighborhoods affect children “has been a quandary with which social science has been grappling for decades,” said David B. Grusky, director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This delivers the most compelling evidence yet that neighborhoods matter in a really big way.”

Raj Chetty, one of the study’s authors, has presented the findings to members of the Obama administration, as well as to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, both of whom have signaled that mobility will be central themes of their 2016 presidential campaigns. After more than 15 years of mostly mediocre economic growth and rising income inequality, many families say they are frustrated and anxious about trying to get ahead.

“The data shows we can do something about upward mobility,” said Mr. Chetty, a Harvard professor, who conducted the main study along with Nathaniel Hendren, also a Harvard economist. “Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.”

The places where poor children face the worst odds include some — but not all — of the nation’s largest urban areas, like Atlanta; Chicago; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Orlando, West Palm Beach and Tampa in Florida; Austin, Tex.; the Bronx; and the parts of Manhattan with low-income neighborhoods.

All else equal, low-income boys who grow up in such areas earn about 35 percent less on average than otherwise similar low-income children who grow up in the best areas for mobility. For girls, the gap is closer to 25 percent.

The former home of the Polk family in Bellwood, Ill.  The fatal shooting of Latonya Polk's husband there prompted her to move away with her two children in search of a safer place. Credit Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Many of these places have large African-American populations, and the findings suggest that race plays an enormous but complex role in upward mobility. The nation’s legacy of racial inequality appears to affect all low-income children who live in heavily black areas: Both black and white children seem to have longer odds of reaching the middle class, and both seem to benefit from moving to better neighborhoods.

The places most conducive to upward mobility include large cities — San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Providence, R.I. — and major suburban counties, such as Fairfax, Va.; Bergen, N.J.; Bucks, Pa.; Macomb, Mich.; Worcester, Mass.; and Contra Costa, Calif.

These places tend to share several traits, Mr. Hendren said. They have elementary schools with higher test scores, a higher share of two-parent families, greater levels of involvement in civic and religious groups and more residential integration of affluent, middle-class and poor families.

For low-income families, a home in places with these characteristics is often a financial stretch. Rachelle Hawkins, a 32-year-old single mother in California, rented an apartment in Contra Costa late last year after moving from a gritty neighborhood near Oakland and being homeless for a time. She makes about $29,000 as a customer-service agent in online banking and faces an annual rent bill of almost $17,000.

But she thinks the burden is worth it for her children, who are 4 and 6. “I don’t think my kids are going to remember what we went through,” Ms. Hawkins said. “They are absolutely better off, just because of the environment.”

In addition to studying the outcomes of more than five million children who moved, Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren also revisited the subjects of the Moving to Opportunity experiment. Working with Lawrence Katz, one of the original researchers to study the program, they analyzed more recent, richer data — and concluded that children who moved before they were teenagers did indeed benefit economically. (The original study had found health benefits for both younger and older children.)

The Polk family's new apartment, in Wood Dale, Ill., is small, but Mrs. Polk and her two teenage children are pleased with the calmer setting. Credit Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

In both studies, the younger children were when they moved, the better they did. Children were less likely to become single parents when they grew up, were more likely to go to college and to earn more. The original research had not been able to follow the economic outcomes of younger children, because not enough time had passed, Mr. Katz said.

Still, the more extensive nationwide data on moving found that older children were also affected by their neighborhood. The effect was what statisticians call linear: Each additional year in a different place had roughly the same average effect on a child’s adult earnings. A teenager’s year in a better neighborhood mattered as much as a 9-year-old’s year — but 9-year olds still had their teenage years in front of them.

Some economists who have seen the new study say that it argues for a new approach to housing policy. Current policy often forces the parents of young children onto waiting lists for housing vouchers. It also gives tax incentives to developers who build in poor neighborhoods, rather than rewarding those who build affordable housing in areas that seem to offer better environments.

In an interview Friday, Julián Castro, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said he was excited by the new data. Mr. Castro said his department had been planning to reallocate funding, so that some people moving to more expensive neighborhoods would receive larger vouchers. Currently, the value of vouchers tends to be constant across a metropolitan area.

The large county on the other end of the spectrum from Baltimore, with the best odds of escaping poverty, is DuPage County, Ill., west of Chicago. It contains suburbs where the schools are considered better and where housing costs more than in Chicago and some close-in suburbs.

In 2012, Latonya Polk decided to move there with her son and daughter, then 16 and 15. Her husband had been fatally shot on the front lawn of their apartment outside Chicago in 2011, in a crime that remains unsolved, she said.

Briana, her daughter, was hesitant about leaving her friends, but Mrs. Polk insisted, saying they could still visit them. “I knew absolutely it would mean better possibilities for my kids,” she said.

Mrs. Polk, center, with her son Jovan Nicholson and daughter Briana Nicholson at home in Wood Dale. Credit Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Mrs. Polk earns about $40,000 a year at a company that helps clear goods through customs. She has been able to afford the move by living in a cramped $1,025-a-month, one-bedroom apartment — and with help from a county program that gives them about $2,000 a year toward living expenses.

Her son, Jovan, graduated from high school last year and is now working, while Briana will graduate this spring. Both plan to enroll in community college in the next year.

Although most places with better odds of escaping poverty have higher rent, the researchers did identify some counties as “upward-mobility bargains.” These include Putnam County, N.Y.; parts of the Pittsburgh and Altoona areas in Pennsylvania; and, if only relative to surrounding areas, Contra Costa.

The main innovation of the new paper — part of the Equality of Opportunity Project, involving multiple researchers — is its focus on children who moved. Doing so allows the economists to ask whether the places themselves actually affect outcomes. The alternative is that, say, Baltimore happens to be home to a large number of children who would struggle no matter where they grew up.

The data suggests otherwise. The easiest way to understand the pattern may be the different effects on siblings, who have so much in common. Younger siblings who moved from a bad area to a better one earned more as adults than their older siblings who were part of the same move. The particular environment of a city really does seem to affect its residents.

The data does not answer the question of whether the factors that distinguish higher-mobility places, like better schools and less economic segregation, are causing the differences — or are themselves knock-on effects of other, underlying causes. “We still need clarity on that,” Mr. Grusky, the Stanford professor, said.

From her perspective, Ms. Hawkins, the Contra Costa resident, said that the mixing of people from different social classes did make a difference.

“It’s all spread out here,” she said. In her old home near Oakland, entire neighborhoods had high unemployment and crime, which led people who did have jobs to flee, causing a downward spiral. “You don’t want to put your kid in harm’s way. That’s just extra stress.”

For all the benefits that moves can bring, they are not a solution to poverty, said people who have seen the new paper as well as the researchers themselves. Finding ways to improve those neighborhoods, for people who cannot or do not want to move, is also important, researchers and policy makers said.

“We can’t walk away from them,” Mr. Castro, the housing secretary, said. “We need a two-pronged approach.”

David Leonhardt reported from Washington, Amanda Cox from New York, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco. Dave McKinney contributed reporting from Wood Dale, Ill.

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A version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Change of Address Offers a Pathway Out of Poverty