If nothing else, Fitzgerald, who died at the age of 44, broke and mostly unloved, would have marveled studios spent over a $100 million on the production.  It almost seems to echo the crazy excess and extravagance embodied in the roaring twenties.

The casting was near perfection: Certainly who else would play Gatsby other than golden boy Leonardo Dicaprio? And Dicaprio’s friend Toby Maquire does make a very convincing Nick Carraway. The supporting cast Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton and Elizabeth Debicki were good as well.

However, the film, directed by Baz Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge fame, certainly has more sparkle than substance and certainly seems to miss – or at least gloss over – the major themes of the novel. Social and moral decay. The hollowness of the American dream.

Luhrmann seems more concerned with filming the dance and party sequences than building characters. A weird mixture of modern R&B with classical jazz. But I suppose Gatsby and Nick and Tom and Daisy are so intertwined in our psyche that seeing them on screen is like seeing an old home video of a family reunion. We already know them. We have known them for most of our English class lives. What more is there to know?

The Great Gatsby, as near of a perfect story as has ever been created, did not gain anything by the psychiatrist character who treats Nick for alcohol abuse or the other details Luhrmann chose to add.

No movie can replace the novel or the Redford version and perhaps that is the point. Despite the movie’s flaws, Luhrmann does a great job of shaking it up of adding something new to an old story and that is probably why the movie has made $50 million over its first weekend. Redford’s version will always be the definitive version—and no amount of special effects, 3D cameras, or stylistic choices will change that.

All it does is make me wish Luhrmann had chosen another story to tell. One that didn’t have so much expectations, so much pedigree and, yes, so much baggage.

To blow a whistle in a sports game is to call a penalty or stop some egregious play.

Although laws protecting whistleblowers have been around for over a hundred years or so, in actuality whistleblowers usually end up in jail, financially ruined or emotionally damaged—and some of the time all three.

Frank Serpico, a New York Police officer, testified in the Knopp Commission that millions of dollars of bribes were being past from drug dealers to police officers, and in doing so, became the first NYPD officer to testify against the force in open court.

Serpico almost never got to testify. Before the commission, Serpico was shot in a drug raid when his fellow officers failed to follow him into a room raising suspicion the bust was set up to assassinate Serpico before he could take the stand. Serpico was severely injured and lost partial hearing in one ear.

Serpico’s story, later dramatized in a movie by Al Pacino, lead to drastic changes in the New York Police force.

Another example of whistleblowing is of Jeffery Wigand (by coincidence another Al Pacino movie) who worked for a big tobacco company. Wigand came out on 60 Minutes claiming Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company had intentionally manipulated its nicotine in its cigarettes to make them more addictive.  Wigand received death threats, including a bullet which he found in his mailbox.  Wigand’s 60 Minute interview was potentially the most impactful single interview in the history of journalism because it was the catalyst to change the course of cigarette manufacturing and marketing. Not only that, but Wigand’s interview changed the lives and health of millions of people not just in the United States but around the world.

These are but two examples to illustrate the importance of whistleblowers in our society, yet often society does little to help them in return. We need to protect whistleblowers, not just with laws but with our actions.

When someone has the courage to stand up, someone like Daniel Ellsberg or Bradley Manning, we need to courage to support them, to stand up with them and fight beside them, because if we don’t then our democracy will become just a little less democratic. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but slowly the secrets government or corporations keep from us will not only erode our freedom but our health and well-being.

We need stronger, more effective laws that prevent corporations and governments from retaliating. We need to recognize the vital importance of whistleblowers and force the people in power to be more open and accountable.

Julian Assange, who recently demanded the United States government of conducting a war on whistleblowers, said in a TIME interview, when organizations –whether people, government, or corporations – are reviled publicly to be abusive, two things can happen: the organization can change to be more accountable, open and honest; or it can tighten the airflow and in doing so suck the lifeblood out of the organization and cease to become effective.

Although Assange may not be entirely correct, abusive organizations cannot change without public awareness and accountability, and that often cannot happen without the lone efforts of a whistleblower.

I got the privilege to interview Lori Verni-Forgarsi and get to know what makes her tick.

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

I was always strong in language arts in school, but the first things I ever wrote planning on them being read by others were nonfiction articles in my Best Paw Forward Newsletter… a small publication I created when I owned a dog training school back in 1995. I planned to use the newsletter as a marketing tool for clients, vets, etc., and I was surprised when I started receiving requests from outside publications to write for them, too!

Marketing is key to any author’s wish to sell their work. How have you engineered this aspect of your writing?

