@Morning_Joe

@Morning_Joe

Maria Tureaud--PRE-ORDER THE LAST HOPE IN HOPETOWN

@Maria_Tureaud

Hello fam and happy Tuesday. I saw a lot of tough threads yesterday re: querying, and realized the only thing anyone can control is the query itself--not the outcome. As this is one of the opportunities in my #RevPit subs, I thought I might #RevThread about this important doc (1

You have 4 seconds. That's about the length of time to read a text message. In those 4 seconds, you need to hook the agent. Why? I timed myself reading subs for #Revpit to get the calculation right. It took, on average, 10 minutes for me to read the query, then pages (2

That's 17 hours to read 100 subs. Agents can receive on avg 50-100 queries PER DAY. Think about that. The query should take time to write and perfect. It's the single most important document you'll ever compose when it comes to trying to sell an agent on the idea of your mss (3

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Maria Tureaud--THE LAST HOPE IN HOPETOWN out NOW

@Maria_Tureaud

Alrighty, folks. I'm still sick in bed, so it's time for another #RevPit #RevThread and today we'll tackle "Show, Don't Tell" (quit ur eye-rolling!)

For the purpose of today's thread, I'll be referring to it as SDT for short. Buckle up!

#writingcommunity #writetip #writingtips

Let's address a common misconception that gets people ALL kinds of riled up:

SDT is NOT about mundane description. I REPEAT: SDT is NOT about mundane description.

When you start describing the scene, and every little thing your character is doing...that's all "telling." #RevPit

Your faces right now:

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Maria Tureaud--THE LAST HOPE IN HOPETOWN out NOW

@Maria_Tureaud

All right folks. I'm sick, in bed, unable to work, so it's the perfect time for a #RevPit #RevThread! There were a lot of calls for this one, so today, let's talk about the dreaded...SYNOPSIS! #amquerying

Fact:
😭 You still have to write them even when you land an agent (sorry!)

Step One: Open a blank document
Step Two: **stare**
Step Three: **stare**
Step Four: **stare**
Step Five: **sob**
Step Six: Repeat steps two-five

LOL jk. First things first. In a synopsis, everything from your main plot MUST be revealed #RevPit

This does NOT mean every twist and turn/arbitrary thing/fun event that happens from main plot to sub plots are revealed.

It means you have to focus ONLY on the main plot, and give everything away. Think of a synopsis like a business plan. #RevPit

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread 02/19/22
The Age of Transactional Man

1/ Trump in the West, Putin in the East. This is the age of Transactional Man. Our heroes compulsively deal. The more amoral the deal maker, the stronger they appear. They advertise themselves as “strong men.”

2/ The Russian tanks entering Ukraine are an object lesson in toxic masculinity. Freud would have some choice words about those cannons. Some combination of greed and unregistered self-loathing has pushed Putin to Hitlerian depths.

3/ Putin's analysis of his situation is apparently that Russia can’t be secure because it just doesn’t yet have enough land. So now millions of people will lose their freedom and hundreds of thousands may well get killed. Then Vlad will get his mojo back for a little while.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread 01/31/22
Fascism Rising

I listened briefly this morning to a tape of Trump in Texas Saturday night. Evil is rising. It’s contagious.

2/ As fascism spreads, evil enfolds first the surly outsiders who become the future tyrant’s goon squads, then the ignorant, then the envious, then the ordinary. It takes years. It suffers defeats and then regroups.

3/This was the pattern for Italy, Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia, China, Romania . . . What begins as folly ends in oceanic suffering. Already the GOP has become morally bankrupt, as its once-honorable membership accedes to Trump’s lies and threats.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread 12/28/21

Trump Wax

1/ “So authentic! So sincere! He’s not a politician! He’s for real!” That’s what 30-40% of the country has been saying about Donald John Trump for the past 6+ years.

2/ I grant that Trump does have a great destructive power. He has single-handedly detonated the moral implosion of the GOP & threatens to end our Democracy. But he is not sincere. He is, as we all can see, a compulsive liar. How then does he carry off the appearance of sincerity?

