Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Writers you want to punch in the face




http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/writers-you-want-to-punch-in-the-facebook/

OK then, here is a link to something I particularly liked on FB. I don't like much on FB, and every time I (compulsively) go on it, I see a lot of things that are not nearly as good, or see something that makes me mad and feel I can't say anything because most comments begin with the word, "Awesome!!!!!" If you say anything else, you're a party pooper and "negative", which is the worst thing you can be.

Social media hasn't done me a whole heck of a lot of good. It has distracted me from real writing, which is what I need to be doing, always. Right now I am stymied as to how I am supposed to use it to sell my book. I seem to be nowhere with it. I know I'm not supposed to admit this, in case the unusual happens and somebody reads this. It has been known to happen, but a large number of views is rare on this blog because I write it mostly to please myself.




I finally have a book in hand, but feel a little lost. The things that helped me stay afloat and promote and get out there with my last two novels are mostly gone. The independent bookstores have been driven out of business, and Big Booky isn't too friendly these days. It's not the way I thought it would be, at all, and all too often I feel like a dinosaur.

That said, several times a day I look at the published version of The Glass Character and just shimmer all over. As it turns out, the cover has a high shine that resembles that antique turquoise glass, and it's effective, as if Harold is looking through a windowpane. It was a long, long haul writing this, and twice as long selling it, and now, though I don't know exactly where I am going with it, it has been externalized, it's no longer just a story or a thought in my head or a hope or a dream: it's a BOOK, and always will be, even if it goes out of print. As an ebook, I suppose it will always be around in some form or another.




I've written about Rich Correll, and I did ask my publisher to send him an advance copy, but I haven't heard anything back. Rich Correll knew Harold, even touched his films and became his unofficial filmographer. What he thinks of  The Glass Character matters. But I have had almost no feedback, and it's kind of like waiting for a medical test to come back. You tell yourself, it's just a precaution, I'm sure everythng's fine. . . but you know that the possibility of "not fine" exists. You tell yourself, for sure, this is your last book. Has to be.

I remember a time when Rich Correll was just some far-flung possibility. I opened a file last night in Word, my first letter to him, dated 2010. I had no idea what his mailing address was, could only find vague references to talent agencies and taxi companies. I even sent a letter to his lawyer. I gave up some time in 2012, and he phoned me in 2013. I could not believe how long ago: last summer. I thought it was maybe two months ago.




I think a lot of what I am doing now is distraction. I should be working feverishly on Facebook and Twitter (though I loathe the thought and would rather be hung upside-down by my toenails than open a Twitter account) to "try to get the word out". What word? My book is out.  Buy it, it's swell. End of message.

I suppose if I don't promote my face off, I won't be eligible for the awards that can propel a writer out of the Paperback Writer zone ("Dear sir or madam, would you read my book, it took me years to write, would you take a look"). I don't know quite how that works. Do I sound super-confident here? I doubt it.




I do feel good about the book. It's not that. Or, I don't think so. It's everything else, what goes with it. Writers are jerked back and forth: stop being so sickeningly self-congratulatory! Get out there and be a shameless self-promoter! Go away, come back.

And then there is Cinderella Syndrome, the great lottery win, with some obscure or completely unknown author catapulting to the top of the New York Times bestseller list (Nirvana for every writer, supposedly). I should have called my novel 50 Shades of Harold.




It's a weird place to be in. I wouldn't want to go back. All of it has been hard. The writing was the best part, as always. I'll never forget it. And a few people have commented on it. Even my daughter liked it! She's the toughest critic I know, one of the few people who actually speaks her mind when you ask her about something, so her opinion matters to me.

All I want to do is make Blingees, right now, to take my mind off things. I have had no reviews at all so far, and there may not be any (not that they lead to sales). One would be nice. And hearing back from Rich Correll. Now THAT would be nice. An invite to read somewhere, so I don't have to phone an organizer and say, "Please, sir. . . "




But I remember the day the idea fell on me to write this book - just fell on me like an anvil out of nowhere, and my first reaction was, "Nooooooooooooo." Somehow, that led to this. The strange "this" I'm in now, which is a long way from the initial assault. 





Monday, December 31, 2012

Top Ten News Stories of 2013!

 
 


(BLOGGER'S NOTE. You thought 2012 was awful? Wait until you read these stories from 2013! How come I know all this stuff in advance? The pace of modern living is so goldern fast these days, we've already caught up with ourselves and gone BOINNGGGG into the future. It's as if the new year never happened at all. JOIN THE FUN!)




1. A GECKO IS ELECTED PRESIDENT

You know that cute little Geico gecko in the TV ads who goes around saying funny things in an Australian accent? He is elected President of the World in 2013 by the unanimous vote of everyone who has a Twitter account.  In the words of the Huffington Post: "Never has a reptile exhibited this calibre of leadership ability melded with such profound humanity." (Only later is it discovered that he is computer-generated and in fact does not exist.)