I try not to write my books with the thought of marketing in mind; I fear that they would lose their unique voice if I were to concentrate too much on what readers might “want” them to be. However, I do many other things marketing-wise, including positioning the release date around Mother’s Day and the summer reading season, maintaining relationships with my readers and many other authors, and providing fun events (both in person and online), with giveaways, excerpts, etc.

“Momnesia” is your award-winning novel about a suburban mom lost in the jungle of being it all. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?

From real life, of course! While it is a fictional story, the actual concept of “Momnesia,” was definitely something I myself experienced when my children were younger. I hoped that by sharing my experience in the form of an entertaining, humorous, and thought provoking story, I might help other moms find ways to balance their lives too… or at least feel understood!

Here is a sneak peek at Momnesia:

Feeling invisible under all the responsibilities of caring for her family, a suburban mom sets about finessing a new version of her old vivaciousness… seeking balance between her “momminess” and her “sexiness!”

Your newest release, Unexpecting deals with quite a different topic. Can you tell us how this idea developed?

As my children have gotten older (I have two daughters, 12 & 15, and two step sons, 18 & 20), I’ve been faced with the terrifying prospect of, “What would happen if one of them had a child at too young an age?” While I have enjoyed my children at each phase of their lives, I have no urge to start all over again, helping them raise another baby “from scratch.” I’ve done my best to help them make responsible choices by having age-appropriate discussions with them over the years and so far, so good! But it did occur to me, “Wow, this could be a great story. How would I really feel? And how could I write the story so that it wouldn’t be the main characters’ actual kids who bring on this dilemma?”

Here is a sneak peek at Unexpecting:

This is my review which can also be found on Amazon

Leo Tolstoy said, “All Happy Families are alike, all unhappy families.” Unexpecting is about the importance of family and learning to be tolerant of each other despite our differences.

In the exciting new novel by Lori Verni-Fogarsi we meet the Morsonys who we first encountered in Momnesia. Shelly and David are the average middle-class American couple. As they enter the middle stages of their lives they look around and have they could possibly want. A big house. David has a good job. The kids are almost all grown up. David and Shelly look forward to a life of leisure.

But then a pregnant teenager, Alexandria, shows up on their front door, claiming to be the child of David, the result of a one-night stand after David got divorced from his first wife. Suddenly everything is thrown out of sync and David and Shelly’s perfect life is thrown into confusion. They agree they need to take care of Alexandria as she gives birth to her son, Patrick.  But neither wants to help raise a newly born while Alexandria has her own teenage problems.

Verni-Forgaris has the uncanny ability to turn the ordinary and make it extra-ordinary. The reader understands and sympathises with all the characters, but especially Shelly, whose eyes through most of the story is told. In the beginning of the novel, Shelly is jolted from her morning cup of coffee and instantaneously the roll of mother to a moody pregnant teenager – not to mention her unborn son – is unexpectedly and unfairly thrust upon her. She has to juggle making her demanding teenage children happy while dealing with the unexpected addition.

It was a pleasure encountering Shelly again and reading the continuation of her story.  Unexpecting will make you laugh and make you cry. Definitely a must read.

Visit the Blog Tour Page to find more features, book giveaways, and enter to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card! http://www.LoriTheAuthor.com/UnexpectingRelease

Facebook, Twitter and other social media have irrevocably changed how the news spread and this, in turn, has changed how journalists work and live.

Journalists have started being more cooperative with each other than before. We have seen news stories where magazines and newspapers and television stations teaming up to deliver important stories. Journalists have realized their stories effect people more globally than ever before and instead of competing for a small piece of the pie, they have joined together in a stronger, unified group. For the documents Bradley Manning leaked, the Manchester Guardian, the German magazine Der Spiegel, and, of course, WikiLeaks banded together to release the story.
Although Julian Assange is not a journalist in the strictest of senses, his organization performs reporter-like functions and in the future you will see more lines blurred as the financial model of journalism shifts. I believe you will see more organizations like WikiLeaks come to prominence to uncover news stories in the near future.

Just recently, through a 15-month investigation, The International Consortium of Investigative Journalist uncovered hundreds of thousands of tax dodges, many of these people are the very politicians who are calling for tighter tax laws. This leak of data has 30-years worth of company names, emails, bank accounts and could very well be the biggest data dump ever. Bigger even than WikiLeaks.