3/ As usual, the answer lies within the word itself.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread 11/15/21
Dizzying Plummet

1/There’s a marvelous scene in Eric Larson’s "The Splendid and the Vile" when the great Harry Hopkins is preparing to leave England after his prolonged visit with Winston Churchill.

2/The moment was fraught. Hitler was preparing his invasion of Russia, and wanted to finish off England with even more saturation bombing. Roosevelt had promised during his third campaign not to join in the war (Japan had not yet bombed Pearl Harbor).

3/...The rest of Europe was tottering. England stood alone.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #05-09-21
The Big Lie

1/ It’s true that Donald Trump is a liar. He lies about himself, about his wealth, about other people, about non-existent threats to the country, about his family, about what he’s done. He lies a whole lot.

2/ Donald Trump's admiration of Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Duterte and of other “strong men”, leads him to imitate those liars. He has learned from them that if you lie consistently and repetitively and if your lies flatter the prejudices of your audience,...

3/.. pretty soon lots of people will believe your lies. And as more people believe your lies, those committed to telling the truth may weary of being dismissed and fall silent.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #02/14/21

1/ How about a brief homily on this Sunday morning? We’ve just had quite a week of revelations to process, don’t you think?

2/ Here’s a great, disturbing text: Luke 8:17 ---“For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.”

3/ First response:Uh oh. Some of my stuff isn’t anyone else’s business. I suppose in terms of personal problems this text is talking about our relationship with God, to whom, the Book of Common Prayer tells us,“...from whom all desires are known & from whom no secrets are hid.”..

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #01/28/21
Hell

1/ I need a 'Get Out of Hell Free' card. In the Hellscape of America that surrounds me in the year of our Lord 2021, 450,000 souls have been dispatched, gasping as they die of a mutating virus.

2/ The Lout lounges away in the gilded & garish splendor of Mara f-ing Lago. This Lout, whose gifts of self-promotion, feral rage, domination & willful blindness were on full view from the White House, continues to fascinate our media & enthrall millions of my fellow-citizens.

3/ I watched the news this morning. In spite of having a new President who is reasserting decency and honor as he and his able team try to help us recover from the disaster of his predecessor,...

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread # 2021/1
Lurking

1/There’s a pond between our home and the cemetery. Just now it’s white, four inches of new snow sitting atop the ice. I don’t let our big collie get on the pond,...

2/.. because just below the ice is a current, and because if he broke through, I couldn’t get him out. Plus, there are good sized snapping turtles, otters, and other critters all about. Stuff lurks.

3/ There’s lots of coverage of our politics at the moment, as Trump thrashes about and Repubs struggle with senate seats in Georgia…. yada, yada. But there’s an undercurrent -- powerful, dangerous, permanent.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread
ChristmasEve2020

1/ So here we are on Christmas Eve -- either isolated or risking life itself to see one another. We watch the President bring down chaos on our land, block any attempt to provide help for those afflicted by a virulent pandemic...

2/...pardon his fellow criminals, threaten to close down our government, surround himself with felons and goons, ignore the hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions upon millions of sickened people this plague has caused.

3/ I know, as do you, that this is an hour of wide-spread suffering. Hundreds of thousands of us have lost our jobs. Tens of thousands of us are about to lose our homes, about to have no place to lay our heads at night.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #250
While Waiting

1/ While we hang around waiting for the ballot counting to finish, I thought I’d speculate about what lies ahead. Of course I don’t know anything, but that has never stopped me before.

2/ Maybe, hopefully, what we just witnessed was the peak of what historians will one day call the Age of Infinite Greed. People have always been greedy, but what has marked the past 100 years or so is a silence about why greed is so toxic.

3/ Like most folks, I spent most of my life wanting, you know, just a little more. A few months ago, waiting to watch an hour of news, I took a pad and counted the number of ads in an hour of a regular day’s news on MSNBC. 54.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread # 200
The Pittsburgh Rally, 9/22/20

1/ This morning, as I listened to @Morning_Joe, I was moved by the pain of @DonnyDeutch as he compared Trump’s speech at the Pittsburgh rally to Hitler’s speeches in the 1930’s.

