Category Archives: Book Writing

Book brings young and old together – Regional News – Yorkshire Evening Post

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1329931233 41 Book brings young and old together Regional News Yorkshire Evening Post

Published on Wednesday 22 February 2012 15:57

Different generations of one community in Sheffield are celebrating their similarities and differences through writing.

The Sharing Our Lives project, hosted by Art In The Park, has already helped to reduce negative stereotypes of young people and help bring personal histories to life.

Now a book of the Sheffield-based project, which started in autumn, has been produced.

It includes work from residents in Sheffield Homes’ sheltered accommodation and schoolchildren who joined forces for the intergenerational writing project. Professional writers helped the residents share their stories and, in later sessions, the pupils were able to ask them questions about their lives.

The resulting book will be celebrated at The Old Junior School, South View Road, Sheffield on February 28 in an hour-long session starting at 1.30pm.

A spokesman for Art In The Park said: “The project was a real bridge between the young and the old. For some children it was the first time they’d spoken to an older person about life in the past. The residents genuinely learned from the children and really enjoyed hearing their chatter and laughter. Fear of young people was reduced.”

Rhian Owen, sheltered manager for Sheffield Homes, said: “This has been a fantastic project to be involved with. I feel our sheltered residents have really benefited from this intergenerational work. The links made with the primary schools will benefit both them and our sheltered schemes. We have made some wonderful friendships and long may they continue into the future.”

Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2012, All Rights Reserved.

Avoid These Common Grant Writing Mistakes

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1329924020 94 Avoid These Common Grant Writing Mistakes

Jonathon Ross Carrington

“I am too busy to finish writing this grant by the deadline.”

“I don’t know where to start on writing grants, and I don’t have the staff or money.”

“The funding agency has never heard of me!”

Does this sound like you?

They are common excuses made by leaders of nonprofit organizations to justify the reason for not receiving grant funds.

It is very easy to make excuses; however, if you don’t try, you will never know what will happen.

Your programs deserve grant funding.

The real reason why your program is not awarded grant funding is because of simple, amateur mistakes in your grant proposal submission.

The mistakes stem from the lack of experience with grant writing and the lack of time management and research skills.

One of the biggest mistakes found in most grant applications is the lack of familiarity with the funding agency.

Before you make another mistake in your grant proposal, take a look at the most commonly known mistakes made in the grant proposal process.

STAGE ONE: MISTAKES IN UNDERSTANDING THE PROPOSAL PROCESS

Submitting Generic Proposals

First-time grant seekers are unfamiliar with the general process: common grant proposal elements and how proposal writing works.

There is this belief that submitting a canned grant proposal from an online template or book will do the job in receiving the grant.

The canned proposal submission reveals a laziness of the applicant and disconnection from the goals and mission of the granting agency.

Not following instructions or reading the Request for Proposals (RFP)

When you do not follow instructions, you have a poor chance of receiving the grant.

Foundations, corporations, and government agencies receive thousands of grant proposals, and determine your ability to follow instructions by the way the proposal is presented to the agency.

Solutions:

Take time to understand the proposal process by enrolling in an online grant writing workshop or conference that teaches the basics of grant writing, or go to your local library and check out grant writing books to learn the process.

Knowing your grantor is key to developing a relationship with a funding agency.

Take time to learn their mission, granting purposes, and results or outcomes expected from your program.

Grant program officers look at whether or not you followed the RFP instructions.

If a funding agency requests a three-year operating budget, then create one.

If they request paper clips rather than staples, then use paper clips.

If they only accept applications from pre-selected organizations, then don’t apply.

STAGE TWO: MISTAKES IN CREATING PROPOSAL TIMETABLES

Submitting the Proposal Late

Proposals are often received after the deadline, which is presented as a rushed and incomplete application.

Applicants are known to request an extension to complete the application.

Contacting the Foundation with Last-Minute Questions

Applicants contact program officers at the most busiest times of the day.

They call or e-mail with last-minute questions.

Funding agencies will not answer or return your calls and/or e-mails in a timely manner.

Solutions:

Create a timetable with deadlines from the start and end of writing your proposal.

Timetables always change your research progresses.

Visit their website first to see if a FAQ section answers any frequently asked questions.

Schedule a time in advance to speak with a agency representative for additional assistance to compile all of the information you need before writing the proposal.