Founded in 1997, the ICIJ has its headquarters in Washington D.C. and has 160 members in over 60 countries and is mandated to look at issues that don’t stop at boarders. The ICIJ, like WikiLeaks, survives on the funds of donations and doesn’t have any reliable income stream—no paying advertisement and no paying subscribers.

Now some may think this puts important journalism in a vicarious position because it is not self-sustaining and relies on the generosity of ordinary people, but on the contrary, it allows journalists the freedom to report on whatever they feel is important and not be interfered by government or big businesses that control much of mainstream media.

In fact, far from the downfall of journalism as many have predicted, we are beginning to enter into a golden age of journalism. Journalism that actually makes a difference.  In fact, Luxembourg has announced a shift in its tax policy, allowing for more transparency. This story, in my opinion, is more important than Watergate, although perhaps less sexy—but then again we haven’t heard the last of the hard drive that contains supposedly over 100, 000 people who have sought a tax havens around the globe. It has made politicians and celebrities alike nervous. And that can only be a good thing for the rest of us.

David Cameron set out to discover how much perception goes into choosing a piece of fiction for a literary magazine with a small sociological experiment he created. He took a published short story from the New Yorker, which is wildly honoured as perhaps the best fiction magazine in the world, and decided to submit it to various magazines under a pseudonym. The biography of his fictional author was a first-time writer who hoped to break into the field.

Cameron started with the minor magazines and worked his way up to some of the larger more respected publications. The result? The short story was universally rejected by every single magazine he submitted it to. Cameron, coy with which publications he chose as well as which story he used, then submitted the short story to the New Yorker which also rejected it. Apparently the New Yorker didn’t realize it had previously published the story.

What does this say about how editors chose which stories to publish and which to send to the dreaded slush pile? It would seem the author’s name attached to the writing means a whole lot.  It also means the selection process is dubious at best and makes one wonder if magazines even look at the work of first-time authors.

There are other famous cases on plagiarism to prove a point. While at Harvard University, Michael Crichton, the famous techno-thriller author, took one of George Orwell’s papers and submitted it as his own. The professor gave Orwell, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, a measly c-plus.

I related the New Yorker story to my father who told me about Emily Dickinson, one of the best early-American poets. She wrote the famous stanza “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me” along with many others.

She hardly published anything in her lifetime and when she showed her work to Thomas Wentworth, a noted critic and author, he told Dickinson to wait until she had been writing for a little longer. Dickinson took his advice and never pursued publishing in her lifetime. It was only after her death that her family found her poems and she got the credit she deserves. Having said that, it appears Dickinson wasn’t overly vexed by her lack of fame and was content to write poetry in anonymity.

Although these stories may discourage some young authors I find them very liberating. Everybody suffers rejection which often leads to self-doubt about your abilities as a writer but if the New Yorker – and indeed most literary magazines – can reject a finely crafted story then it doesn’t necessarily mean your writing is worthless or terrible either. Your writing might be incredible and it only means the editor looked at your bio or your name and decided you weren’t marketable enough. Now I know on the flip side, you can conclude most editors won’t take a chance on a young fledgling author, but that was an established fact before David Cameron tried his experiment—after all, Harry Potter got rejected eight times before it was published and became a $15 billion industry. So keep going and don’t be disheartened by rejection. What do those editors know anyways?

Earlier this year ex-CIA operative John Kiriakou pleaded guilty to violating the Orwellian-sounding Intelligence Identities Protection Act, passed in 1982 to weed out spies.  The guilty plea has given Kiriakou the dubious distinction of being the first CIA agent to be imprisoned for leaking information to a reporter.

A more famous example is Private Bradley Manning who is facing a minimum of twenty years in prison and up to a maximum of a life sentence and this is all for releasing secret documents to Wikileaks. Not even the Cold War spies were treated as harshly as Manning.

Both men are what are called whistleblowers, people who tell the public about illegal or dishonest activity.  Democratic countries needs to protect whistleblowers not vilify them. They are an important part of our societies and are, in part, what makes journalism function. Without whistleblowers, governments and corporations will feel more comfortably  disregarding the rules when it suits them.

In 2007, several years after he left the CIA, Kiriakou spoke out on national television about waterboarding torture, a type of torture the CIA used to interrogate suspected Al Qaida members. In this torture, a cloth would be placed over a victim’s face and water poured over his face, causing a sensation of drowning. Waterboarding can cause permanent lung and brain damage as well as psychological damage.

After Kiriakou’s television appearance, he gave a freelance journalist  the name of a colleague to help the journalist out in a story. The colleague’s name was not meant for publication and nor was it published—no harm was done –  yet Kiriakou was arrested and prosecuted.

