Drinking Starbucks Coffee

 

My son got married this past weekend. I’ve been to busy to blog about it yet, so I decided to be lazy and reprint a blog post from October 27, 2014 discussing the legal aspects of using trademarks in novels. I chose this post in particular since the issue came up at the author’s fair I attended last month.

I will blog about John and Christina’s wedding next week.

Drinking Starbucks Coffee

I drink a lot of coffee, although not usually from Starbucks. But my characters go there. That’s because it is a nationally-recognized name, and I like to use some recognizable brands to give my stories a sense of authenticity.

But I know writers who are scared of using brand names. They think it will violate copyright or trademark laws, or they don’t want to use the ® symbol because it can interrupt the flow of the story.

I don’t worry about any of that.

You can’t copyright names, so copyright law doesn’t apply. You can trademark names, and Starbucks is a registered trademark. However, trademarks have a specific, limited purpose, so the protection the owner gets is much narrower than with copyrights.

Trademarks protect against consumer confusion over the source of a product or service. Consumers use recognizable names and symbols to tell them that they are getting a certain quality or a product with particular characteristics. When you see the Nike swoosh on a pair of shoes, you expect them to last for a while. When a counterfeiter prints the swoosh on shoddy-quality shoes, people are mislead. That harms both the consumer (who is not getting what he or she expected) and Nike (who could lose sales to the counterfeiter and suffer harm to its reputation when the shoes fall apart).

Your characters can drink 7-Up without worrying about trademark infringement. No one is going to go out and buy counterfeit 7-Up based on your novel, nor will readers assume that the makers of 7-Up are connected with your book. You don’t have to call it lemon-lime soda.

A brand name can lose its trademark protection if consumers use it generically for any brand of the same type of product. After people started referring to all tissues as kleenex and to photocopies made on any brand photocopier as xeroxes, the owners of those trademarks spent a lot of money educating consumers on the proper use of the terms. That’s why brand owners would like you to use the © symbol. But you aren’t required to. If you want to help trademark owners protect their property and you think “the real thing” will add authenticity, just capitalize Coke.

So let your characters drink Starbucks’ coffee if they want to. Or 7-Up. Or Coke. (There seems to be a lot of drinking in this post. Maybe I should send my characters to the bathroom more often.)

Setting is Important

I just finished reading Bummer Camp by Ann Garvin. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it to anyone because the plot was ridiculous. It may have been intended for humor, but I winced much more often than I laughed.

Normally, I would have put it down after a few chapters. So why didn’t I? The story took place in a summer camp in the woods, and I was caught up in the well-executed setting.

The photo shows the outdoor amphitheater at Presbytery Point in Michigan, a Presbyterian camp located on the Upper Peninsula. I spent a number of summers there as a child. Or rather, I spent seven days there each summer, since the individual camps were only a week long. I always looked forward to going but got homesick after being there a couple of days. And yet, the next year I couldn’t wait to return. So the setting of Bummer Camp brought back many pleasant memories.

Setting can be an integral part of a book’s plot, as it was here, but it is the plot that is crucial to the story. Even though I finished the book, I will not read another one by Ann Garvin.

Still, although a good setting is never an excuse for a bad plot, it can cover some sins.

That’s why a good writer doesn’t ignore the setting.

One Wedding Down, the Big One Yet to Go

 

My niece, Rachel, got married on Friday, so that’s one down and one to go. I didn’t have to do anything for Rachel and Göran’s wedding other than show up, so it was the easy one. As the mother of the groom, however, I will be much more involved in John’s wedding.

My brother and his family don’t farm, but when he retired from his last church, he and my sister-in-law bought a farmhouse and the outbuildings that came with it. When Rachel and Göran decided to have an outdoor wedding on the farm, they knew that there was plenty of room in the barn and other buildings if the weather didn’t cooperate. Fortunately, though, it did. The sun beat down and made it rather warm when the service started, but it soon cooled off and the weather turned out to be ideal.

The full Camp contingent, including my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, was in attendance. We had a good visit without the rush that is likely to overwhelm us the next time we meet.

My brother performed the mostly traditional ceremony. Rachel and Göran wrote their own vows, as well, and it was clear that they understand what it takes to make a marriage work.

Although the ceremony and the bride’s dress were on the traditional side, not everything was. My sister-in-law grew up on a farm and is a farm girl through and through. She knows how to drive a tractor and there was one in the yard, so when someone dared her to chauffer the bride and groom around, she did, driving them along the road that leads to the farm. It was one of many wonderful photo ops.

Rachel and Göran are among the few people who actually make a living as performers. In fact, they met playing Mr. and Mrs. Banks in the musical version of Mary Poppins. So instead of the traditional couples’ dance, they performed “Everything” by Michael Buble.

