It's Not Just You (an IWSG post)

I gave my thoughts about Tron way back in this post. It's probably not necessary for this post, but it goes along with what I'm saying here... and it's interesting. Sure, that's me saying that it's interesting, and I wrote it, but still...

Anyway...

My boys love Tron. My daughter likes it, too, but not the way the boys do. We were even watching Tron: Uprising but that got derailed because of school. Now that summer is here, I'm sure we'll finish it up. They were very excited about the sequel to Tron: Legacy that has been in the works and was scheduled to begin filming in a few months.

Look, this is a big deal. The movie was in pre-production. It had stars attached to it. It was getting geared up to start filming... and Disney pulled the plug.

end of line

Dude.

My boys were devastated. Well, okay, that's a rather transitory experience for teenagers, but it lasted at least 10 minutes and no one can mention Tron in the house, now, without hearing "awww..." from one of them.

So what happened? Tomorrowland happened.

Now, see, I liked Tomorrowland, but that doesn't change the fact that it had a rather underwhelming opening weekend. So underwhelming that Disney pulled the plug on a completely unrelated project: Tron 3. I suppose you could say that Disney got a little insecure.

So, see, it's not just you. Even the big guys have moments of doubt and insecurity and, sometimes, it makes people do dumb things because they start focusing on what could go wrong instead of focusing on how to make it work.

Just sayin'.

$120/hour (an IWSG post)

So let's talk jobs that make $100 an hour or more. According to CNBC at any rate. Well, okay, I'm not really going to talk about them, just give you an example of some of them.
1. Underwater Welder
2. Anesthesiologist
3. Commercial Pilot (the best ones, anyway)
4. the best Tattoo Artists
5. the top Arbitrators
6. half or more Orthodontists
7. the top 10% of Freelance Photographers
8. the top Interior Designers
9. Hand Models or other "parts" models. So, yeah, if you have an exceptional "part," you can make pretty good bank showing it off.
10. Life Coaches. Seriously.
11. big city Massage Therapists
12. Political Speechwriters.
13. my daughter playing her accordion

Let's talk about #13.

Back during October, my daughter got asked to play her accordion at an Octoberfest function. It was just 20 minutes of accordion playing. 20 minutes isn't much. I mean, she practices more than that every day. For her 20 minutes of playing, she made $40. That's $120 an hour! It's kind of sobering. That's more than I've made from my writing for the entire month of November, November was my best month ever.

There are times, evidently, when it really pays to be a cute, 11-year-old girl. Literally pays. At the rate of $120 an hour.

I don't have a real point with any of this. I'm proud of my daughter. She's really good. Her accordion teacher (who's been teaching for... well, let's just say a long time) says my daughter is one of the best students she's ever had. I hope one day she proves you really can play accordion in a rock-n-roll band.

For the moment, though, it's just a little unsettling to be outperformed by a sixth grader.

Well, except at video games.

"You're not my friend anymore!" (an IWSG post)

Remember those days when you were a kid... What? You don't? Well, let me remind you...

You're playing with your best friend, one of your many "best" friends (because aren't they all when you're a kid?), and everything's going fine. For a while. Then, one of you does something the other one doesn't like: had GI Joe kiss a Barbie, won in a game of Checkers, used the wrong shade of blue while coloring Spider-Man and, suddenly, the dreaded phrase rings out, "You're not my friend anymore!" Usually, that's followed by the offended party running away, probably, to go tattle while leaving the unfriended in tears wondering what s/he actually did wrong.

Of course, you didn't do anything wrong, did you? Even when you told your friend that you didn't like the picture he drew. Because, you know what, it's not wrong to have preferences.

And what inevitably happens (at least when responsible parents are involved) is that the kid who yelled "You're not my friend anymore!" is marched back in to apologize for being hurtful, which is as it should be.

[And this is when I would like to talk about being forced to eat horrible things that I didn't like when I was a kid all in the name of being polite, but I don't really have room to go into that.]

