Archive for the ‘Neurotic Griping’ Category

I always do this.  I procrastinate trying something new because I know it can’t be perfect the first time out, and I’m not good at accepting my own mistakes. I really admire the people who can just bravely face the world with ignorant confidence and go for it. If they don’t have figurative balls the size of car tires, they sure act like they do. {My apologies to my husband and the rest of the blogosphere for using “balls” in my work again. It must be a compulsion.}

I go back to the concept of expectation. It’s a big word for a reason.  If you want to truly identify what separates the rich from the poor, you need look no further than that four syllable “e” word. {The middle class is extinct. People only say they are middle class to make themselves feel better. The middle class died out with leaded gasoline and cigarette commercials.}

In a very generalized nutshell, rich people expect their kids to succeed. Poor people expect their kids to survive. When those expectations are not met, there are dire social consequences. Furthermore, when those expectations are exceeded, there are also dire social consequences.

I grew up poor. My parents are loving, decent people who have always worked hard and done what was necessary to survive. At a young age it was made very clear to me what their expectations were. Get through high school without going to jail or winding up pregnant. That was it. After eighteen, I was the state’s problem. And, believe it or not, where I came from, that was considered a high expectation. I’m pretty sure they had no freakin’ clue what to do with me, when at age twelve I informed them that I planned on going to college.

I only made it worse when I said I was going to art school. “Why don’t you be a nurse or a teacher? They make lots of money.” These were the only female role models in my small community that my parents could relate to. But at the time most of the teachers seemed mean, and since I normally cried at the sight of my own blood, a medical career didn’t sound like a good idea either. Plus, when I was about seven, it became evident that I could draw. Being the validation junkie that I am, I clung to that positive reinforcement with every fiber of my being.

What I failed to recognize though, was that the combination of  “creative and poor” culminated into “weird”. I was social suicide, no matter the economic class. I did manage to find a few other “weird” friends, and we forged alliances that persist to this day. But try as I might, “uppity trailer trash” still clings to my psyche like persistent skunk musk. It’s downright debilitating, especially if there’s a risk of failure and embarrassment.

There have been numerous times throughout my life when I wished to God that I could live within others expectations of me. Life would have been so much easier, but I would have been miserable. Often, I was miserable anyway, but at least I was honest. Living a false life to make others more comfortable would have been so much worse.

By the way, this entire neurotic gripe is brought to you because I’m about to launch a Facebook fan page. It’ll be a first for me, and I’ll probably make mistakes, so please, for the love of God, lower your expectations (eek!).

As a writer drawn to the motives of murder, you would think I have an analytical bent on the atrocity that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut. I don’t.  I’ve let my mind wander into some pretty sinister crevices in my own brain to create the murderers in my books, but I’ve never found this particular monster.

And unfortunately, Adam Lanza chose to leave the world as a monster. He most likely didn’t start out that way. It’s actually quite difficult to look at the emaciated geek in the fuzzy black and white snapshot and picture him hurting anyone. I think that’s a good thing.

When writers dramatize murders, whether it be in a play, book, movie, or TV series, we make it a point to hide who that murderer is, but once that person is revealed, the motive is clear and reasonable at least to the murderer. An audience needs the motive for closure. Somehow, it needs to make sense.

But how do you make sense of an anonymous killing spree? What’s the motive?

Take your pick; Columbine, Virginia Tech, Arora, Portland, Newtown; these horrible acts of mass murder were committed by marginalized young men who no longer valued the sanctity of human life, including their own. If I had to sit down and come up with a reason, the only one I can think of is pretty damn sick: a need for attention.

However petty it may seem, we all want to matter to the rest of the world in our own small way. If you’ve been marginalized by the community that you were born into, that need can start to mutate into something off center, sometimes culminating into a positive force, sometimes negative. The catalyst that shoves your own personal pendulum one way or the other can come from just about anything or anyone.

We can all sit on our high horses and say, “I would never do that.” Yet, we all want a motive. We all want it to make sense and be easy, so we can feel safe again about the world around us. The problem is, though, we only want our understanding to be shallow. We don’t want to look inside ourselves and search out the monster within us.

So I ask, who are you? Are you the marginalized or the marginalizer? I honestly believe that if we as a society can’t or won’t answer that question, we will only perpetuate what is becoming a painfully glaring problem.

I just finished editing Book 3 last night. Phew! Now, onto the covers so I can get this book out to my readers.

This is where my obsession for being the god of my make believe universe really kicks in. As a self publisher, I get to design my own covers for both the ebook and the paperback. Book 3, unfortunately, exists in a time and place that I don’t have any relevant pictures for. That forces me to rely on other people to provide something usable, and since they aren’t in my head (which is a good thing. It can get scary in there), I’m not completely satisfied with their offerings.

I know I’m being unreasonable. Control freaks usually are. It’s not that we’re not appreciative of the efforts of others. We just get irritated when they don’t do it exactly the way we think it needs to be done. The kicker is, we probably don’t excel that much more than the other person would. We just need to be in control of the given task to retain comfort and security with the situation. It’s a sickness to be sure, but since doctors and therapists are notorious control freaks also, I don’t see a cure coming anytime soon.

Because I’m also a graphic designer (one of oh-so-many jobs in my repertoire of life experiences), I have to privilege (or curse) of obsessing with the look of the book, hands on. I not only choose the images and typeface, I lay everything out, staging whatever is necessary in the cover shot. I tweak and nudge and measure. I scrutinize the covers from the previous two books to get the branding (yeah, I hate that word two, but it works) just right.

The ebook cover is one thing. The paperback cover is a whole new obsessive ball of wax. Now I have to worry about how well my decisions will print. Do my photos have a high enough resolutions? Is my white type on the colored background going to be readable? Do I have overprint problems?

There are times when I wish I didn’t know any better. I’d probably be happier and look younger if I could give just put my stubborn will to rest, let my life flow around me and allow others to make their contributions free of my self-righteous judgement. But you know….they’d just do it wrong.