The One Positive Thing About #Trump? Endless Fodder For Ridicule

It's true. The man practically begs to be made fun of. That bit about 'the best crowds ever' at the inauguration—seriously? His choices for cabinet members—an illiterate moron for Education, a climate change denier for the EPA, a freakin' banker-slash-Wall-Street-scammer for Finance—and his own son-in-law as 'Senior Adviser'! I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Any dystopian novel that included even a fraction of this goofed-up circus would be laughed out of even the most amateur of literary agents' offices. To quote Monsieur Cheeto himself: Unbelievable. 

And tragic. And—to put it mildly—worrisome. But a sense of humor is the hallmark of an educated mind, and if we can't see the hilarity in all of this, we're that much farther away from gaining the perspective we need to fight back.

Enter The Netherlands.

(Updated video, since original is 'no longer accessible'... Censured, perhaps? :D )

Got to love the Dutch. (Plus, Cheeto-man really hates to be laughed at, which makes the laughing all the more enjoyable. Thank you, dude, for elevating laughter into an instrument of resistance.)

2017 To-Do List

Lately I've been doing more visual "art" than writing... Not sure why. Maybe creativity not only comes in different shapes of expression but actually requires these different shapes to feed on, to renew itself, even to deepen itself. (Or maybe I'm just a five-star procrastinator and spin doctor.)

Here's one of the latest: the 2017 To-Do List. Hope you like it :)

The 2017 To-Do List, by Guilie Castillo
Created in Photoshop, January 2017

On the Money We Make (or Fail to Make) Through Writing

Getting paid more than zero for your work is the first step toward learning what it’s really worth to you, the best way to learn to stop obsessing about what it’s worth to everybody else.

This brilliant piece I just found on Slate.com touches on some of the key elements of making a living through writing. Many authors I know say it should never be about the money. Many others believe it shouldn't be about anything else. Some feel that making money off their 'art' is akin to 'selling out'; some consider payment the ultimate validation.

Either way, though, and as the article says, 

"Few connections are more mysterious than the one between writing books and making money."

Oh, and this:

In their candid moments, most publishers will admit going into business with writers whose work they regard as subliterary because they believe that they can profit from their books. This is still considered shocking in some unsophisticated quarters, but publishing isn’t literature: Literature is literature.

Read the full article at Slate.com.

The Voice of Frustration

We—all of us falling under the liberal, progressive label—have just about had it with being told to "get over it", "work together", "move forward". Two months after the election and the divide is only growing wider. I've seen plenty of material—call it rants, or apologies, or whatever you want—in the blogosphere and elsewhere, and as brilliant as much of it has been, none of it has captured both the frustration and the sheer reality of it as perfectly as this post. My highlight (WARNING: strong language):

You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don't you explain liberalism to them? Why don't you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won't matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.  

The whole thrust of these "let's learn about the yokels" articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We're all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.

Exactly. (Even if I take exception to the use of 'Americans'... America is a continent, which makes not just US citizens but Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, etc., etc., also 'Americans'.)