Some of you know that I do a lot of reviews ("lot" being a relative term) and that I try to focus on indie authors. Being an indie author, I know how important the reviews are. Yea! for reviews, right? But, also, I don't give any special consideration, which means I give negative reviews, too. I believe honest reviews are better for the community overall than just lying and giving someone 4 or 5 stars. This has the unfortunate result of people (metaphorically) yelling, "You're not my friend anymore!" and running off and unfriending me from all of social media. Mostly, I'm okay with that, because I should be allowed to say whether I like something or not, and I'm not the one exhibiting the bad behavior (unless you're one of those in the camp that says a bad review is bad behavior, in which case, you should yell at me right now and run on off and unfriend me).

Here's the thing, I was checking out the reviews for a book I've been looking at reading and the book only has 5-star reviews and all from people that are in the blogging community. Okay, so right away, that sets my warning bells off. I don't tend to read 5-star reviews, because they usually amount to no more than "Everything is Awesome!" But I was scanning down the reviews for this book and one of them happened to catch my eye. The reviewer had a list of all the things she didn't like about the book. Okay, that intrigued me, so I read the review. Now, let me make this clear, the review only had negative things to say about the book but, at the end, she said, basically, "But it was intense and I loved it," and she gave it 5-stars. This was not a short review, either. Paragraphs and paragraphs about the issues with the book and then gave it 5-stars. Clearly, there is some amount of dishonesty happening here.

One of  my favorite reviews for a book was by a guy who ripped the book to shreds in his review. I mean, he really tore it apart. It was an even longer review than one I mentioned above. He had absolutely nothing good to say about the book but ended with something like "But it was very creative and a good read" and gave it 4-stars. The author actually responded with, "I'd hate to have seen what you would have said if you hadn't liked it." Again, clearly, there is some amount of dishonesty happening here.

All of that to say two things:
1. Reviews are believed to be important. [It's hard to say how important, though, because there is some evidence that suggests that reviews are not as important as we think. I think early in an author's career, though, they are important.] As an indie author who wants to support the idea of doing reviews, I do reviews. We have to learn to be comfortable with giving honest reviews. It hurts everyone when all we do is lie to our friends and give them 4- and 5-star reviews. Yes, that means we have to be willing to risk people yelling "You're not my friend anymore!" at us.

It also means we have to address only the work. For instance, it would be okay for me to say, "I didn't like how the author chose to color Spider-Man's costume green. I believe Spider-Man's costume should be the traditional red and blue." It is not okay for me to say, "This author is SO STUPID! She couldn't even get Spider-Man's costume right! Flaming IDIOT! Don't read this crap!" See, when I say, "I didn't like the green the costume," someone else might see that and think, "Huh? A green costume? That sounds interesting." But, if I attack the author's intelligence, we've moved the discussion away from creativity and made it personal.

2. We have to learn not to yell "You're not my friend anymore!" That's just destructive behavior. Sure, I get that it doesn't feel good to have people not like what you worked so hard on (which is why you have to like it enough to not worry about how other people feel about it (but that's a different discussion (and one I've had before, but I'm not finding that post, at the moment)), but cutting someone off is like kicking someone out of your restaurant because she didn't like one particular dish. Maybe you should try saying, "Well, I'm sorry you didn't like this book; maybe, you'll like this other one better." Or the next one. Or whatever. What I can say for sure, though, is that, in my case specifically, I won't be returning to the particular author who unfriended me because I didn't like that particular book. She's not someone I'll continue to support.

And you might be thinking, "But a negative review isn't support," but I would argue with you that it is.
1. I bought the book, which is, honestly, more support than most of you out there are willing to give (I have hard evidence on that by looking at my sales numbers).
2. I left a review and, even if it's not a 4- or 5-star review, it shows that I read the book, which, again, is more than most of you out there are doing. And there is a component that quantity of reviews are just as important (or more important) than quality of reviews.
3. My reviews mean something. Whether I like the book or not, I give the reasons why I did or did not. Those things are important. They tell other people, like with the green Spider-Man example, whether they think they want to read it.

At any rate, all of this stuff is insecurity inducing, but, as authors, it's stuff we have to learn to deal with. If you want people (especially other authors) to be willing to give your book a review, you need to be willing to do reviews for other people. If you want to get reviews, you need to be willing to listen without unfriending people when they say, "I didn't like this one."

