It’s going to happen – you’re going to do or say something stupid. And you’re going to have to take it back.

If you’re in the public eye in any way, it’s critical that when you make a mistake, you make a heartfelt apology. There are four parts to a proper apology. Here is your guide to writing an apology that is sincere and has a good chance of repairing any damage done.

A couple years ago I sent an invitation to my membership with a sentence that offended more than one person. In the invitation I wrote what I thought was a funny joke:

There will be soft drinks, heavy whores–de–ovaries, and door prizes!

One of my writers wrote to tell me she and others found the joke offensive. I had to retract what I had said in short order.

Part One: Describe it and own it.

In this first part of your apology, describe what happened. You don’t have to give all the gory details. But you have to be clear that what happened was real, you wish it hadn’t happened, and you recognize it was wrong.

You may have seen this done badly by politicians, actors, and other public figures.

Avoid phrases like:

• I am sorry my comments were taken out of context.
• I am sorry if anyone took offense by what I did.
• It is unfortunate that so many were offended by what I said.

These sorts of comments are a non-apology. They put the responsibility for the offense on the recipients. You must own whatever it was that you did wrong. Here’s what I wrote in my apology email:

In my last email I used a barnyard joke that I had learned in my youth and gave little thought to. A good friend alerted me to my indiscretion and to my horror I realize I’ve said something really stupid and offensive.

Part Two: State your standards

It’s critical that you let your audience know that what you said or did does not meet your standards for excellence. Remind them what you expect of yourself and others in your organization. Make it clear that you did not come up to those high standards.

Agile Writers has always been about inclusiveness and respect. And in this moment I’ve failed you all in that goal. Sadly, as this was sent in a mass email, there is no way to take my mistake back.

Part Three: Apologize

State clearly that you apologize for your actions. Don’t hedge. Don’t blame circumstances (like illness, stress, the weather, etc…)

I hope that you will accept my deepest apologies and disregard my mistake and will still feel welcome to come to our party.

Part Four: Learn from your mistake

Let your audience know that you’re human. You make mistakes. And you will accept this error as a learning opportunity to improve yourself. You want the reader to know you don’t want this to happen again.

My lesson learned is that I still have biases that I have to re-evaluate and overcome. Please accept this as my most sincere apology. I will endeavor to do better in the future.

Conclusion

You’re human and you have a wide audience. Inevitably you’re going to make a public mistake that you will have to apologize for. Own it, remind everyone of your standards, apologize unequivocally, and learn from your mistake. If you do this, people will remember your apology far longer than your error.

Experimenter (2015)
Director: Michael Almereyda
Writer: Michael Almereyda
Stars: Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, John Palladino, Anthony Edwards, Jim Gaffigan

Peter Sarsgaard plays Dr. Stanley Milgram who in 1961 performed a series of experiments where unwitting subjects asked another person questions and shocked them with up to 450 volts of electricity for each wrong answer. The fact was, that no one was actually shocked. The “shockee” (or learner) was behind a wall and the “shocker” (or teacher) was instructed to continue to shock the learner as long as they got the answer wrong.

In the experiment, the “shockee” would complain loudly of pain, even begging for help. If the “shocker” asked the director to stop, they would be blithely asked to continue. The conclusions of the test were that people would do what they were told in the face of authority.

The show is shot in a unique fashion. They purposely used flat murals and old 16mm backgrounds to simulate driving giving the film a period-piece feel by using period filming techniques. Also, there’s a scene where Milgram is talking to the screen while walking the halls of Harvard – with an elephant walking behind him. Possibly that’s the “elephant in the room?”

Experimenter re-raises some old questions about using human subjects in psychological experiments. Since the subjects were “fooled” into the situation, they had no control over how they were treated. And, they may have suffered adverse affects due to the stress of hurting another person under perceived duress.

This film went to great pains to show that “no one was harmed” in the study. They even went so far as to show Milgram enjoying an episode of “Candid Camera” where people faced the back of an elevator to induce conformity. (Interestingly, there was no mention of his friendship and collaboration with high school chum Philip Zimbardo of the famed Stanford prison experiment from 1971. The two were fans of Alan Funt’s show).