STAGE THREE: MISTAKES IN CONDUCTING RESEARCH

Failure to thoroughly research the funding agency’s interests

Proposals do not succeed because of its superficial research.

It is not enough information to know that the foundation makes grants for education.

Do they support K-12?

Do they specialize in organizations with high poverty schools?

Focusing on the needs that your program does NOT plan to address

Applicants go overboard with information about the need of the organization rather than the needs that the project will address.

Asking for the wrong amount

Grant applicants request substantially less or more than the typical grant size of a funding agency.

If you ask for less, then you have underestimated your program’s need and the agency’s giving.

If you ask for more, then you have not done the sufficient research about the funding agency’s grant size.

Solutions:

Identify and locate all of the information you need to develop a solid proposal.

Identify the perceived need that your program addresses, the solution that your organization proposes, and the nature, mission, and methods of funding sources you hope to approach.

Research past grant making history of your potential funding sources.

Determine the grant size awarded to similar organizations, which is the amount that you want to request in your application.

Your research questions are thoroughly answered in the foundation’s guidelines, online research databases, the agency’s website, and the IRS 990 form.

Outline how your program will deliver the services to the people who need it.

Include what your organization can do for more people in receiving the grant in a general operating support request.

STAGE FOUR: MISTAKES IN BUILDING YOUR PROPOSAL’S FOUNDATION

Too much emphasis on the “why”, not enough on the “how”

When a poorly written proposal is submitted to a funding agency, reviewers have little patience for bad writing.

Many novice grant writers present an overly sentimental story about the problems of their target population, and why the program should be funded rather than how the program will address the need.

Solutions:

Recognize how each potential source will make a good match for your proposal.

You should be equipped with the information to address the perceived problem and the proposed solution.

Present a step-by-step guide for the reader on how your program will meet the need by including measurable goals and objectives and an explicit, actionable plan.

Include how you will record, collect and measure information on your program’s successes and outcomes.

STAGE FIVE: MISTAKES IN PREPARING YOUR APPROACH TO FUNDING AGENCIES

Not participating in informational calls/seminars

Proposals are denied because of detailed information missed in an informational session conducted by the funding agency.

Not all of the details can be found in the RFP.

Many organizations have experienced cases where their proposal did not comply with a restriction explained in a meeting, disqualifying their proposal.

Preaching to the choir

Organizations assume that funding agencies know everything about the applicant’s organization, especially when describing the capacity to carry out projects, using industry jargon, and other catch phrases.

Solutions:

Attend the informational seminars and calls and collect additional information and material you may need to know about the funding agency.

Use simple language throughout your proposal and present a clear case about your program’s need.

STAGE SIX: MISTAKES IN WRITING THE BODY OF YOUR PROPOSAL

Not enough detail

Nonprofit executives become absorbed in day-to-day business of fulfilling the agency’s mission that certain details about the programs, organization, and mission statement often get left out of the proposal.

Too much detail

Sometimes, proposals have too much information that embellishes the problem or ideas about the project.

Submitting sloppy budgets

Program offers detect over hundreds, if not, thousands of sloppy budgets every year. They will know if you left out a major item or padded the salaries.

Inadequate/Unrealistic cost analysis

Proposals have unrealistic cost estimates that make nonprofits appears fiscally inexperienced and incompetent.

Also, proposals miss the mark in including income projections, making your organization appear too dependent.

Lack of Quantitative Data

Nonprofit grants are too light on hard data, with no quantifiable objectives and results.

Not Asking for the Money

Many proposals forget to include the amount of the grant they seek in the proposal.

Solutions:

Structure each section of the project.

Grant reviewers are learning about your project for the first time so provide specific information.

Each section of your narrative shows how the funds will be used responsibly and effectively by your organization.

Prepare the budget with same care as the narrative and match each section point for point.

STAGE SEVEN: MISTAKES IN REVIEWING AND REVISING YOUR PROPOSAL

Careless Editing and Proofreading

Program officers have to read over 600 grant proposals on the same topic.

The problem with some proposals is that they find themselves re-reading sentences in your proposals due to typographical and grammatical errors.

Not using the checklist provided in the RFP

Many nonprofits don’t look at the checklist provided by the funding agency.

Lots of applicants leave out required pieces of the proposal, disqualifying the candidate from the start.