This post has been brought you in part by the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

Great Pumpkins! (an IWSG post)

Last IWSG, I was talking about how late it was that we planted our garden this year. And it was. Very late. You can go read about that here.

As late it was planted, though, it is doing very well, now. Sure, we didn't get things like tomatoes as early as everyone else, but we're getting them faster than we can eat them, now. In fact, it's time to start making and freezing sauce.

The above picture is the first three pumpkins to come off the vines. There are three more I'm going to get soon (in fact, by the time this posts, I will probably already have gotten them). AND the vines have suddenly put out all kinds of new growth, so there may be more pumpkins next month! Or early November. And here, that's a totally doable thing, because they're not going to freeze.

The picture above, still showing the pumpkins, also shows "the monster." Or, shall I say, "the attack of the killer tomato vine." [My kids totally accused me of making it up when I told them about the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!] Let me just make it perfectly clear: We did not plant this particular tomato vine. It grew there all on its own.

You can't really see the placement of the vine in the picture, but it's right next to the front door of our house. Back behind the "the monster" is the gate to the backyard. My daughter hates this tomato plant, because it keeps growing over the sidewalk leading to the front door (no matter how often I cut it back), and it has grown up and through the lattice by the front door, so it attacks people is they go in and out of our house.

Now, I just want to be clear, here. We are in the middle of the worst drought on record in California. I did not water this plant for the entire month of July and most of August. I was hoping that by not watering it, it would, you know, scale itself back. Not grow so crazily. But it did grow crazily even without the water and, today, when I was picking tomatoes, I got as many off of it as I did off of all of other vines, the vines we actually planted and took care of, combined. In fact, I didn't finish picking from it, because I ran out of storage space, so I got an equivalent amount and left A LOT behind. It is The Monster.

When the vine first started growing, my wife wanted me to pull it up. "It's in a bad place; it will never survive; we don't even know what kind of tomato that is." But I didn't see any reason to just pull it up. My idea was to just let it grow and see what happened. Of course, since then, my daughter has been the big advocate for killing it, but my wife doesn't want to do that anymore. Mostly, I think, she is just amazed at it. I know I am. What a huge success from such an unexpected source.

Which is the point. We don't ever really know what's going to take off and be successful and what's, despite our best efforts, just going to sit there going nowhere. Or just piddle along. Or whatever. It's like when you work really hard on something, something you think is great, and show it to someone and he just shrugs at it and says, basically, "So." But, then, you have this other thing that you just threw together and don't think is anything special and someone comes along and really loves it. Really loves it. As in, "This is great!"

So you nurture your ideas and let them grow, even the ones you don't think will go anywhere, because you may just end up with something huge. As I mentioned recently, that is how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started out.

And you may end up with some pumpkins, too. Things that take a lot of work, that look doubtful for a while, but yield a nice prize at the end. By the way, between the beginning of this post and now, I did go out and pull those other three pumpkins. They're in a nice pile on my table, at the moment, and we have big plans for them. It's all a matter of keeping your options open and not closing off ideas just because you don't think they will amount to anything. I mean, "the monster" grew out of rocks, basically in a completely inhospitable environment, with people trampling on it and no water. And, well, my daughter's scared of it because it wants to eat her. That's what she says, anyway.

* * *

This post has been brought you in part by the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

Time Enough? (an IWSG post)

"People assume that time is a straight progression of cause to effect but, actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff."

Of course, what I want to do is get all philosophical about time, about how time is finite, about what it would be like to be able to step outside of time... Except I can't really imagine that. My view of time is kind of like a painting. Or, maybe, a movie. Time only exists within the movie and, if you could only step out of it, you could see the whole thing at once, be in any part of it. That kind of thing. Except, conceptually, as soon as I remove myself from the movie, I put myself in another one, because I still imagine a sequence of events and, without time, there can't be a sequence, so it's not something I can properly imagine.

None of that is what I really want to talk about anyway...

Sometimes, there are events that remind us of the finite-ness of time, that there will be an ending. At least, for us. Well, for all of time, but I expect TIME to go on much for much longer than I will. At any rate, the sudden departure of Tina Downey of Life Is Good from TIME has served as a reminder. Time is, after all, finite. There's a deadline on the things I want to accomplish in life.