Sometime in 2009, Manning felt he was involved in a meaningless, unjust war. A war which the Allies not only waterboarded its enemy but handed over prisoners to the Iraqi government for far worse torture, which is in clear violation of international law. Manning, like his colleagues, was told to turn a blind eye to the torture. However Manning refused and was the only person in the U.S. Army who did something. He turned over documents to Wikileaks and thereby telling the world what was occurring. Despite, the United State’s fear mongering, no agent has ever been killed or captured because of the leaked documents.

I would also like to note the Canadian army turned over prisoners in Afghanistan knowing they would be tortured, so it’s by no means limited to the United States Army.

The actions of Kiriakou and Manning were not treason, but the noble pursuit of the truth, and the truth is something nobody should be prosecuted for.  Governments  hide behind rules, laws and even semantics to prevent its citizens from finding out how it’s violating international law. If people see how whistleblowers are treated, they are less likely to speak up when they see something wrong or illegal and that would be to the determinant of all of us.

Why is this important? Crowdsourcing used to be thought of as amateurish and in bad taste but not anymore. Now, in absence of a major studio’s backing, it is an acceptable form of raising funds for your film. Even Lindsey Lohan’s last picture, The Canyons, was funded by crowdsourcing.

Filmmakers now have a better opportunity than ever before in the history of filmmaking to make the film they want and have it largely distributed. We no longer need Hollywood Studios. The small can compete with the large.

You think that is crazy? A independent film called Lonely Place for Dying, directed by Justin Eugene Evans, was funded entirely by his family for about $200 000 and stars Oscar-winner James Cromwell and decorated actor Michael Wincott. It has had national distribution and has sold exceedingly well on iTunes and was for several months was the fifty-fourth most downloaded movie. Although $200,000 may seem like an astrological amount of money, remember it is competing against Hollywood movies that were made with millions of dollars and marketing campaign that can sometimes cost as much as the movie. Alternatively, Evans did much of his marketing on social media sites, although he did supplement it with the occasional television ad.

Still not convinced? Let me tell you about a small company called Apple. I know you are probably laughing right now but there was indeed a time when Apple wasn’t as large as it was today. Apple set out to make a digital online library of music which you could download onto an MP3 player. Apple created the ipod which revolutionized music but there was another company that should have had done it a long time before Apple. You may have heard about this company: it’s called Sony.

Sony had all the pieces to become what Apple is today. It had Sony Music that had the rights to many popular acts like Alice in Chains,  Johnny Cash, Alicia Keys, Oasis, The Offspring, N Sync, Jimi Hendrix, the list goes on. Sony also created the portable Discman. Do you remember the Discman? Laughable today, it was what I grew up on and was my version of the ipod. I used to wear those large cargo pants and put my Discman in one of my large pockets.

Sony should have been a shoe-in to create the next generation of portable music players. Yet Sony, with its net income of five billion dollars and with assets about a hundred and sixty billion, could not connect the dots while Apple, only a few years ago wasn’t very far from bankruptcy, beat out Sony, and everybody else, to basically control digital music and become the most profitable company in the world.

You can do the same. You don’t need studio money anymore to become successful. Just look what Evans did, a director with only one previous directing credit for a short film to his name. Kickstarter financed ten percent of the total films at Sundance last year– seventeen films in total and surpassed a hundred million dollars in donations. That’s an outstanding number if you think about.   It’s only a matter of time before studios lose their iron grip on the film industry and, who knows, an independent film might one day win Best Picture at the Oscars.

He is the author of the Invasion USA series and the new American One series. Wade was born in Kent, England but moved to Zimbabwe as a child where he grew up. Throughout his adult life, he has lived in England, Portugal and Germany before moving to South Africa. In 1997, because of political turmoil he immigrated to the United States. He has written a total of nine novels and lives in North Carolina with his wife and kids.

His first series, Invasion USA, is a breakneck thriller in which every electronic device made in China for the past thirty years all shut down at once! From traffic lights to airport communications, television to iPods, automobile systems to children’s toys, the whole of Western civilization is effectively dismantled. “A truly frightening scenario vividly brought to life!” 

TI Wade’s most recent series, America One, mixes space exploration with government intrigue: Ryan Richmond is a self-made billionaire who has always dreamed of going into space. After building his own space shuttle by employing the best minds in the industry, he is faced with the US government trying to seize his ship, America One.

Wade was very gracious to be interviewed for this blog.

 Who are some of your favourite sci-fi authors?