Solutions:

After finishing your proposal, review the proposal carefully.

Refer to the funder’s proposal guide and verify all of the essential information is included in the proposal.

Proofread for grammar, spelling and syntax errors, and have a friend or colleague read it for you.

The checklist is usually found in the guidelines; and it is important for a funding agency to know that you followed their directions and did not miss any required pieces of the application.

PHASE EIGHT: MISTAKES IN SUBMITTING YOUR APPLICATION

Simply not asking for the grant you need, or not submitting the grant at all

Grantseekers love to make excuses such as:

“It’s not the right time to apply for the grant” or “The economy is down” or “I am too busy to finish the proposal before the deadline” or “Grantors don’t know who we are”.

Solutions:

Submit the proposal according to the RFP guidelines in a timely manner whether or not it is the right time to apply.

The economy will always have its ebbs and flows, but does not excuse your organization from asking for a grant from a funding agency.

If your organization is too busy to ask for funds for a deserving program, then your organization should not even exist.

Make time to ask for support for your programs, and also take time to develop a rapport with a prospective funder.

Excuses are easy to come by, but you will continue to make these mistakes and never get any funding if you just don’t try.

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10 Ways To Target The Elusive Millenial Demographic

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1329916788 30 10 Ways To Target The Elusive Millenial Demographic

Millennials are a confusing demographic for businesses to target successfully because it’s difficult to pin down what this age group is into, up for and supposedly up against. Unpredictable, incredibly segmented and with fleeting interests, how can an entrepreneur reach a generation that doesn’t stay still long or often?

Tina Wells CEO of Buzz Marketing Group who strategizes for top clients within the beauty, entertainment, fashion, financial, and lifestyle sectors to target the allusive Millennial demographic, has 10 predictions for the year 2012.

Tina Wells is the CEO of Buzz Marketing Group, strategizing for top clients within the beauty, entertainment, fashion, financial, and lifestyle sectors. She is the author of the tween series Mackenzie Blue (HarperCollins Childrens Books) and Chasing Youth Culture And Getting It Right (Wiley). She is also a member of The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

Read more posts on Young Entrepreneur Council »

Joe Carnahan to write and direct a remake of Bronson classic Death Wish

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1329882011 59 Joe Carnahan to write and direct a remake of Bronson classic Death Wish

Could’ve sworn just a few days ago, when talking to him at the junket for “The Grey”, that Joe Carnahan suggested he’ll be staying away from big-studio franchisey things that’d get him sneers and projectile-spat-at from now on.

Carnahan, whose Liam Neeson survivalist thriller opened to big numbers at the box office this past weekend, said if his last big studio pic “A-Team” hadn’t flopped he’d never have gotten to make “The Grey” – he’d be stuck doing unoriginal, franchise pics. Moreso, the filmmaker suggested that he copped so much flack for doing something like an “A-Team” movie that the whole experience left him with a sour taste in his mouth. As such, he’s going to try and concentrate on doing more meaningful, original projects like “The Grey” up.

When he spoke to Moviehole, Carnahan said his next project will likely be the Pablo Escobar biopic (“Killing Pablo”) that he’s been toying with for a while, and if it comes together, he might even make a low-budget, Canadian-lensed follow-up to his crooked cops epic “Narc”. By all accounts, he was now a serious filmmaker.

Then today, 24 Frames reported that Carnahan is writing and directing a remake of “Death Wish” – a movie that would go onto becoming one of the most unyielding franchises of our times.

Yes, that original film was based on a book, but it’s unarguably more famous for it’s Charles Bronson-led movie series (that got crapper and more ludicrous with each sequel). The studio knows that. They want a remake of an action classic – not another interpretation of the book. It’s brand, brand, brand.

Now it’s possible that the deal came together quickly, and was solidified after this weekend’s terrific takings for “The Grey”, but I dare say this “Death Wish” remake is something Carnahan’s had several meetings on over the past couple of months. Not to say Carnahan isn’t a good choice for “Death Wish”, just that his comments about staying away from franchisey, unoriginal material would seem null and void. After all, even with a spiffy new script, how original can the whole “Death Wish” template be? That whole one-man-army revenge thriller genre has been beaten like Tina Turner after a blunder concert.