2. LINDSAY LOHAN GOES TO JAIL AND DIES

In a much-anticipated climax to her long career of self-destructive flailing, Lindsay Lohan slugs a producer, fails to show up for her court date, slams her car into someone she doesn't like, gets in a bar fight and bites someone, stars in some lame-o movie about Jackie Kennedy, fails to show up for another court date, slugs someone else, and. . . on December 31, 2013, the authorities break into her sumptuous Malibu beach house and haul her off to jail on multiple charges, after which she is immediately released on bail and dies from a chihuahua bite. Though it is determined that the chihuahua is an attack dog trained by her mother, her death is listed in the media under Public Improvements.


 


3. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMPLETELY DISINTEGRATES

This results from the relentless forces of tweets and twats, not to mention texts that mean nothing (I don't CARE what you did this afternoon when it rained out), constant Smartphone calls that mean nothing, and the compressed, misspelled quasi-language of social media worming its way into Webster's Dictionary as an acceptable new language called Twitspeak.


 


4. EVERYONE ON THE PLANET IS DRAGGED INTO A SCANDAL FOR POSTING NUDE PHOTOS ON THEIR FACEBOOK PAGE





 
(or Twitter or whatever)


5. PUBLIC ATTENTION SPAN SHRINKS FROM THREE SECONDS TO






 
 
6. HORRIFIC WEATHER DISASTERS ARE BLAMED ON "NORMAL CLIMATE FLUCTUATIONS"





. . . as New York City sinks six hundred feet under the sea, California disappears, and late-night comics (grateful for some fresh, relevant material) spew out endless jokes about it from their new studios in Newton, Kansas, Entertainment Capitol of the World.




7. THE KARDASHIANS TURN INTO LIFE-SIZED STATUES MADE OF BOLOGNA


 


8. THAT GREAT BIG MASS OF DISCARDED PLASTIC FLOATING IN THE OCEAN INCREASES FROM TWENTY MILES WIDE TO FIFTY MILES WIDE



 
 


In 2013, environmental experts are quick to reassure the public that this new man-made continent will begin to disintegrate by the year 5019. In the meantime, a theme park is being contemplated.






9. TREES BEGIN TO SPONTANEOUSLY IGNITE DUE TO CONCENTRATED FUMES IN THE OXYGEN SUPPLY

More fodder for the late-night comedians.




10. A NEW REALITY SHOW DEBUTS IN 2013, STARRING A VAST LUMP OF PUNGENT ORGANIC MATERIAL

This is called Here Comes Funny Poo Poo.




And I could go on and on, but I can hear a little voice in my head saying, "Heyyyyyyyyyyy, that's depressing!" So I'll stop.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

If there are no mistakes, then why am I such a screwup?



There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.
Buddha


Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde


Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.
Benjamin Franklin

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
Bruce Lee




There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross


If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.
John Wooden


Making mistakes is the privilege of the active. . . Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.
Ingvar Kamprad





OK THEN! I've been wanting to write about all this for some time now, and it seems even more relevant in light of some recent events.

I am constantly coming across quotes about how desirable it is to make mistakes. We should make lots and lots of them, or else it proves we aren't doing anything. These quotes can come from business wizards like Steve Jobs, or spiritual bigwigs like Buddha, or meatball-eating furniture magnates like Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad (whom I always thought was an actor in one of those . . . movies . . .  you know the ones I mean).

The reality is somewhat different.

I think people say these things to try to alleviate the excruciating embarrassment and even humiliation that can arise from a single mistake. They're trying to make themselves feel better, not just you, and not just for past or present-day mistakes but as a sort of immunization against the humiliation of mistakes as yet unmade.






People are fired because of a single mistake, and their careers and self-esteem sometimes never recover. People lose their spouses because of a mistake (an affair? It happens, believe it or not), changing not just the course of their lives, but the lives of children and grandchildren and all their friends, who may not know on which side their loyalties should fall. (It's always one way or another, folks.)

One mistake, even one clumsy social error, can lodge itself in people's memory like one of those sticky-burr things. If you are kind and gracious 99% of the time, and fuck up 1% of the time, guess what people will remember?






I won't mention any names here, because I can't, but I once worked with an agent who ran into some problems approaching a publisher. The managing editor said, "I hate Margaret Gunning!" When asked why, he said, "Because she panned one of our authors." Something like ten years earlier, I had written a "negative" review of one of their books (I had certainly not trashed the book but felt it didn't cohere, which matched the opinion of the majority of other reviewers).

Was it a "mistake"? I was just doing my job, which is NOT to write synopses or dishwater generic non-reviews providing no critical analysis whatsoever. But even if it wasn't a mistake, it seemed to have created a rancor which would live forever. To that particular publisher, no matter what else I did to redeem myself,  my name would always be mud.

So imagine what would have happened if I HAD made a mistake, even a little one!




I've misfired on emails before, sent them the wrong way.  Doesn't everyone do this? I thought so, until I did it myself. Again, it was a publisher, and it was a mistake, and no one said "it's OK to make a mistake, it's the way we learn" or anything like that. Instead I got an email back saying, "Do you realize what you've just done?" You could hear their gasp of horror.  According to them at least, I had done so much damage with a single click that it turned out to be irreparable. Those people will never forget. And there was nothing vindictive in my email, nothing abusive, just information they should not have received.