I suppose most people have all sorts of things they want to accomplish and that they all feel like they have plenty of time in which to do it. There's always tomorrow, right? But there's not always tomorrow, and, sometimes, tomorrows quit coming sooner than we think they will.

I know that Tina was writing a book. Mostly, though, I think she was working on the writing skills she would need to really write the book. What it means, though, is that I'll never get to read the book. Neither will you. And, you know, maybe it wouldn't have been any good and, in the scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but, maybe, it would have been life-changing. For me. Or for you. Or for someone. That book that really inspired a life and changed its course.

We'll never know.

I have a lot of books like that. Unfinished ones, I mean; I'm not claiming that I'm writing great, life-changing, works of literature. I have PROJECTS! The idea that I could leave TIME with them unfinished... well, it kind of panics me. I don't want to leave things unfinished. Well, I don't want to leave these things unfinished. I'm sure I will always feel that way about whatever projects I have in the works, but other projects are in the future, and I have nothing invested in that stuff yet. These things, these things I have going on now, I know I don't want to leave still in progress. Especially the stuff that relates to The House on the Corner. Too many people ask me when the next when will be finished for me to be okay with just not doing it.

None of this is meant to change the focus from Tina's passing out of TIME, but it was one of the first things I thought of, "I'll never get to read her book." Which, then, has applications for all of us. Not just writers, all people who are doing things. Who have projects of whatever sort. Some of which sit around and sit around and are left abandoned for months or, even, years on end with the thought, "I'll get to it. Sometime." But "sometime" doesn't always come.

So... I am reminded to look at the things I want to do and evaluate them on the basis of what it's okay with me to leave unfinished. Like, I would like to spend time painting, but it won't really bother me if I leave TIME and there are big stack of unpainted miniatures in my garage. It's not like I'm the only one that could paint them. But no one can write the stories that are in my head. Even with notes about them, no one can write them the way I will, so that's the thing I need to get busy with, working on the things that only I can do so that they're not left unfinished should I have to leave.

And that's what I'm going to go do...

How Doesn't Your Garden Grow? (an IWSG post)

We were late planting our garden this year. There were issues with softball, softball that I've been mentioning on and off since March and which started in February, softball which still has two weeks to go.

That's a picture of my daughter hitting a double.
Basically, since March, we've had no weekends, so the garden didn't get planted when it should have. We had the last weekend of May and the first weekend of June, the interim between the spring season and the travel ball season, and that first weekend in June is when we finally got everything planted, a full two months late.

Some of you are probably wondering what would be the point, at that point?
It's a good question.
I mean, here we are in August, and our garden still really hasn't started producing. I didn't pull the first tomatoes from it until July 23.

Yeah, that was the first of our harvest, all five of them. There was one very early and overly ambitious pepper, back in June, right after I planted it, but there haven't been anymore since then, but they're working on it. This year, I'm also trying watermelons and pumpkins for the first time in my experimental garden area. I think I missed the watermelon window. That or the birds keeping eating my baby melons, because they keep disappearing. The pumpkin has become a monster.
Here it is a week after I planted it (that's it in the lower right):

And not long after that:

And now:

And you might think that looks great, and it does... except that everyone else already has orange pumpkins. And we haven't had our tomatoes, which are a big thing for us during the summer. Tomatoes everywhere. All of which brings me back to the question: Why bother with the garden at all when we started it so late?

Fortunately, the area of California where we live has a long growing season. I think I was still pulling tomatoes off the vines in October, last year, so, even though we planted late, we should still actually get a pretty decent harvest. Eventually. Not that that makes it easier to look at everyone else's gardens with all of their abundance of produce. I mean, I actually accepted tomatoes from someone else last week, something I've never done before because we've always been overflowing with tomatoes at this time of year.

All of this is how I sometimes feel about my writing career. That I planted it too late. My sales are like those few little tomatoes in the picture. I'm just hoping I prove to have a long growing season like the area where I live!

Existentially Cranky (an IWSG post)

Some time ago, my wife referred to me as "existenially cranky." I, um, well, I couldn't argue with her. In fact, I just kind of looked at her, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, I guess so." It's hard to argue with the truth.

