The Road Not Taken: An Update. (June 30, 2008)

I am coming to the end of the first phase of my publishing project: the graphic artist is making the changes, just before the text goes to the proofreader. But I am still doing some work on the Afterword. The problem is a small passage that invokes Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point where I posit that 1980 provided the tipping point in violence in Jamaica. I wanted the whole text to be rock-solid and to be fluid. Didn't want anyone to say "I get the sense of what you are saying." I wanted it to be crystal clear. To this end I made the mistake of contacting someone on Craigslist who assured me she was a high school teacher and ended up scamming me out of one hundred dollars. Another lesson learned! Steer clear of an outfit called writeitup.com. I have been fussing over the text. I had to delete some of my favored quotes because of copyright issues. I actually attempted to call a copyright outfit in California over a quote ("The blues is a lowdown achin' heart disease like consumption killing me by degrees...") by blues singer Robert Johnson, who died in 1938 for God sake! Normally the lyrics of someone who dies goes into the public domain after 50 years, but the laws were apparently changed. I am getting an education. I had to delete T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," which I stole from a Hunter S. Thompson book, probably Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, quotes from lyrics by Sting, Leonard Cohen and Toots Hibbert (Pressure Drop). I want the book to be much better than the first edition. But I am going to let it go: it is what it is!