I goofed. I clicked. I was dead.

Is it just me? If it's just me, I might as well commit suicide right here and now. If I am to believe all these wonderful quotes and the people who insist you should make as many mistakes as you possibly can in the course of a day (and maybe they mean "mistakes" like borrowing someone's pen and forgetting to give it back), then perhaps it's true. Perhaps I'm the only one who suffers massive repercussions from a mistake, hostility, rancour, and the feeling that what I've done is totally and permanently unforgiveable.





So OK. Let's take a look at these quotes that everyone finds so comforting:  Kubler-Ross for a start.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Kubler-Ross became world-famous for her "stages of grief" theory, which automatically found near-universal acceptance with therapists and clergy and every other type of counselor until someone decided, many decades later, to do some research on the subject. They discovered that there are no stages of grief, and that everyone processes grief differently. The original premise was "stages of dying", so Kubler-Ross was not entirely responsible for this misinformation. Her theory applied to people who were terminally ill and trying to come to terms with approaching death.

I don't think she ever intended these stages to be lodged in neat compartments, to be worked through sequentially over a set period of time, but that's what happened. Therapists began to require patients to "go through the stages", and if they didn't, they were pushed to do so. Come on, it's time for the anger stage now! Why aren't you angry? And how about some bargaining? You can't go on to acceptance until you do.




So what was the mistake here? The biggie was universally embracing an untried idea just because it sounded good. Her theory was appealing because those neat stages helped to regulate and contain something that most people find overwhelming, a force of nature that seldom shows any mercy.




I'd like to believe - OK, I wouldn't like to believe, because it's too out of touch with reality - that "all events are blessings given to us to learn from". I know New Age people who believe this, but I can't. I can't because I have known people who have lost infants to disease and children to horrific accidents and had to try to pick up the pieces. I can't because I watch the news every day and see with what horrifying regularity people are casually slaughtered by crazed gunmen who one day decide they'd like to spill a little blood.

These are the extremes, but there are plenty of them. I can't believe "all events are blessings" when I watch a documentary about Auschwitz or Dachau. (Calling the Third Reich a "mistake" is the understatement of all time, but with neo-Nazism thriving and even considered "cool" by some young people, did we really learn from it?)  I am still trying to figure out how an intelligent person can embrace this obvious fallacy. If your son commits suicide, is it a blessing? If you lose all your money and become homeless? I won't go on.






I can't compare events in my own life with tragedies of this magnitude. But I have experienced the alarming ways in which technology makes it even more costly to make a mistake.

I recently experienced one of those examples of the hellfire the internet can put you through. Because of something I wrote, I wasn't just roasted: I was mocked, excoriated, ridiculed, called nasty names, and made to look thoroughly stupid on someone's blog.

Obviously I had made a mistake. It was a bad one, I saw it quickly, deleted it and did what I could to make amends for it. I'd posted something that should never have been posted. Since I could not turn back the hands of time and un-write it, I could only do what I could do, and keep it brief, because over-apologizing is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

But I don't think it did one iota of good, and at best I was probably seen as covering my ass in a  gesture of self-preservation. I realize now that this was a mistake that might just live forever. "Delete" doesn't do anything to erase people's memory.




It doesn't matter if I did 99 things right. That hundredth thing may spell the end of my perceived integrity and worth as a writer, and even as a human being. And now that we are in the age of blogging and internet and social media, one mistake can explode massively in a matter of seconds. It can go viral, reaching hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people in the blink of an eye.




Blessings given for us to learn from? By the time we get around to learning from them, we may be ruined. Human brains always retain the negative, we seem to have evolved that way, while positive and neutral events just sort of wash away with the tide. Combine that with the supernova-level, instantaneous communication that exists today, and you could have a recipe for disaster.

I approach Facebook and other such systems with leeriness now. If I try to "friend" someone and it turns out they are the friend of someone whose book I panned in 1998, might they diss me on Facebook, their blog or elsewhere for being an opportunist, rude or just plain stupid? Do I "friend" more than one publisher, or will that be a conflict of interest? If I ONLY friend one publisher, what sort of idiot am I who can't do business with social media, which is in large part what it is set up to do?

But if you admit that, oh boy. Embarrasment! Everyone looks away. Everybody knows Facebook is just a friendly chat over the back fence, and anyone who even thinks it might be a form of making business contacts is either gauche or completely mercenary.  An elephant has suddenly appeared in the room and deposited 50 pounds of shit, and nobody knows where to look.




Maybe I was just behind the barn door when the rules were passed out. But it seems to me we'd all better watch our step. Making mistakes is a luxury which I think is the province of those alpha personalities who end up founding Ikea and changing therapeutic practice forever. The rest of us poor schlubs had better beware.





P. S. This post was written before the death of Alex Colville. The painting still remains one of my all-time favorites, speaking with no words about forces which are about to collide with catastrophic impact. It strikes me as strange that artists get to make these kinds of statements, but when writers do it they're being "negative" and going against the tide of happy-face philosophy that - as far as I am concerned - collides with reality.


 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look