Forgetting all that though, would the director of “Narc” and “A-Team” be able to make a kick-ass, gritty, tense “Death Wish” film? I’m sure of it. And I look forward to seeing what he comes up with. But how about casting the thing, right – and staying away from the more obvious choices like Jason Statham and Gerard Butler? I dare say Carnahan’s already thinking of Neeson for the lead role (Of course he is!), and he’d be perfect, but he’s also worked with a barrage of older, veteran actors that’d also fit Kersey – someone like Andy Garcia, from Carnahan’s “Smokin’ Aces”, or even Ray Liotta, who shone in “Narc”?

A “Death Wish” remake has been on the cards for years now. At one stage Sylvester Stallone wanted to direct and play Paul Kersey, but he changed his mind when his fans reacted negatively to the news of him rebooting the Bronson classic. How will Carnahan devotees react to the news?

In other news. . . : Prince Pierre Casiraghi beaten in nightclub brawl; Mark Kelly to write children’s book

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In other news. . . : Prince Pierre Casiraghi beaten in nightclub brawl; Mark Kelly to write children’s bookPrince Pierre Casiraghi in 2010. (Francois Durand/Getty Images)

• Prince Pierre Casiraghi of Monaco — the 24-year-old grandson of the late Grace Kelly — was badly beaten Saturday at a trendy supermodel-filled Manhattan nightspot, the NY Post reported. Nightlife entrepreneur Adam Hock, 47, was charged with four counts of third-degree assault — but insisted to the paper that prince and his posse started the brawl. Casiraghi, whose face was bloodied, was treated at a hospital.

• Sooner or later, every political VIP writes a children’s book – and now it’s Mark Kelly’s turn. The astronaut husband of Gabrielle Giffords signed a deal with Simon & Schuster for “Mousetronaut: A Partially True Story.” The story of a mouse who goes into space — based on an idea he first had a decade ago, he told the AP, when his two daughters from a previous marriage were young — will be published in October.

Inflammatory article case: HC grants anticipatory bail to Swamy

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1329873549 47 Inflammatory article case: HC grants anticipatory bail to Swamy

In a relief to Janta Party president Subramanian Swamy, the Delhi High Court on Monday granted him protection from arrest in connection with a case for writing an alleged inflammatory article in a Mumbai daily.

normblog: Writer’s choice 338: Frances Thomas

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1329866407 93 normblog: Writers choice 338: Frances Thomas

Frances Thomas has written many books for adults and children, including The Fall of Man and Finding Minerva. Her biography of Christina Rossetti has just been reissued by Virago. She lives in London and Wales. Here Frances writes about Annemarie Selinko’s Désirée.

Frances Thomas on Désirée by Annemarie Selinko

Reading cushioned my childhood. Which was perfectly happy, but I was an only child, and this meant long stretches of time when it was just me and whatever there was to be found on the shelves in my room. Noel Streatfield, Elinor M. Brent Dyer, Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease, Pamela Brown, Kate Seredy, George Macdonald; in their various and different ways all these people and more kept me securely and blissfully floating in a world of imagination.

But there came a time when somehow these wonderful writers weren’t quite working for me any more. I cancelled my subscriptions to School Friend and Girl, forsook my beloved junior library, and started to look, a little bemusedly, at what was on the shelves in the big serious library downstairs. And it wasn’t easy; there were so many books, I didn’t know where to start, and many of them, with their adult themes – I don’t use this word in a sexual sense, though that was probably there too – seemed quite foreign to my interests and aspirations.

I guess that these days the transition stage is handled by fantasy: dystopian futures, vampires, ghosts, wild and weird fictions in which dauntless heroines stride through bleak and crumbling landscapes to find their happy or happy-ish endings. But that kind of book didn’t exist when I was a teenager. Young Adult? Don’t make me laugh – as long as you wore school uniform, you were a child. Nobody saw you as audience, or consumer, or person of interest.

What I turned to, in what would otherwise have been a bleak period for my reading, was historical fiction. Only those books seemed to offer the extended horizons, the new worlds that I craved, without the rocks and turbulences of adult books. I was a voyager on a rickety boat watching a beloved and familiar land fade into mists but also turning curiously to those further shores.

