Lessons Learned: The Hard Way

Life is really too short.  You can dwell on this or that.  If it makes you happy, then good for you.

One of the most difficult challenges I have faced in life is not always being able to see when I was wrong about something.  I try to be honest with myself, but sometimes that doesn't always work.  So if you are losing sleep, and something is taking away your ability to live your life, then you have a problem.

I have an issue I have struggled with this year and I have finally done what I needed to do.  I've said my peace.  I've accepted my responsibility and I'm moving on.  My children are the top priority in my life and their smiles offer rewards beyond compare.  I have a loving and supporting wife and I stand on my own two feet without depending on the graciousness of my friends or family.  I have doors of opportunity open to me and there are many ways I can explore my horizons.  I realized that I'm capable of turning in any direction that I choose.  There is no course of action that I'm locked into.

~Will

Sometimes it is better to just make your point & move on. If you try too hard and if you are wrong, you might overplay your hand. #letitgo

Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell Tale Heart (Why It Wouldn't Fly Today)

This morning I was fooling around with some free-writing and decided to check my work using Grammarly for errors. I was not surprised at the number of errors it had discovered, but I was surprised by the number of advanced errors it had found.

Curiosity got the best of me, so I decided to check one of my favorite short stories of all time for errors.  I googled "The Tell-Tale Heart", then copy/pasted it into Grammarly.

First thing I noticed, Grammarly discovered eighteen critical errors. A few were misspellings, but most were punctuation. The English language has changed over time, so to find a few of these instances was considered acceptable to me.

But when I took a look at the 39 Advanced Errors the program discovered, I was actually a little surprised.

• 15 errors of "Wordiness"
• 8 errors of "Improper Formatting
• 5 errors of "Passive Voice Use"
• 4 uses of "colloquial phrases"
• 2 incomplete sentences
• 5 more advanced errors

Keep in mind that this isn't a novel, but a short story of only 2,147 words! That's a large number of major errors for a work this small.

It boggles my mind that this work is considered a masterpiece among the same scholars who absolutely refuse to accept breaches of writing protocol.  Today, modern writing standards are designed to strip the artistic prose of a subject matter, leaving it dry and soulless, with only a few truly amazing authors like J.K. Rowling who have the gifts of a true wordsmith.

So when you are reflecting on the classics and want to read more works like them, think on this: Writers are told to abide by modern writing standards and there are now a considerable number of armchair critics who spout on about writing etiquette.  An author today wants to be recognized for their works of artistic expression, but in our modern world, most average writers likely they will never succeed if they go against the grain.

Authors are expected to dumb down their work by breaking apart their artistic expression so that it will appeal to the largest common denominator.

How Self Publishing Makes Me Want To Pull My Hair Out

Ok, this is cheesy public domain pic kind of day!  Obviously, I'm a dude and the picture isn't, nevertheless, it conveys my sentiment this morning.

Yes, I know that I only uploaded my self published work to Amazon just a few days ago.  I had also expected this to be a marathon, not a sprint.

My original idea was to setup a blog tour for August.  I've reached out to several tour organizers and I haven't heard anything back.  That's cool and all.  I know that I stay pretty busy myself, so they must be busy themselves.

But I'm not a sit back and wait kind of guy.  I like to take initiative.  Action is always better than inaction.  When I don't take charge of something that is important to me, I quickly drown with apathy.  I know, I should be more Zen, find just the right balance.  However, like a chihuahua, I'm up and down all over the place, barking and chasing my tail and nipping at the heels of every stranger.

I decided that while I waited, I would go ahead and find some bloggers who might be interested in doing a review.  The fact is, quite of few of the bloggers that I found on Google by searching "Young Adult Book Blog Reviews" in fact, are not accepting submissions.  Still, others will not accept submissions from self publishers.

When I weighed the options of going publisher vs. self publishing, the main reason I decided to self publish was because I thought by doing so, I would potentially contribute to the successes of self publishing authors.  Publishing houses have been notorious in the past for being nit picky.  For example, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter was thrown into a trash can and rejected more than a dozen times before someone saw what they had right in front of them.

To me, self publishing is how we can tap into all the potential on this planet so that writers can write without fear of rejection.  That fear can inhibit the creative process.  Yes, there would be more books to sort through to find those rare gems of genius, but the benefit far outweighs the struggle.

So this is my rant.  Maybe I'm just not in the mood today to run into barriers.  For now, I believe I have done what I can.  I can use this time to set up my twitter account instead and write this blog post.  I will try again tomorrow.