The multi-talented award winning journalist Michael Hastings’ death has left many in shock this week. He was only 33 years old, but he’d accomplished more in his short lifetime than most people do in a span of decades. This article has a few good photos of him.
Hastings’ groundbreaking reporting on Gen. Stanley McChrystal‘s candid criticism of the Obama administration is credited with ending McChrystal’s military career and earned him a 2010 George Polk Award. He was 33.
The Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed reporter is being remembered by many of his colleagues as an unfailingly bright and hard-charging reporter who wrote stories that mattered.
This next link will lead you to a piece that has a video of the car crash. It’s very disturbing to watch and I would suggest that if you are not comfortable with things like this you pass on it.
A photographer from freelance photography/videography outfit Loudlabs alleges to have been on the scene immediately after journalist Michael Hastings died in a fiery car crash early yesterday morning.
Because of the nature of Hastings’ work as a journalist, this next article gets into speculative theories about whether or not his death was part of a conspiracy.
Journalist Michael Hastings’ death early Tuesday morning, June 18, in Los Angeles after the Mercedes C250 coupe he was driving slammed into a palm tree at high speed has sparked conspiracy theories that Hastings, like Clooney’s Clayton, was targeted for his investigative reporting. The crash was so intense that the car’s engine and transmission were found 100 feet from the main wreckage.
And this peice gets into even more detail about the conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, LA Weekly reports that Hastings was reporting extensively on the CIA at the time of his death, and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Hastings’ last article for BuzzFeed was on the NSA and the Democrats’ love of spying on Americans.
It doesn’t take much thought to guess that Hastings would have been working on the topic of spying on Americans, especially with all that’s been happening with Edward Snowden. However, so far all speculations of conspiracy and foul play have been knocked down, and they say his death was, indeed, an accident.
In the past twenty years, Tony and I have had four Mercedes and one of the main reasons why we have them is for the safety factor. And when I read that Hastings was driving a Mercedes and that it blew up the way it did, I had to stop and wonder myself. Of course any car can do anything in an accident and no one is ever 100% safe in an accident no matter what they drive. But it still makes me wonder, because we’re living in interesting times right now.
Sara York Interview
Last night an author I know from social media, Sara York, did an online interview with WT Prater, whom I don’t know, that I thought was worth linking to today. She’s one of those people I see on social media often, and I always like what she has to say and what she does in public. She has a lot of books out, but she’s never in-your-face obnoxious about hocking them. I also never get that scent of pure bullshit and fakery when she’s on social media that I do detect too often on social media.
But the thing I liked most about this particular interview is that the questions were interesting, and Sara York answered them well. One in particular about self-publishing caught my attention, because I would have answered the question exactly the way she did in the interview. What I find interesting nowadays is that literary agencies like The Nelson Agency and Dystel & Goderich, to name just two of many, have been helping their authors self-publish for the past two or more years. Self-published authors who have already been published with large publishers even have a name now: hybrid authors. This is because they both self-publish and trad publish. And yet I still see small authors with small start up e-presses in genre fiction turning their noses up at self-publishing as if they are too grand for it…even though we’ve reached a point in publishing where some of the most popular bestselling authors are now proud to admit they’ve self-published.
In any event, Sara York did a great job in the interview, and it was interesting to put the voice and the thoughts with the person I see on social media so often. I highly recommend listening to it.
Here’s a link, and I had no issues listening to it on my iPad.
Winston Gieseke
A few years ago I received an e-mail from an editor in Germany asking if he could reprint a short story I’d written for an older Starbooks Press book I was in titled, “Noah’s Arch,” in
Dreamboys and Macho magazine with publisher Bruno Gmunder. Of course I was so thrilled
I jumped at the chance. This really is my favorite kind of writing, and I’m huge fan of all this publisher’s work, magazines and books.
And this year I was contacted again by Bruno Gmunder with a different editor, Winston Gieseke, who wanted to know if I was interested in submitting anything to a few anthologies he was working on. Once again, I made the time to do it. I’ve submitted to the upcoming release, Daddy Knows Best, and for another titled, Straight No More. I’ll post more about them when they are released, but I wanted to talk about Winston Gieseke today.
I’ve worked with a lot of editors in the past, but this time I’ve enjoyed my e-mails with Winston. We both have a lot in common, and I found his basic information fascinating. He has a blog you can
check out here. It’s titled
Expats in Berlin. Although I’ve never been there, my partner, Tony, has been many times on business trips and he’s always raved about Berlin. This is from the about page:
Expats in Berlin details the experiences of John and Winston, who relocated to Europe’s hippest city from Los Angeles with their two adorable and moderately well-behaved dogs.
The site was named Best Blog by the Web Critics Association of North America and has enjoyed fairly positive write-ups in People magazine, USA Today, and Monster Truck Monthly. It has also been discussed in various forms of media by celebrities and journalists, everyone from Anderson Cooper and Howard Stern to Gayle King and those women on The View.
OK, there’s not one iota of truth in that second paragraph, but something had to fill this space. Everything else you’ll read here is true, we promise.
Learn more about us here.
And, he’s absolutely adorable!!