In the end, Experimenter is an interesting look at the work of a man who uncovered startling truths about the psychology of modern man. It begs the question – is there a ‘banality of evil’ in each of us. Unfortunately, the story is told as a fictionalization that makes us very aware that we’re looking at a movie. Ironically, it casts some serious shade on a 1975 fictionalization of Milgram’s work starring William Shatner (The Tenth Level). Milgram was apparently so upset with the work that it threatened his marriage.

To this day, Milgram’s work is required reading in psychology curricula – despite the fact that modern standards would never allow their reproduction. Many scientists dispute the results – despite Milgram’s repetition of the experiment in several countries which all come to the same conclusions.

Is there a “banality of evil” in each of us? This film doesn’t try to answer that question. It only attempts to set the record straight on Milgram’s research methods and their benign effects on its subjects. However, it is notable that Philip Zimbardo who came to similar conclusions as Milgram after his Stanford prison experiment, now proclaims a “banality of heroism” in each of us and is a leader in the Heroism Science community.

From a storytelling point of view, Experimenter is very non-standard. It straddles the line between documentary and fiction. Having the protagonist talk to the screen gives us an immediacy you don’t normally get in a movie. But it also opens the opportunity for Milgram to be an “unreliable narrator”. So, it comes off as a sort of “Milgram apologetic” – validating his work.

How To Choose a Good Domain Name

Everyone knows it’s necessary to have a strong internet presence if you’re going to be a modern writer. Perhaps one of the most difficult decision you’ll make is the domain name for your site. Or maybe not.

Domain names are becoming less and less important. Today, people are searching for site links with Google using the name of the company, writer, or book title, and not bothering to remember site names. However, you still want your domain name to be professional so you don’t look like a scammer.

Guidelines

That being said, here are some guidelines to good domain name choice.

1. Short (< 15 chars)
2. Descriptive of the company, or individual
3. Easy to say (and spell)
4. Fairly unique across the web (HeroesWay.org and HerosWay.org are very close and two very different sites)
5. Avoid punctuation (like dashes greg-smith.com)
6. Avoid numbers (thai-diner-2.com – do people spell out TWO or the digit 2 or the words TO or TOO.)

• NOTE: Single-word domain names have already been scarfed up by the domain harvesting companies. So “Wonderful.today” is never going to be available without paying a hefty fee on the order of thousands of dollars.
• NOTE: DO NOT PAY FOR BROKER SERVICES. Brokers claim to be able to get you a deal on harvested domain names, but they almost never broker a deal for less than several thousand dollars.

Top Level Domains (TLDs)

Your domain name doesn’t have to end in ‘.com’ or any of the usual suspects. Consider a different Top Level Domain for your website.

• .pro
• .site
• .group
• .world
• .page
• .today
• .guru
• .info
• .fyi
• .name – all the usual last names are taken, so be creative, or use both first and last names.

I’m stunned and amazed that .writer is not a TLD.

Suggestions & Resources

Here’s an extensive list of TLDS and prices you can expect:

• https://tld-list.com

And here’s GoDaddy’s search engine for domain names. Make sure yours isn’t already taken!

• https://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-name-search

Finally…

Regardless of what you choose, be sure to do a ‘sanity check’ with friends, relatives, and coworkers. Google your own domain name components to see what else shows up and see if you’ve picked something that yields unexpected results (go ahead and Google ‘writers bounty’ from my example, above – you may be surprised). Above all, have a little fun!

From Publishers’ Weekly:

“YA author Julia Watts has been removed from the slate of authors participating in LitUp, a teen literary festival sponsored by the Knox County (Tenn.) Public Library that was inspired by a teen book festival of the same name launched last year in the Kansas City area. Knoxville’s inaugural LitUp festival is scheduled to take place on October 13 with a full day of programming, including appearances by 10 YA authors, a mix of regional and national names.

“According to Watts, a local indie bookseller who is involved in the LitUp festival’s planningasked her in July to be one of its featured authors. “My name and photo went up on the website,” she said. Last Friday, however, that same bookseller called Watts to tell her that she was no longer slated to appear, as, after Googling her name, a member of the organizing committee had expressed concerns that she has also written erotica.”

I’ve seen this before. When a public organization or non-profit decides they don’t like what an author has written, they withdraw support. In this case, Julia Watts is in every way a “legitimate” writer. While she’s written erotica (which is essentially pornography in print), she was not presenting that content. She was presenting her traditionally published YA/LGBTQ fiction.