By some American standards, Canada is viewed as a liberal, semi-communist state and in many respects they are correct. Not mentioning universal healthcare, up here in Canada, we have the Canadian Broadcast Corporation which is mainly funded by the government. This is crazy to many Americans who rightly have a very healthy mistrust of government. How can a media corporation be funded by the very entity it has to hold accountable?

The CBC, founded in 1941 and modeled after the British Broadcast Corporation, is Canada’s largest news corporation in Canada and is funded mostly by government subsidies but also some advertising. Despite its model, it actually does remarkably well in holding the government accountable, and has some of the best news coverage in Canada, if not the world.  Most recently, the CBC has done a good job of reporting on a mishandling of a defense contract for new fighter jets.

The BBC, despite recent flounders, has historically also provided the world with in-depth, breaking news and is still considered one of the premium news outlets in the world.  In 1984, the BBC was particularly instrumental in galvanizing help for Ethiopia during a particularly large famine.

In the United States, the biggest news media corporation is the National Broadcast Corporation. Formed in 1926, it is also the oldest. It has ten television stations across the States and over two hundred affiliates and for decades, along with Time Warner which owns CNN, has proved high-quality, in-depth news coverage to the American people.

However, in the past decade, NBC and Timer Warner have both taken a beating from News Corp which owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal among other holdings. Fox News generally describes itself as being a news station, but it is often criticized from all sides for being biased and for forwarding its conservative views. From the beginning, it hosted some of the most egregious personalities including Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and John Gibson. Fox News is not  fair and balanced in a way the American people deserve.

Unfortunately Fox News gives journalism a bad name. In 2004, a documentary film, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism showed how terrible Fox News was with footage from Fox News and internal memos from senior staff members dictating to journalists on how to cover certain subjects.  There have also been numerous times Fox has, used photo manipulation (a cardinal sin for journalists)  footage of an event and misrepresented it as something else to either further its conservative view-point or dramatize the news. It is no wonder Americans trust the news much less than Canadians do. In the United States, in 2012, distrust in the media hit a 60% high, which is the highest since the think-tank group Gallup, started collecting statistics in 98. This is in contrast from a poll done by the Globe and Mail, also in 2012, that said only 10% of Canadians mistrust the news.

In Canada a new station called Sun News, created by Quebecor Media, is applying to become one of the stations on basic cable. Sun News is Canada’s equivalent of Fox News with colourful graphics, outrageous commentary and sensationalism designed to increase profits and boost ratings.

Although the model Fox News designed in the States works well, in Canada the reception has been a little frosty. Sun News lost about eighteen million dollars last year and is applying to be a part of basic cable in a last ditch effort to break even. As basic cable, Sun News would earn a percentage of the money customers paid for basic cable. If you would like to sign the petition to stop Sun News from becoming part of basic cable please follow this link http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_fox_news_north_2013_rb/?bDDhTdb&v=22313

If you are American, I also urge you to sign the petition, but more importantly I urge you not to support Fox News and watch news programs that have integrity. Fox News cannot survive if they don’t have viewers.

Book: Fade to Silver (Book 2)

Series: The In Between Series

Genre: YA

Author: Catherine Converse

Fade to Silver Synopsis:

Adie is forced into new territory when her dream overlaps with a complete stranger in a different part of the country, while Dannika escapes from Research, not accepting the new assets in her brain that will change the way she works forever. Despite their separation, their lives merge once again to solve a major corporate conspiracy case, where one man has already lost his life, and Adie has set interference in motion on the next victim in line. But the corporation holds something that is so special, they aren’t the only ones that are willing to kill for it. With two young men battling for her affection, Adie struggles to keep focus on the case. Once again, Adie and Dannika become the targets, as they become identified as obstacles for those who are after the corporation’s unique discovery. Until it becomes clear that only one person has the power to stop the chain reaction that has begun. And only one question will reveal that person. Who holds the key?

Fade to Silver Links:

Fade to Silver on Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16124294-fade-to-silver

Fade to Silver on Amazon: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=boobroandbar-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=B00APOV8RA

Author Bio:

Catherine Converse lives with her husband and four children in beautiful Montana. She squeaked by with a Business Degree at Carroll College, only to realize (while glancing back at transcripts years later) that the only A’s she got were in Writing and Literature classes.

She wishes there were more hours in the day (who doesn’t, right), and that her mind would just shut down sometimes.

If not writing, or researching, she would really like to be outside with her family, and preferably on her snowboard. Or just petting their horses.