I suppose most people would take that statement as an insult, but she didn't mean it that way, and I didn't take it that way. The truth is, that is kind of how I experience existence. Not that I'm cranky, not really; it's more that I approach almost everything from a standpoint of being dissatisfied. And not really being dissatisfied, just seeing the flaws in things, which is not really about seeing the flaws but about seeing how things could be made better.

Unfortunately, that extends to human behavior as well, a thing which is often the root of my crankiness. And, actually, when it's about human behavior, it may well be crankiness.

So here's a short example:
Many years ago, I worked as a youth pastor. At some event or other, one of the kids (one of the girls, actually) got in trouble for something (no, I don't remember). Her father got upset that she got in trouble and complained to the pastor and, thus, there had to be a meeting. You know, because how dare I discipline his daughter for something that was clearly unacceptable behavior. During the meeting, I explained how the behavioral expectations had been very plainly (multiple times) laid out and how she had been aware of the behavioral expectations. His response to that was to say to me something along the lines of, "Well, you can't expect teenagers to follow those kinds of rules."

I have to say, his attitude made me mad. And I expressed it. Very matter-of-factly, I said, "Yes, I can. I certainly can. Every other teenager there was able to follow the rules [which, really, were very simple], so I certainly can expect them to follow the rules."

His response? "Yes, but..." blah blah blah about how his kid was "special" and shouldn't have to follow the rules. Those rules were there for all of the other kids. I shouldn't have those same expectations of his daughter. At which point I had to explain that, yes, with that attitude, there is no way to expect better behavior from his daughter, because it is only through expecting better behavior that we get better behavior. He left unconvinced. I didn't apologize.

This attitude, the attitude of being "special," is one of the reasons that it annoys me so much when people disobey traffic laws. Did you know that studies show that that is the #1 reason people speed and break traffic laws? It's because they feel "special." No, seriously. Studies show that people who, say, speed believe that the speed limit was established for other people, people that don't drive as well as they do (and no one drives as well as they do). Therefore, they have a special exception to not have to follow the speed limit.

The problem is that being a good driver is like having a good sense of humor: Everyone believes they have one. Or being smart, because everyone thinks they're smart. It's all those other people that are just of average intelligence.

Yeah, this kind of stuff really does make me cranky, because so much of it is founded on the ways we lie to ourselves. I suppose that's how a lot of people are able to live with themselves, but I'm often struck by how much of the bad behavior that exists exists only because we don't expect better of ourselves.

Lately, I've been very struck by this same kind of attitude in relation to blogging. In this other forum that I'm involved with, there is the frequent question by people of "how do I get more traffic to my blog?" 1. Because, yes, someone can ask the question one day and two days later someone else will ask the same question (pay attention, maybe?). 2. It doesn't matter how many times you say "be involved and visit other blogs," etc, the response is inevitably "I don't have time for that." Well, you know, I don't have time for it, either, but I do it.

[And in this particular corner of the blog world, it also extends to "buy my book," "review my book," "support my book" frequently by people who never do the same for anyone else. Never.]

Basically, there's this attitude of "I should get to be the 'special' one and have everyone else do for me without doing anything back, and, man, that attitude does just make me cranky. I'm sorry, but, if you're not Neil Gaiman, you don't get to have thousands of followers of your blog without being involved. Or, maybe, John Scalzi, but Scalzi is involved. I don't know if he visits blogs, but he supports authors in a lot of ways he doesn't have to.

So what I'm saying is this: if you want people to support you, quit asking; go support some other people. I can guarantee you, if you do it sincerely and consistently, people will notice. I mean, I notice when someone has reviewed (or even rated) something of mine, and those people get more of my time when I'm doing something to support other bloggers/writers. If you put a new book out, I'll probably buy it (unless I just can't afford to at that moment); that doesn't take any time or much effort. If you've reviewed something of mine, your stuff gets higher on my list of things to do, not because of trading favors or anything like that, but, if you've supported me, I want to support you. [Which does not mean a "good" review, but it does mean an honest review.] If I had more time to read, I'd review more stuff, but I do always have something "indie" that I'm reading, and I review everything I read.