2/ When I was 19, a sophomore at Hamilton College in upstate NY, my roommate, Nelson, was the only non-white in our class. (This was 56 years ago.) A man named George Lincoln Rockwell came to Hamilton and gave a speech in our theater. ...

3/..Rockwell was the only prominent self-professed Fascist in America in those days. I went to the speech. Rockwell said, “We have this Civil Rights Movement. How about a civil rights movement for real Americans?”

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #190
9/11 Reflections

1/ I was already at the office of our church plant in Austin, Texas. My sister from NYC was visiting, watching the Today Show with Barbara at home.

2/ My associate, Mike, was doing a service at a local school. Barbara called and said a plane had crashed in NYC. She called again and said my sister was really upset because Tom Brokaw was saying it was an attack.

3/ Mike was on his way to the office and could tell something was wrong. He called and asked me if I knew what was going on. I said we had been attacked. I told him to go home to his family...

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #170
A Tribute to John Lewis

1/ I loved seeing John when he was, I think,77, crowd-surfing on a Stephen Colbert show. He was then a little older than I am now. Letting strangers keep you aloft just on their hands is an act of faith not just in God but in humanity.

2/ The writer, Jon Meacham, who knew Lewis up close and who knows something about history, has been saying that John was a saintly person. I second the motion.

3/ Not only was John Lewis a good man, and a just man -- he was a holy man. That is to say he was simultaneously courageous, courteous to all, candid about being fallible, humble, fun -- and loving every person while demanding justice, especially in this hour of our corruption.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread # 161
Treason?

1/ It took a full day for Trump and his administration to deny, weakly, the story reported in the NYT about the administration’s briefing of the President on Putin paying generous bounty money to any Afghan soldier killing an American or UK Soldier.

2/ The administration doesn’t deny that Putin is doing this, merely that the President hadn’t heard about it, in spite of the reporting about a briefing.

3/ So, before I address the issue itself – that if he knew, Trump should be immediately impeached, removed and then tried for treason – let me address his denial that he knew about it.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread # 160(b)
Stewarding Righteous Anger

1/Both "Hamlet" and its comic counterpart, "Measure for Measure" deal with the management of emotions that are outraged by injustice...

2/... I say that just to show that this is a big issue. Handling it badly can lead to many deaths; handling it wisely can lead to social renewal.

3/ Here’s what comes to me: Righteous anger needs to be Sustained, it needs to be Confined, and it needs to Counterbalanced.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #160(a)
Righteous Anger

1/ Someone asked me to do a #RevThread on Righteous Anger, on how to steward that anger and be healthy while angry. My initial response is that I couldn’t do that right away because I was too angry. But it’s a really interesting request.

2/ The person asked please twice, which moved me.

3/ It’s the kind of question – like “How should I parent?” or “What keeps love alive?” -- which is way beyond expertise, a question about which every one of us is an amateur. What is righteous anger? How should I manage it? When should I let it go?

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread # 153
Apostles of Greed

1/ After FDR had spent years preparing for D-Day, he told his inner staff on June 5 that he needed to write a prayer he wanted to broadcast the next day...

2/...They offered to help him compose it. He said, “No, boys; thanks, but some things a man has to write for himself.” Greatness.

3/ In the prayer he wrote, FDR spoke of those who had to be defeated if freedom were to survive. He asked God to help the Allies defeat “The Apostles of Greed.” That may seem like an odd way to describe Fascism, and a strange thing for a man who inherited vast wealth to say.

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Rev Jeff Black

@jeffblack945

#RevThread #152
Stone-Catchers and Stone-Casters

1/ In the final chapter of “Just Mercy", Bryan Stevenson’s great account of his life’s struggle against the systemic racism of our justice system,...

2/... Bryan recounts meeting an elderly woman who for years attended a courthouse in Alabama, offering comfort and solace in the court’s lobby to those in pain, as judges and courts grind down African Americans. She explained that she is a stone-catcher.

3/ Stevenson asked about that and this woman then spoke of the stone casters. You know, as in “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

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