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Let Me Be Totally Honest Re: My Books--It Involves That Dirty Word: Self-Publishing!!!Aug 12 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line And, furthermore, I don't look as adorable now as I did in those pictures (3 mos. and 6 years) I've shared on my profile page.
This has been one busy summer for me! I'm getting ready to publish three books--soon to be followed by more (more details on this later)--and have been coping with a computer that was growing more and more impossible with each passing day. Thanks to my forever friend, "adopted" kid brother, and computer guru, Mark, I finally got my computer fixed. He was afraid that some sort of worm or virus was in it from the way it was acting, but--once I shipped it down to Tennessee for him to look at--he found out that it simply needed to have a lot of space cleared on it and things like that, due to normal wear-and-tear and my own computer ignorance when it came to maintenance. Mark has also been the one who has been helping me to put my books together--that is, between trying to fix first his mom's car then his brother's car then his mom's car again. The last fixing of his mom's car (which he's still doing as he gets time) is installing an air-conditioner in it. We're currently having weather up here in Indiana that the people down in Tennessee envy. Mark has a number of health problems (back, heart, diabetes, etc.) and needs to take time to rest. On top of that, he's been going here and there for health problems of other family members and friends, and he's been dealing with certain people (business people) who have done everything from "legally" steal his car (long story) to simply give him a hard time. And he's trying to get the right classes for this semester that he'll finally be able to graduate and move back to Indiana where he'll, hopefully, find work in management at the currently-improving-and-expanding Indianapolis International Airport. And, on top of that, he's been doing all of this for me and only charging me expenses (e.g. shipping). Eventually--hopefully, today--we'll get the books finished. We've been running into snags caused by quirks in our respective computers. And fitting all of this into busy lives creates snags as well. In short, the three books originally were to have come out in July. I've been thinking back to the summer of 1967. Aunt Kate was having surgery and Uncle Don was working, so Denise (their daughter) came out to stay with us. My folks worked during the day, so that was when I took care of Denise 100%. Let me tell you about Denise. We had moved out of our four-bedroom home (one bedroom used as a playroom and the other three as bedrooms) into a two-bedroom mobile home while our new home was being built. Denise and I shared my bed--and let me tell you that this five-year-old must have been dreaming about going to Radio City Music Hall and becoming one of the Rockettes, because she was doing some major moves complete with kicks while sound asleep. After half-a-night of that, I just let her take over the bed and made my bed on the living room sofa! I think that kid only needed about five minutes of sleep every three days (not exactly true, because she had remained asleep long enough to kick me half-to-death--and might have completely kicked me to death had I remained in that bedroom for the entire night). Anyway, at some ungodly hour in the morning (since my folks had both gone to work, it was probably actually well after eight) that seemed, at the time, to be about five or six, here came Denise into the living room demanding "brestfast." I asked her to wake me again in ten more minutes. About thirty seconds later (though looking at the clock would prove these calculations to be inaccurate), Denise marched over to me, woke me up by shaking me, and told me that she had given me fifteen minutes of extra sleep time instead of the ten I'd asked for and that she wanted her "brestfast." So I rolled out of bed to fix us some "brestfast." I was thinking about all of this a little while ago and have decided that I must be getting punished for delaying my poor, little cousin's "brestfast" all of those years ago--you know, the karma philosophy of what goes around comes around! Anyway--back to the present--if I'm almost through with my punishment for starving that little curly-haired moppet, I should have three books on display at Cafepress.com by sometime tonight (or even this afternoon). I had made plans long ago that, when this happened, I was going to put up a review here that would include Nirav in some way. As it turns out, this piece of writing is also going to be including him, so I hope he doesn't get the idea that I'm stalking him--even though I can tell that he's a studmuffin in spite of the fact that I'm old enough to be his mother! Anyway, Nirav--if you're reading this--rest assured that I have no designs on you (at this time, anyway). What I have to say is that I came back here a few days ago after getting my computer up and running again. One of the first things I did was to go to the members' center to see if there were any M&Gs going on close to me, so that I wouldn't miss out on any meeting and greeting. I found out that one had just taken place in Boston--and I also read that Nirav had resigned. He seemed to have mixed feelings about resigning. A few days after that, I came across an entry on a website regarding his resignation. I don't know if what was said was an urban legend or the truth, but what it basically said was that he had exaggerated his credentials. Anyway, I have at least a couple of things to say about that. The first thing I want to say is that--even if he hadn't gotten any further in school than kindergarten (after repeating it three times)--Nirav is brilliant! I hope you're reading this, Nirav!!! Degrees are great, but they don't necessarily make you better/wiser/smarter/nicer than someone else. There are people in the world who might have three doctorates--but they might be using those doctorates to do harm. Then, there's a simple soul like James Robert "Radio" Kennedy--they just made a wonderful movie about him (one I'll be writing a shining review about in the near future)--who has, with his sweet personality, not only made Anderson, South Carolina a better place to live but has also warmed zillions of other hearts in places hundreds of miles away from him!!! Nirav Tolia has already proven that he's capable of putting together a wonderful website (If you're reading this, you're using it right now!) that has gone through its ups and downs but has managed to survive to this day, long after the Dot.Com Bubble burst!!! This hasn't been done through him alone--this hasn't been a one-man show--but he had a dream and worked hard to make it come true. And I think that you'll have to say that Epinions.com has made a positive difference in a lot of lives. It has brought people together to rally around a bright, funny, and tenderhearted guy from a small town in Missouri--and to comfort his family when he lost his fight to cancer. I know of at least one wonderful and lasting romance between a guy from Canada and a woman from New York who met here. When children have become seriously-ill, funds have been raised for their treatments. And it has, in short, brought together a lot of strangers and made them friends. Again, Nirav, I hope you're reading this, because I want you to know that you've made a very special contribution to this world, and I don't want you feeling like less of a person than what you are!!! The other