I'm not saying that visiting blogs and commenting and reading and reviewing are miracle cures to traffic woes, but it's where you start. I mean, I don't care how brilliant your blog is, if I stop by there consistently and comment and you never visit me back, I'm probably going to quit coming around. Unless you're just that brilliant. Or Neil Gaiman. Or John Scalzi. Because, and let's just face it, you're not that special. Neither am I. But, then, that's why you see me visiting and commenting.

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm insecure that my existential crankiness drives people away. Actually, my demand (because it is kind of a demand) that people do better, be better, think better (think at all) that stems from existential crankiness drives people away. It does drive people away, which makes me more cranky. But someone has to expect better behavior, right?

This post has been brought to you in part by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG.

The Struggle for Confidence (an IWSG post)

This post is part of Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group blogfest thing. Click the link for more information.

High school is a time for two kinds of people: those with superiority complexes (the jocks and cheerleaders) and those with inferiority complexes (pretty much everyone else). There's not a lot of middle ground there. Go watch pretty much any of the 80s high school movies by John Hughes to get a good look at what it's like. At least, what it was like in  the 80s. Or Better Off Dead (which is not by Hughes but still gives a good look at the chasm between the superior and the inferior).

However, the general consensus in psychology is that the superiority complex is just an act. Basically, at the root of both inferiority and superiority complexes, we find vast insecurities. Questions of worth. Belief in inadequacies. It's a hard thing to deal with. And, really, as much as we'd like to think we do, writers do not corner the market on any of those things.

Dealing with one's insecurities is a tremendous task, and it's a task that we are more and more sabotaging in this current day and age. That, also, is not just something that writers do, but I think it can be clearly seen amongst the blogging community of writers.

But let's back up a moment. What is the answer to feelings of insecurity? What do you do to make those pesky things go away?

Confidence.

Yeah, that's easier said than done, right?

I mean, what is confidence? I'm gonna keep it simple, so we'll just say that (self)confidence is a belief in one's own abilities.

Insecurity undermines confidence, and the thing that makes insecurity so common these days is the lack of reliable feedback from, well, everywhere. We live in a positive feedback society, and it makes it impossible to know if you're really doing well or not. [All of this ties into what I said here and all of the related stuff I've been saying since then. And before then.] If everyone is busy saying "you're doing great!", how do you know if you really are?

There are two responses:
1. the traditional: I must really suck, and no one wants to hurt my feelings.
2. the new-fangled: I'm awesome! (if you read yesterday's post, you'll have heard that this response is on the rise in the good ole USofA, right now (as in, it's becoming an issue in the American workforce)).
Both of these come out of an inability to judge our own performance because of a lack of reliable information due to faulty feedback.

You know, I get it. It feels so much better to surround yourself with people that say "oh, you're so great! you're so awesome! I love it and I love you!" It makes you feel better, and it makes them feel better, too, because they don't have to deal with any fallout from saying something negative. But, really, it's just like a diet of constant sugar. Sure, it tastes good, but, ultimately, it's gonna kill you. And, on the way to killing you, it will make everything else taste just godawful bad (see this post for more on how sugar ruins taste (or, actually, how much taste you will discover without sugar)). You will never develop confidence, actual confidence, surrounded by people who only say how great you are.

I mean, face it, how many people do you know that are actually made of AWESOME? Now, how many people do you know that think they are? Or, at least, espouse to that belief.

The thing is, confidence comes from within. It comes from knowing, I mean actually knowing, that you're good at something. Knowing it objectively, not feeling like you're good at it. All that feeling like you're good at something doesn't mean a thing if you actually suck. The problem is coming to an objective knowledge, and you can never come to an objective knowledge of something if you surround yourself with people who only ever tell you good things about it.

So I'm hearing some of you out there right about now protesting that there are no objective measures in something so subjective as writing, but that's where you'd be wrong, because there are objective measures (which I discussed, in part, here), and that's why we get books that a vast majority of people can agree are good and some that people will agree are bad. Sure, it's hard to pinpoint the specific things within a work of art that make it objectively better than some other work of art (do any kind of research on the popularity of Star Wars to see this), but that doesn't mean that those objective things don't exist. When a vast majority of people can agree that something is better than everything else, you can bet there is something objective behind it even if you can't measure what that objective thing is.