Like all the reading I’d ever done, they were a mixed batch, those books. Some, like Forever Amber, were racy (does anyone use that word any more? – in those days it seemed to mean dust jackets that showed a lot of cleavage). Some – Georgette Heyer – were romantic. Some – Jean Plaidy, I remember most particularly – brought historical women to fairly convincing life. Some were just marvellous novels: Mary Renault, who opened windows into mythology and the deep past; Robert Graves, whose Claudius books taught me more than dull school Latin ever managed to do.

But the other day, a buzzy conversation on a forum for children’s writers that I belong to reminded me of this one – Désirée by Annemarie Selinko. This book tells the story of Désirée Clary, a silk merchant’s daughter from Marseilles, whom the young Napoleon first loved and then jilted, and who then by one of those strange quirks of history went on to become Queen of Sweden through her marriage to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.

Annemarie, like her heroine, also lived through a time of historical turmoil. She was born in Vienna in 1914, and went on to marry a Danish diplomat. When war broke out, Annemarie and her husband were active in the Danish resistance, and later had to escape to Sweden on a fishing boat. Her sister Liselotte, to whom the book is dedicated, was not so lucky, and was murdered by the Nazis. It was while she was in Sweden that Annemarie became fascinated by the Bernadotte dynasty, who still rule the country, and their French origins. After years of research, she published Désirée in 1953. It was an immediate hit and went on to be made into a film staring Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando.

I think I came across it because of a newspaper article that described it as one of the best historical novels of all time. My copy, unfortunately, came with an inappropriate ‘racy’ cover, which led to my easily outraged grandmother thinking I was reading a book called Desire (and put my husband off reading it for years, despite my recommendation, until I found a copy with a more tasteful jacket).

The story starts with the young Désirée Eugenie Clary, at fourteen years old. Like everyone else in France in 1794, she lives in an atmosphere of danger and the constant threat of the guillotine. Désirée is brave and resourceful, and when her brother is unjustly arrested, she rushes off to the Deputy’s office to try and bring about his release. She returns after a series of adventures, having met a young man with an interesting face and an unpronounceable name – something like Boonopat, she thinks. This is a tease on the part of the author; the Bonaparte she has met is Joseph, and it’s not until he brings his younger brother, the shabby General along, that Désirée’s interest is really engaged.

The rest is quite literally history. We follow her through the years, we see her youthful enthusiasm and ebullience turn to unhappiness as her ruthless and charismatic lover leaves her for Josephine, but are relieved when she meets and marries the more suitable Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. Through her viewpoint, we watch as Napoleon becomes more and more powerful and megalomaniac, ennobling himself and the members of his large and unruly family, among whom is now numbered Désirée’s sister Julie, married to Joseph. The family acquire more and more weird and wonderful titles, and at the centre of everything, Napoleon broods like a malignant and pitiless spider. But later, Jean-Baptiste, who has impressed the Swedes in the course of a campaign against them, finds himself invited to succeed their aged king Charles XIII and revitalize a dynasty, which has become increasingly inbred and feeble. Désirée’s life takes another quite unexpected turn.

Skimming through the reviews on Amazon.com, I was interested to find that most of them were either written by teenagers or by people who had first read this book as teenagers. Désirée is a sympathetic and engaging character (though for today’s taste she can be a little irritatingly naïve: Selinko wrote in an age where it wasn’t good for a woman to appear too clever), and though there’s a lot of quite difficult history to take in, your attention is engaged. And Napoleon is one of those figures that you both love and hate – his dangerous charm is well conveyed.

In spite of the romantic and light-hearted beginning, this isn’t an easy read. Selinko doesn’t shirk from describing the horrors of war, as the increasingly power-mad Napoleon drags his ruined army through the snows of Moscow, and later on subjects the remnant to the cannons of Waterloo. Men die and are horribly mutilated; the glorious and glamorous Empire collapses in blood and squalor. Because we watch it all through Désirée’s eyes, we understand the human cost of all this in a way that a history book wouldn’t convey.

The conclusion of the book isn’t entirely satisfactory, though. After Jean-Baptiste has been chosen as the Swedish regent in 1810, Désirée travels to Stockholm with him and Oscar, her beloved only son. The formality and protocol of the Swedish court are too much for her, and she returns to Paris, where she stays until 1822. This reflects historical reality, but it doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the warm-hearted and loving heroine that we’ve grown used to. I remember that at this point I felt faintly uncomfortable as a young reader; things weren’t working out quite as I expected. There was another ‘true’ story hidden uncomfortably beneath the fiction, and from time to time I was aware of it bubbling through the story’s surface.