The buffet was set up in the barn and the dancing was there, too, but we ate outside and enjoyed a beautiful sunset.

The wedding and reception were delightful, but they are only the beginning.

My wish for the happy bride and groom lasts forever.

May God bless your marriage.

A Disorganized Author Fair

 

I've always had mixed feelings about the value of attending author fairs, and Saturday was a good advertisement for staying at home.

Here is how they usually go. After paying a table/registration fee, which varies with the venue, I sit at a table for 3 to 5 hours talking to visitors and selling books. For part of the time, anyway. Although I enjoy the interaction with readers, there is a lot of down time. I take something to do, but it isn’t always enough. Still, if I make more than my table fee, I usually consider it a success.

By that measure, Saturday’s Hammond Author and Art Fair was a success. And I did get a lot of work done. But by other measures, it was a failure.

The Hammond Public Library event is the most expensive author fair that I participate in, so I was pleasantly surprised when they gave participants a ticket for lunch at a food truck. Unfortunately, the line was too long. I didn’t want to take that much time away from my table, so I munched on the snacks I had brought from home.

The bigger problem, though, was the distraction. The material soliciting author participants said we would have a fifteen-minute slot somewhere else in the library to give a reading from one of our books. I went through Learning to Surrender and selected two related passages to make up my quarter hour.

When I arrived at the library, the reading opportunity had morphed into fifteen-minutes each to discuss why we had written our books. Furthermore, the schedule for the two rooms to be used did not include me. (More about that later.) The employee who was passing out the schedules promised to slot me in at the end, however.

I might have been okay with that format, but just before these sessions were supposed to start, they morphed again. Now the 15-minute presentations were to (and did) take place in the same room as the book sales.

That was totally counter-productive. Before then, visitors felt free to walk from table to table, talking to the authors and buying books. Now, sales suddenly stopped. Too many people thought it was rude to wander around looking at books and talking to other authors while someone was giving a public speech. (Fortunately, I had already made my table fee back before the sessions started.)

That wasn’t the worst problem, either. I felt as if I was forced to sit through solicitations I had no interest in, and I imagine I wasn’t alone. The original format would have allowed people to choose which, if any, of the sessions they wanted to attend. The revised location made that impossible.

The Hammond Library staff who work on the author fair are extremely nice, but the fair itself has always been badly managed. My checks don’t get cashed for months, and this time they lost the check and messed up my registration. They must have found it because they allowed me to participate without asking for a replacement check, which I was prepared to give them. However, that is probably why I wasn’t on the original presentation schedule, and when they moved it to the other room, they simply forgot about me. I don’t know if I would have had additional sales if I had been called up to present, but I definitely felt left out.

If they use the same format next year, I won’t participate. Like I said, though, the staff is extremely nice, so maybe they’ll listen to feedback.

I certainly hope so.

A Tale of Two Wedding Showers

 

I’ve mentioned before that my son and my niece are getting married within two weeks of each other. Rachel is getting married at the end of this month and John’s wedding is on September 14. Both brides had showers, although they were reversed, with Christina’s before Rachel’s. Both were fun, but they were also very different.

My daughter, Caroline, and I flew out to North Carolina for Christina’s shower. We left from and returned to different airports and used different airlines, but we managed to work our schedules to arrive at and leave from the Raleigh airport at approximately the same times. Unfortunately, Caroline couldn’t make it to Rachel’s shower, so I was the only one there from the Camp family, but I enjoyed the 1½ drive for listening to classical music on the way there and an old radio drama on the way home.

Christina’s shower was what I consider a traditional bridal shower with games as well as food and gifts. With probably only two exceptions, including me, the guests were all Christina’s age or younger. Everyone dressed up a little, and it was all women. Not even John was there. (He was on his bachelor party trip to Niagara Falls. Knowing who else went, I doubt that it got very wild, but they probably had a great time.)

One of the three games involved splitting into teams and dressing up a “bride” in a toilet paper wedding dress. That’s the photo at the top of the page. The team that dressed the woman in the middle won. Christina was the judge, and I agree with her choice. (If there had been a last-place pick, it would have been the team I was on.) The other two games were pen-and-paper: one to see how well you knew the bride and groom and one a bingo game based on the presents she received.

Rachel also had food and gifts at her shower, but there were no games. Instead, her guests decorated concrete and clay pipes and turned them into flower arrangements to line the aisle at the planned outdoor ceremony. The next photo shows Rachel demonstrating what was to be done, and the third shows some of the guests doing it.