We all want to feel confident. We all want to have some ability to judge ourselves. Unfortunately, this starts with having people around us that are willing to tell us where and how we are screwing up. After that, it comes from repeated reliable feedback. Sometimes, as with an athlete, this comes from actual objective, indisputable data: "you ran this race in x seconds, the stop watch says so." Sometimes, this comes from people that are skilled in a particular area and can just tell you where you're falling short: "you're not bending your knees enough." Whatever the source, we need it. We need that thing that is willing to be honest with us about how we are doing if we want to get better.

I actually think that some of us don't want to get better. It's too hard. We'd rather just have people around us telling us how great we're doing and keep right on being sub-par for, well, forever as long as we can keep people around us to tell us we're great and awesome. I guess what you have to decide is whether you do want to get better, and, if you do, find those people that will help you to get there.

And just to give you some personal insight (that I don't think I've previously shared (although I could be wrong)):

For me, all of this started back in college. Well, really, in high school. Or before that. Anyway... I've known, on some level, that I was a good writer since elementary school. It was in high school that I figured that writing would always be a part of my life. It was in college that I decided, somewhat pretentiously, that real writers are poets. I spent my personal writing time (meaning non-assignment related) working on said poetry. I was in this writing group (not just any writing group, but a school group that you couldn't join without first... well, let's just say it was prestigious to be accepted into the group), and I was really pumping out the poetry for it, because, as I said, real writers are poets. The writing group was presided over by the English faculty, so it wasn't just a bunch of students patting each other on the back. We had people with experience in there. Anyway, one day I had this piece that I was particularly proud of that I'd read to an adequate response, meaning what usually happens with poetry, the ones that didn't "get" it said it was good, because they didn't want to be seen as not "getting" it, and the ones that did get it said it was pretty good. Well, except for one professor (the one that all the students feared and dreaded having, but who was the best English prof around). He didn't say anything specific during the meeting, but he did ask me a lot of pressing questions about the piece, questions about why I'd done particular things in my writing, etc, and it wasn't very comfortable, because, at 20, I didn't always have good answers for those things. After the meeting, he pulled me aside and said something to me that caused me to re-evaluate everything about my writing. He said, "This is great prose, but it's horrible poetry." I was too shocked to even be mad or upset about it. I'd never had anyone say anything like that to me before. He went on to tell me that that was often his response to my poetry, that it would be so great if it wasn't poetry. He suggested that I go back and re-write it as prose.

See, the thing is, he was right. I did go back to my room and read that piece again. And again. And again. Later, I wrote it out in paragraph form and read it again. I tweaked bits and parts and filled it out to make the language work, and it was great. When I took it back to the next meeting as a paragraph of writing and read it that way, no one had issues with understanding it, and everyone loved it. It was because he was honest with me, though. What's more, he allowed me to look at my own work from a more objective viewpoint because he had been honest with me about it. As much as I'd like to be, I am not gifted in poetry. I still work with it sometimes and, occasionally, come up with some things that are decent, but it's not my strength. I only work with it as a writing exercise that makes all of my writing stronger.

The point, though, is that we all need someone who can speak to us like that. Someone that will say, without fear, "this is horrible." Someone that we trust to be saying that out of a desire to help rather than put us down or just to make us feel bad. Yeah, that person can be tough to find, but we all need at least one of those.

The path to confidence requires courage. The courage to be honest and accept honest feedback. I hope you all find the strength to walk that path.

A Preface to Confidence

Tomorrow is the monthly Insecure Writer's Support Group post, and I will have a word or two to say about confidence, what it means, and how to get it. The last few months have been interesting for me, because it seems that just as I started talking about reviews and the overly positive reviews that have been flooding the bookwaves, so did a lot of other people. "Real" people that get to talk about these things on Slate and in the New York Times and a score of other places. I've been reading these articles which have echoed my thoughts on the matter, which has been nice, because, initially, I thought I might be off my rocker. Not only have people been talking about it but there have been being some serious studies done on the tsunami of (almost only) positive feedback flooding our world. Recently, NPR had one of these psychologists on one of their shows, so in preparation to tomorrow's post, I figured I'd let you guys listen to it, since it doesn't fit into my post the way I want it to. So go listen to this. It's short.