The book ends with Désirée’s eventual return to Sweden, and her coronation, but in real life her final days there seem to have been lonely and unhappy; she never learned Swedish and became increasingly eccentric, driving round and round the night-time city in her carriage. Selinko has taken some liberties with historical truth to make her heroine more attractive to us; perhaps rather more than is justified. But probably I wouldn’t have enjoyed that ‘real’ story, the empty marriage, the eccentricities; and this book started me on a lifetime’s fascination with its real hero, the charismatic Corsican boy who became emperor. And re-reading it now, after a gap of many years, I found I enjoyed it just as much as when I was young.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

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Scholastic Book Club’s Dystopian Writing Contest

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2011 Dystopian Thumbs on Scholastic Book Club’s Dystopian Writing Contest

If you are a student grade 6 through 12, you could win a trip to the Hunger Games premiere! Scholastic Book Clubs is holding a dystopian writing contest.

What’s your version of a world gone horribly wrong? Write a dystopian story that depicts a terrifying future, and you could win a trip to attend The Hunger Games movie premiere!

Entries must not exceed four (4) pages on paper no larger than 9″ x 12″ and include the following information: student’s name, age, and grade; teacher’s name; and school name, address, and phone number. Winners will be selected based on creativity, execution, and clarity of thought. Winners will be notified on or about March 5, 2012.

Such a great contest! I wish I was qualified to enter.

You can read more about the contest HERE.

Source: Scholastic Book Club

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Pineapple Grenade

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1329854348 77 Pineapple Grenade

Two Serge A. Storms books in three months?! Is that too much of a good thing? No. There is actually no such thing as too much of a good thing, and for Tim Dorsey to follow WHEN ELVES ATTACK with PINEAPPLE GRENADE is Exhibit A for that proposition. While this may not be the best of Dorsey’s chronicle of Florida’s most inventive serial killer, it contains some of his best writing, hands down. Yes, I know, it’s complicated. I’ll write now and explain later. Maybe.

"PINEAPPLE GRENADE features all of the elements that we love and expect in a Storms novel: manic dialogue, surreal vignettes…fascinating Florida trivia, and murders by the dozen."

PINEAPPLE GRENADE is Dorsey dipping his toe into the ocean of the espionage thriller genre. Is it a satire? Sure. Does it work? Sometimes. As has occasionally happened in some of the other installments of  this series, Dorsey gets carried away with the sounds of the voices in his head. So it is that at one extremely complicated point in the book, I totally lost track of the plot. Check that: I lost track of part of the plot.

Serge, instead of killing people, gets involved in attempting to protect the president of a Latin American democracy who appears to be the target of an assassination that is to take place during the Meeting of the Americas conference in Miami. Serge and his sidekick, the eternally soused Coleman, are on a mission to make the town safe for innocent visitors of all stripes and continues to be extremely adept at coming up with new, original, and yes, painful ways of executing carjackers, wife beaters and the like who happen to cross his path. Serge also falls in love (or something like it) with a sultry lass named Felicia, who wants to keep the president of her beloved country alive. With Serge on her side, the bad guys wouldn’t seem to stand a chance, but they do.

The problem with PINEAPPLE GRENADE is that Dorsey becomes so fixated on establishing the alleged ineptitude of the CIA that it threatens to derail the book. Not to worry, though. Just keep plowing through, even when things get a little rough. There are plenty of Serge’s trademark trivia drops, one of which involves a strip club with a flying saucer mounted on the roof and another in which he mentions my all-time favorite episode of the immortal “Miami Vice” (the television series, not the feature film). So aside from some rough sledding (or should we call that water-skiing?) through the plot, PINEAPPLE GRENADE features all of the elements that we love and expect in a Storms novel: manic dialogue, surreal vignettes (wait until you read what occurs at the Diplomats’ Ball), fascinating Florida trivia, and murders by the dozen.

But wait, there’s more! What will really knock you back here is Dorsey’s demonstration of literary derring-do where not once, but twice, he sets the clock ticking and actually puts his readers on the edge of their collective seats. Keep in mind that the Storms series feeds off of a comfortably familiar but always hilarious template. We don’t really expect to be surprised by the end result; it’s how Serge gets there that provides the entertainment. There’s a bit of a change-up or two here, where Dorsey stretches his previously demonstrated talents in another direction and kicks posterior. I will tell you that if he wanted to write straight spy/thriller fiction under a pseudonym, he could probably do it if he felt like reigning himself in just a bit, plot-wise.

