Ask the Author: Kevin DuJan
Answered Questions (6)
Kevin DuJan
Just stay the course. If you feel blocked, shake things up a bit. Instead of focusing on trying to write a chapter, get out some markers and paper and storyboard what you are having trouble writing. Draw it if you can't write it. Visualize it. Draw the setting, the characters, the action that is happening in the way that movie makers story board their films. Get around the block by tapping into the other creative centers of your brain. Engage your visual and artistic creativity. And then the block is gone.
Kevin DuJan
The best thing about being a writer is being able to capture a moment in time and to sing the praises of good people who need to be recorded in history. Capturing lessons learned so others may benefit from them is also fulfilling. Things that you learned and observed and documented now exist for others to learn from, instead of just being exclusive to you. Sharing knowledge and information is such a privilege and an honor.
Kevin DuJan
Work on your book a little every day without taking breaks. Whether you have an hour or 30 minutes or three hours. Just work on it each day, even if taking a piece of paper out and sketching out ideas for later chapters or making lists of characters. Just don't lose your momentum or abandon your project. Visualize completing it and keep working toward that wonderful day that you imagined, where your manuscript is complete and you are handing it over to your proofreader or editor or formatter.
Kevin DuJan
Megan and I are working on our second book in our series on local government corruption. Our new book will be about how a community can come together and demand transparency and accountability when a local government breaks the law and ignores its own rules and refuses to listen to its citizens. How are people able to exercise their First Amendment rights to compel a local government to admit it is wrong and stop what it is doing at the village level?
Kevin DuJan
Megan and I were inspired to write our book SHUT UP! because the American Library Association appears to target moms and dads who complain about problems they encountered in public libraries. Whenever a parent complains about sexual activity happening in a library that is dangerous for children, the ALA steps in on the library's side and assists in attacking the parent. Scaring away parents, making them afraid to talk, and attacking a mom who complains is the way that the ALA keeps parents afraid of speaking out about bad things happening in libraries. The ALA does not want the sex that is happening in libraries to stop, so it punches hard at parents who complain about criminal activity and dangers in libraries.
Kevin DuJan
Megan Fox and I encountered a serious problem at the Orland Park Public Library back in October 2013. We discovered that staff allowed men to engage in sexual activity at computers anonymously, even handing them slips of paper with anonymous codes to get on the computers (so they could get off watching porn). No other area library allowed anonymous access to computers without a library card and no other library allowed men to watch porn like that without being stopped. The computers were in an area that was completely visible to passersby, right by the books on local history that high schoolers needed for class projects. When Megan told a staff member what was going on, the staffer at the OPPL said "we get a lot of that in here" like it was no big deal. Curious about what "we get a lot of that" meant, we used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the OPPL's internal incident reports...and that revealed many years' of sex crimes happening in the library. In almost all cases, library staff refused to call the police and allowed the men committing crimes to escape. They didn't seem to want police to be called because then there would be police reports that would appear in the local paper's crime blotter. The only time the police were called to intervene when crimes were being committed was when moms who spotted problems called the police themselves. Instead of handling this situation like a customer service issue and addressing their problems, OPPL management and Board Members decided to try to silence, intimidate, and chase Megan and me away. They censored us during board meetings, they used the local police as a weapon against us to harass us when we were passing out flyers or protesting the library's failings, and the Board even encouraged one library employee to file a SLAPP lawsuit against us to shut us up. The book is a case study of everything they did to us and how we survived it.
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