And, because they talk about it, I just want to mention something related to this "sandwich" method of delivering negative news. A totally separate study (which I don't have the link to) recently found that about 80% of people have virtually no retention of things they view as negative. The study had to do with gambling addiction, the economic collapse of '08 and other things of that nature. We look back and wonder how "we" can lose so much, but, going into a situation, most people (because 80% is most) literally can't see the possible negative outcomes, even when presented with them. Especially when presented with them as an option weighed against some possible positive outcome. The negative outcome completely evaporates from their minds.

All of that to say that another study showed that that whole "sandwich" way of delivering negative criticism (No, that's not redundant, because a criticism is looking at something in a critical manner, which, then, delivers positive criticism and negative criticism. Potentially.) is completely ineffective, because, well, 80% (or more) of people can't retain the negative part of whatever was said when it's presented with the positive stuff.

I'll leave that for you guys to work out. Or you can come back tomorrow and see what I have to say about it.

Moving Like Glass (brought to you by IWSG)

This post is going to be a bit different from my normal kind of post in that I'm participating in Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group this month. People tend to believe that if you're a writer then you're insecure about it, that those two things go hand in hand. I'm actually not insecure about my writing, so I've been inclined to skip these posts in the past. Skip writing them, that is (I don't skip reading other people's posts), especially since many of my posts tend toward what I would consider support posts for other writers anyway.

However, although I'm not insecure about my actual writing, I am insecure about the whole writing career thing. One thing in particular constantly nags and pokes at me: everything seems to happen so slowly! I feel like a piece of glass.

Did you know that glass is a liquid? Okay, so, maybe not. Actually, the state of glass is still being squabbled over by Science, but, for my discussion, we're going to go with the "glass is a liquid" side of the argument. And, no, I'm not going to try and explain the argument, but I will say this: glass does not crystallize as other solids do when it's cooled. For this reason, it's generally called an amorphous solid or a supercooled liquid. Yeah, I know: if you go touch it, it feels plenty solid, and it can break, but if you want to go read up on all the science behind it, you go right ahead. [There's a good discussion here if you want to read up on it.]

Anyway...

Did you know glass is a liquid? The way it was explained to me (in Science) is that glass is a colloidal suspension. A simple example of this is Jello. Basically, you have a liquid into which is introduced a solid that is in suspension within the liquid causing it to hold it's shape. Or that's the case with Jello, at any rate. It doesn't actually have to be a liquid/solid suspension, but that's what works for my example. With glass, the actual glass is a liquid and has to have foreign particles introduced into it so that it will solidify and retain the shape it is cooled in. Most manufactured glass is soda-lime glass, known as such because of what is introduced into the system to help it retain its shape.

The theory is that glass then, only being a colloidal suspension, continues to flow very slowly over the years. Very slowly. Very, very slowly. So slowly in fact that this is also debated by Science, but, for my purposes, we're going to side with faction that believes in glass flow because it's a liquid.

And that's how I feel! Like a piece of glass moving so slowly that you can't tell I'm moving. I don't mean on the actual writing front. I'm not sitting here with writer's block or anything. But on the selling front, on the getting my name out there front, I feel like nothing's happening. See, I know that's not quite true, because I do have people reading my work and leaving reviews, but it's not spontaneous at this point. And that makes it feel like it's not happening at all.

And that makes me insecure. The feeling of no movement.

I suppose the good side of that is that it makes me want, even more, to finish my next project and get it out there.

Speaking of that next project, it's called Shadow Spinner (for those of you coming by for the first time today because of the IWSG thing. The rest of you should know this!). The first chapter, "Part One: The Tunnel" is available for free this week for the Kindle (only) over on Amazon. It would be so great if you'd go pick up a FREE copy of it, click the "like" button (something that seems to be difficult for most people stopping by), and, after you read it, leave a short review and rating. Yeah, okay, so I'm asking a lot, but it's a short read because it's just the 1st chapter, so there will be plenty of time left over for a short review! Make me feel like heated glass!

The cover has been done by the fantastic artist formerly known as Rusty Webb:

Did I mention it's FREE?!?


["Part Two: The Kitchen Table" will be available soon.]