This is a case of confusing the author and the art. There is no law against writing pornography. Generally speaking there is a difference between erotic romance and erotica.

While I don’t allow erotica in my workshops (I tell the writers no worse than “R-rated” content, please), I have never turned an author away for their content. I wonder if this library would have turned Shel Silversteen away for writing for Playboy? I certainly think not.

Shunning authors for any reason is unacceptable. Content does not maketh the man*. If an author has a catalog that includes works that are essentially illegal, that is one thing. But shunning an author for artistic expression is the worst form of censorship.

Read More at Pubisher’s Weekly

* I hope you will forgive my appropriation of the cliche and its associated gender bias.

Some Definitions

“Erotic romance, according to a definition from the Romance Writers of America, refers to “novels in which strong, often explicit, sexual interaction is an inherent part of the love story, character growth, and relationship development and could not be removed without damaging the storyline.”

“And erotica? “Erotica is just people doing it,” says Cordelia Logan, who has written 19 stories under five pen names and is beginning to focus on BDSM. (To maintain privacy, she declined to reveal her pseudonyms.) “[Characters] are having sex in interesting ways and with interesting people,” she says. “There’s not a lot of character development. The plot revolves around how these people are going to do it, and what’s getting in the way.”

From Publisher’s Weekly

K.M. Weiland is an excellent resource for writers of all types. Her website Helping Writers Become Authors should be on everyone’s short list of helpful websites. Also, her books on writing are excellent and merge well with Agile Writer theory. But, in a recent site article by Katherine Marsh entitled “Why Do So Many Bad Books Sell on Amazon?” steps over the line from advice to judgement. Let me explain.

In the article Marsh explains that Amazon has started promoting eBooks that are newer – like only 30 days old. This has allowed ‘ghost writers’ to churn out new stories using a template from a previous book (replace princess with enchantress, replace castle with mansion, etc…). Thus, these writers are producing a book a month and getting (presumably) good sales.

What Ms. Marsh argues is that this promotes ‘bad books’. At Agile Writers the definition of success is getting your book into the hands of readers who want them. If readers are buying these copycats, then they are probably satisfied. Otherwise, they’d return them (you *can* return eBooks, you know). Therefore, these are not bad books. They are finding a home with people who crave the same plot lines with different characters and locations. The Romance genre is rife with this sort of churning.

And that’s, Okay.

It’s the responsibility of the author to work the system – to play the game – to get their work into the hands of readers who want to read it. Knowing how the game is played and then playing the game well does that.

Ms. Marsh goes on to lay out a plan to deliver *good* books (in her estimation) by splitting a novel into segments that are released every 30 days. This is a brilliant strategy the uses the Amazon system to the author’s benefit. There is no need to qualify ‘good’ vs. ‘bad.’

The READER determines what is good or bad, not the author – and not the algorithms at Amazon nor the publishers in the ivory towers of the Big Four publishing houses.

I heartily recommend Ms. Marsh’s article because it lays out the information you’ll need to get your book in front of more readers’ eyes.

However, this should be only one arrow in your quiver of promotional tools. Remember – Amazon is a *destination* site. People go there because THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR. Impulse buys on Amazon are far less likely than in a bricks-and-mortar store like Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million. People go to bookstores, newsstands, drug stores, and others without knowing precisely what book they want – if any.

But because the self-published author doesn’t have the advantage of in-store sales, we have to rely on self-promotion. And by self-promotion I mean social media and search advertising.

Learn the rules of the game. Then play the game well. The definition of a ‘good book’ is one that finds its reader. Make sure your book finds its home in the hands of the reader waiting for it.

I just found out about Shawn Furey’s “Awesomize Your Life” seminar next week (March 23rd, 2019) in Augusta, Maine. Shawn is a leader in the heroism science community and applies his special knowledge of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to help facilitate psycho-educational groups and provide one-on-one counseling to people in recovery from opioid addiction. He’s a true hero.

So, he asked me if the Agile Writer Method could be used in autobiography and memoir to help recovering addicts and others tell their stories. And I said yes, and many people at Agile Writers have done just that. The Hero’s Journey is superbly attuned to just such stories.