Since we were painting, people wore jeans or other casual clothing. The casual dress also worked well for the setting, which was the farm buildings on my brother’s property. As you can see from the picture, there were men at the shower, and many of the guests were older than Rachel—either aunts and uncles or friends of her parents who also played a big role in Rachel’s life.

Both were a lot of fun, but they demonstrate how different wedding showers can be.

I’ll leave you with a photo of the three Camp women taken at Christina’s shower, with the bride-to-be in the middle.

 

I'll Try Again Next Year

 

Another Lake County Fair has come and gone. I submitted 15 photos this year and won nothing. That’s not unusual. My record has always be uneven. Last year I won three white ribbons and one blue one, but the year before that I also won nothing. And that’s okay. Yes, I like winning, but its the process that’s fun.

That’s why I’ve already started selecting photos for next year. Oh, not all of them, and even the ones currently in my 2025 folder may be replaced if I shoot something better before next summer. But if it fits a category and I like it, why not save it as a possibility?

One category I’ve never entered is for photos from the Lake County Fair itself. But last week I took several photos, including the one of the 4-H color guard that heads this post. I don’t know if it is good enough to win anything, but it is certainly good enough to enter, so I saved it to next year’s folder. I’ve also saved a couple of potential portraits (both taken at my soon-to-be daughter-in-law's’ bridal shower), a butterfly who posed for me while I was out on a walk, and a sports complex taken in Sydney during our trip to Australia last year.

I’ll add others over the next nine or ten months, and then I’ll have the fun of sorting through them and choosing the ones I like best.

Because, although ribbons are nice, I enjoy the process even when I don’t win.

Romania

 

We finished our Eastern European cruise in Romania. We docked in a fairly rural area and took an excursion bus to Bucharest, which is not on the Danube. When we left the boat (for good) and were waiting for the buses, there were feral dogs close by. I didn’t see it but was told that one of them had chased a woman. When I saw them, however, they were just standing or lying about, including one lying in the street and making cars drive around it. Here’s a photo.

The bus dropped us at our hotel in mid-afternoon. In the meantime, it took us on an excursion into and around Bucharest.

Our first stop was at the Palace of Parliament. The Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, built the huge building (one of the world’s largest) as a monument to himself. In the process, he tore down houses and perfectly good buildings and spent more money than even Trump has, impoverishing the population and draining the economy. He limited people to two hours of electricity a day in order to preserve the limited energy supply available to the building and to Romanian industries.

After Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989, Romania had no idea what to do with the white elephant that was very expensive to maintain. They considered selling it but couldn’t figure out how much it was worth, so they turned it into government offices. It wasn’t paying for itself, though, so they also rent out office space to commercial entities (and probably anyone who is willing to pay the rent). It also contains an international conference center and several museums and can be visited by tourists for a price, but we only saw it from the outside. The inside would have been interesting, but I’m not sure we would have had time for it.

The next two photos show the Palace of Parliament and the Central Committee Building at Revolution Square, the significance of which is described in the subsequent paragraph.

We made a short stop at Revolution Square, named after the revolution that overthrew Ceausescu in December 1989. He tried to give a speech to calm the crowds that gathered in front of the Central Committee Building, but the angry mob forced him to flee to the roof, where he escaped in a helicopter. He was captured and executed three days later (on Christmas), and that was the end of Communist rule in Romania.

Our next stop was for a walking tour and lunch in Old Town. The highlights of Old Town were the palace occupied by King Vlad III and the oldest church in Bucharest, which is right next to the palace. We didn’t go inside the church for lack of time, but we had an entirely different reason for staying away from the palace—it probably would have collapsed on our heads. The photo at the head of this post shows the palace from one direction, but the next photo, taken from a different direction, shows the true state of the wreckage. The guide said that there is some discussion about restoring it, but that will be a long time in the future, if ever.

So why is King Vlad III’s palace important? He was also known as Vlad the Impaler and was the model for Dracula. He got his nickname because he executed his enemies by running a stake through them lengthwise, starting at the space between the legs and going toward the brain. It was apparently a very slow, painful death.

Here are two other photos taken in Old Town. The first is a street, and the second is the oldest church.

The last stop on our excursion was at the Village Museum, which includes the current “palace.” The remaining members of the last royal family stay there at times, but calling it a palace may be overdoing it since there is no monarchy in Romania today. The family was staying there when we visited, so we couldn’t get too close. But the real attraction at the museum is all the old houses that were moved there to show how people used to live. One of the really cool ones is the buried house used by poor people in one region. As you can see from the final photo, only the top of the house is above ground.

That was the end of our very interesting cruise. If you want an easy way to see Eastern Europe, I recommend Viking.

But now I have to come up with an entirely new topic for next week’s blog.