Dorsey may be known as a brilliant humorist, but there is a depth to his talent that has yet to be fully explored. We get a hint of it in PINEAPPLE GRENADE. Get through the convoluted plot, and you will be more than amply rewarded.

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Angry Afghans protest Koran disposal

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1329851951 61 Angry Afghans protest Koran disposal

Muslim holy books that were burned in a pile of rubbish at a US military base in Afghanistan had been removed from a library at a nearby detention centre because they contained extremist messages or inscriptions, a western military official says.

The military official with knowledge of the incident said it appeared that the Korans and other Islamic readings were being used to fuel extremism, and that detainees at Parwan Detention Facility were writing on the documents to exchange extremist messages.

Parwan Detention Facility adjoins Bagram Air Field, a sprawling US base north of Kabul, where more than 2,000 angry Afghans demonstrated against the incident.

The burning stoked anti-foreign sentiment that already is on the rise after a decade of war in Afghanistan. It also fuelled the arguments of Afghans who claim foreign troops are not respectful of their culture or Islamic religion.

“Die, die, foreigners!” the demonstrators shouted. Some fired rifles into the air. Others threw rocks at the gate of the base and set tyres ablaze.

US General John Allen, the top commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, apologised to the Afghan people and said the books were inadvertently given to troops for burning.

“It was not a decision that was made because they were religious materials,” Allen told NATO TV.

“It was not a decision that was made with respect to the faith of Islam. It was a mistake. It was an error. The moment we found out about it we immediately stopped and we intervened.”

The military official said that several hundred Islamic publications, including Korans, were removed from the library. Some of the publications had extremist content; others had extremist messages on their pages, the official said.

The official said the documents were charred and burnt, but that none of them were completely destroyed.

“We will look into the reason those materials were gathered,” Allen said. “We will look into the manner in which the decision was made to dispose of them in this manner.”

Allen said he would issue an order spelling out how Islamic religious materials should be handled by the coalition.

“This was unintentional,” he said, adding that no member of the coalition deliberately set out to defame Islam or desecrate the religious materials of the faith.

In a statement, Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident and appointed a delegation to investigate. He said initial reports were that four Korans were burned.

Early on Tuesday, as word of the incident spread, about 100 demonstrators gathered outside the base in Parwan province. As the crowd grew, so did the outrage.

One protester, Mohammad Hakim, said if US forces can’t bring peace to Afghanistan, they should go home.

“They should leave Afghanistan rather than disrespecting our religion, our faith,” Hakim said. “They have to leave and if next time they disrespect our religion, we will defend our holy Koran, religion and faith until the last drop of blood has left in our body.”

Ahmad Zaki Zahed, chief of the provincial council, said US military officials took him to a burn pit on the base where 60 to 70 books, including Korans, were recovered.

The books were used by detainees once incarcerated at the base, he said.

“Some were all burned. Some were half-burned,” Zahed said, adding that he did not know exactly how many Korans had been burned.

Zahed said five Afghans working at the pit told him that the religious books were in the rubbish that two soldiers with the US-led coalition transported to the pit in a truck late on Monday night.

When they realised the books were in the rubbish, the labourers quickly worked to recover them, he said.

“The labourers there showed me how their fingers were burned when they took the books out of the fire,” he said.

Afghan Army General Abdul Jalil Rahimi, the commander of a military coordination office in the province, said he and other officials met with protesters, tribal elders and clerics to try to calm their emotional response.

“The protesters were very angry and didn’t want to end their protest,” he said.

Later, however, the protesters ended the rally and said they would send 20 representatives from the group to Kabul to talk with Afghan parliamentarians and demanded a meeting with President Hamid Karzai, Rahimi said.

The governor’s office in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan called the incident a “shameful move by some stupid individuals.”

Zia Ul Rahman, deputy provincial police chief, said between 2,000 and 2,500 protesters demonstrated at the base.

“The people are very angry. The mood is very negative,” Rahman said while the rally was going on. “Some are firing hunting guns in the air, but there have been no casualties.”

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