So, I signed up for Shawn’s conference and wouldn’t you know it? He asked me to speak. I’ll be presenting alongside other hero science luminaries as David Rendall, author of the book “The Freak Factor” and Dan & Carrie Chavanne who stopped a shooting at a Wal-mart in Augusta, Maine.

I’ll be talking about how we use the hero’s journey to write autobiography and memoir at the Agile Writer Workshop. I hope you’ll drop by Shawn’s web page to learn more and take a look at his Facebook group “The Hero Science Think Tank” where many people in the hero science community gather to share thoughts, opinions, and research on heroes and heroism.

https://success4.com/blog/the-hero-forge-shawn-fury/

Why Watch Bad Films

Every year, my writing partner on ReelHeroes.net, Dr. Scott Allison and I discuss the idea of reviewing films on the Golden Globes and Oscar nominations lists. Scott prefers to review movies he knows are going to be of high quality, whereas I like a sort of random draw – reviewing both bad and good movies. I find I learn more from a bad movie than a good movie. Scott’s position is pretty pragmatic – he just hates to spend money on bad films.

I think everyone should know what the Golden Globes and Oscars are really about. They’re not necessarily the best films – just the films that industry insiders think are good. This doesn’t mean that you, the viewing audience, will enjoy them. It’s just that their peers think they did a good job.

Golden Globes

In particular, the Golden Globes are awarded by the 93 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Consider this for a moment. There is an entire awards show that influences the purchase of tickets by the viewing public by a very small number of people.

Do *you* really want to go to a movie because 93 photographers and journalists from 55 different countries liked it? In my estimation, that’s a lot of power for a very small pool of individuals about whom I know next to nothing and may not even have the same cultural sensitivities that I have.

Academy Awards

The Oscars, on the other hand, are awards given by peers of the artists creating the films – as many as 8,000 members. One thing you may not know is that to qualify for an Oscar in 2018, the film had to be released in a certain number of theaters (in Los Angelas, CA)  before December 31, 2018. And, the Academy tends to favor films released near the end of the year. So, very often, Oscar-worthy films are not released until December, and then only in limited release.

The Oscar nominations are announced in late January with the ceremony about one month later in late February. This means that many of the films and artists nominated are for films most of us never saw in theaters.

The voters are grouped in branches or divisions. The actors number about 1300 members and are the strongest influence on the award. The voting is highly political and often sentimental. So, if an actor or director happens to be unpopular among their peers, they may not get up-voted – despite having created great art. Likewise, an actor who has contributed a long life of excellent work, but has never won an Oscar, could be voted an award despite a lackluster performance – just out of sympathy.

Also, the studios will spend millions of dollars sending gifts and advertising to the voters to influence their vote. Very often, the film that most successfully courts Academy members with pre-release copies of the film and bling can win – despite the public never really having seen the film.

So, just because a film wins a Golden Globe or an Oscar doesn’t necessarily mean that *you* will enjoy it. In fact, there’s a good chance that you won’t. Because the films aren’t graded on their entertainment value for a mass audience, but on an elite cast of players’ opinion of the artistic merit of the cast and crew of the film.

Rotten Tomatoes

In my humble opinion, if you want to know if a film is any good, or if you’ll enjoy it, check out two metrics that I look at. The first is box office performance. Generally speaking, if a film tanks at the box office, there’s a very good reason for it. Secondly, I find RottenTomatoes.com is a great reflection of how an audience responds to a film.

Rotten Tomatoes has two ratings. The first number is an aggregation of what professional film critics think of the film. That may not be useful to you. Like the professionals of the Golden Globe and Oscars, critics often look for things a mass audience doesn’t care about. The second number is based on audience members who saw the film and either up-voted or down-voted the movie.

I find this second number very telling. For example, Adam Sandler movies are often panned by the critics because the quality is very low and critics don’t appreciate sophomoric humor. However, the audience scores will be significantly higher – because Adam Sandler knows his audience and he plays to that crowd.

Recommendations

So, if you want to determine if a film as going to be entertaining, especially if you have tastes that swing wide from critics’ views, check out the Rotten Tomatoes scores. And after you’ve watched the film, check out our review at ReelHeroes.net where we review films based on the quality of the heroic elements of the film. See if you agree with us and let us know what you think.