thing I want to say is that I was thinking about how some people feel the need to exaggerate their credentials even before reading that Nirav had been accused of this. Already, I'd been planning on writing an article on this subject. What first got me to thinking about it was the tragedy in Utah where a husband has now been arrested for killing his pregnant wife--a wife whom he loved very much and who had also loved him very much. In the weeks and months to come, we'll be finding out more about what had happened, but we already have the short view of things--that being that, for some reason, this man had thought it necessary to exaggerate his credentials. Seemingly, the story is that, when this man's very elaborate fake life began to unravel, he snapped and shot his wife to death. WHY? Why did this man feel as if he had to present himself as having more education than he actually did? Why did he drop out of school but continue pretending to be in school, to graduate, and to have been accepted by a couple of graduate schools across the country? I believe the answer has to do with the fact that he felt that he needed to be that person he'd created in order to be successful. Now, let me add here that it's one thing to picture yourself as the person you'd like to be and do your best to achieve that goal. But there's something wrong with the picture when you feel as if you have to tell people you already ARE that person. Also, if you don't reach your hoped-for goals, don't think of yourself as a failure--instead, think of yourself as someone who has either been temporarily sidetracked with that goal still out in front of you or else as someone who has ended up going in another direction altogether. In the past, I've mentioned that some twists and turns in my own goals--twists and turns that were extremely painful to me at the time--ended up working in my favor to the point that I ended up at the right place at the right time where I would get information that would end up helping a dear friend who had been plagued with grand mal epilepsy since the age of four or five. And, of course, there was that blasted physics and chemistry class that I was required to take in order to get a degree from the college of my choice. As far as lab work was concerned, I thoroughly enjoyed that--but the text seemed to be all Greek to me (I was later told that it was probably all Greek to me because it was all Greek!). For every lab project that would earn me an A there would be a test over the text that would earn me an F. My first instructor (as well as the senior student who had been trying to tutor me in this class) advised me to drop his class and take it later--so, I did take it later three years later during the summer of 1975. With my A labwork and my F tests, I ended up passing by the skin of my teeth with a D. But, at least, I had now met that requirement. If someone were to ask me what I got out of that class, I would tell them "Mark!" Had I stayed in the original class during my freshman year, I might not have ever met Mark! Mark, after all, hadn't been a full-time student but, instead, someone taking a summer class to add to a degree that he had been building at another school. And, pure and simple, I had ended up taking this class in the summer of 1975 because I had (in this class, anyway) proven myself to be a failure back in early 1972. The way I see it is that God wants to take our failures and guide us into turning them into successes!!! There are times in life when it seems as if doors between us and being "successful" at achieving our goals have slammed in our faces and forever sealed against our entry, and we have many ways we can react to this. We can--and this is very tragic and not at all what we should be doing--write ourselves off as total failures and end up attempting/completing suicide. We can--and I believe that this is the best solution--grieve for lost dreams (and this is okay, because you own those feelings) but, also, be keeping an eye out for a better door that will open in its place or else for the later reopening of the first door at what will prove to be a better time for going through it. We can also do something almost as unhealthy as the suicide choice: decide to pretend to be what we aren't. It's one thing to have plastic surgery to correct a true blemish--but quite another to have a total makeover to the point that you become a clone of Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts. It's one thing to eat healthy, get enough exercise, and take the needed vitamins when training for some sort of athletic goal--but quite another to be pumped full of steroids to the point that it also wrecks your health and even kills you. Along those same lines, it's one thing to recognize that you need to lose some weight--but quite another that losing weight becomes such an obsession that you don't know when to stop losing and you begin to look fat to yourself when you're a 65 pound skeleton. It's great for parents to encourage the strengths and talents of their kids--but quite another when they have their kids so overscheduled and pushed that the kids have very little if any time to do what they're meant to be doing: being kids. What happened the values that we fought for in the sixties--the ones about peace and love where it was more "in" to extend a hand than to point a finger? Perhaps, if we got back to where our first reflex was hand-extending instead of finger-pointing, people wouldn't feel as if they had to exaggerate and fabricate traits in themselves that they see as signs of success. I could write a whole other article on this--or else write in more detail in this article--that would go into more detail re: this problem and how I think we got to where we are. However, I'm going to have to quit, because the hour is getting later, and I have three books I would prefer to have out no later than tonight. I could have told you that some big-name editor had accepted all three books, but I won't. These are self-published books. Turn up your nose if you wish and tell me that I'm not a "real" writer because I'm going the self-publishing route. I'll soon be telling you several of the advantages of going that route, but we're all entitled to our opinions. But, no matter what anyone reading this thinks of self-publishing, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that my books were accepted by the top editor at somewhere such as Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, or whatever. And I'm not going to tell you that I look a lot better now--or, at least, just as good--as those kewtsie kiddie pics of me on my profile page. But that's just the way I am--and, to me, it's a comfortable way to be, because it saves me a lot of trouble of always having to be on my toes to cover up my cover-ups. And I can sleep at night. But I'm also not--most of the time, anyway, though I have my moments--a finger-pointer. I'm a hand-extender who has, in many ways, never left the sixties. So I want to tell anyone who feels as if he/she has to exaggerate things such as degrees, bank accounts, etc. that I'm not here to judge you. There's a lot of pressure in today's society to be "successful" based on certain expectations, and it's easy to cave into the pressure. All I want to tell you is that you don't have to do this. Mark said something to me way back when we were in college, and I want to pass it on to you to use in your own life when you need a little--or a lot of--building up: "God made you and He doesn't make mistakes!!!"  |
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