Jen Smith's Blog, page 6

When is an author really an author?

Just because I've written a book and it's available on Amazon.com, does that mean I'm an author?  I've labeled myself many things before, student, groupie, investment analyst, felon (not convicted), space shot, mom, but never author.  In my social network obsessive plight I've begun interacting with other authors in forums where I am supposedly an author as well.     

Recently I discovered a Facebook family called Book Junkies.  I read about it some where in some article in somebody's blog.  I wish I could quote where from for you but I was so intrigued I instantly Googled Book Junkies and found the page and the option to join, swiftly leaving the blog source in the dust in classic A.D.D. style.  Book Junkies is a place for Indie Authors to meet, learn about each other and support each other.

Like the good addict that I am, I went ahead and sent way more requests out than I'll admit for people to friend me.  Within moments I had a few responses.  I was pleasantly shocked!  These people don't even know me and they'll friend me?  Some even posted "hello" on my wall and one asked me to like his book fan page.  Then the light bulb went on! …or perhaps really just sizzled a bit from a few discombobulated brain cells.  What if I message all the people friending me all at once and ask them to like my SICK book fan page?  After doing this I was instantly ridiculed and informed that what I did was considered spam and that it would kill my reputation. Yikes!  I apologized to the few who would still talk to me and then to the Book Junkie world with an apologetic post on the wall for all to see.  Some folks were very kind and schooled me on Book Junkie Facebook ethics.  I did, however, get sixteen more fan page likes.

One man who clued me in was David Cleinman.  He is the author of Toys in the Attic and Principle Destiny both about strong woman.  The latter based on true events- got to check these out.  David also hosts an internet radio station where he often interviews authors. http://davidcleinman.com/writings/  He messaged on the Book Junkies Facebook wall that due to drop outs there were author interview opportunities.  Of course I immediately filled out his lengthy interview form with high hopes.  Stay tuned for the result of that.  David was kind to me about my spam blunder and I am grateful to him for his gentle words.       

I also met a writer from San Francisco named Dan Mader, author of the books Biker and Joe's café.  I simply thanked him for friending me on Facebook and we started a conversation.  He shared his blog and a couple of links to articles he'd written.  Check out his blog unemployed imagination. http://www.jdmader.com/  Later I found a really fun interview of Dan Mader on NcNally's blog http://sablecity.wordpress.com/  Best format for an author interview I've read so far- actually read the entire interview, they are usually boring.  Dan also kindly turned me on to another blog where Indie Authors can submit content. http://www.indiesunlimited.com/

So am I an author now that other authors talked to me?  Will I be an author if David Cleinman decides to interview me?  Will I be an author after I make a certain amount of money from my book?  What do you think makes an author an author?

Tweeking on Twitter

I love Twitter! I think I'm addicted to it.  Of course given my overly obsessive compulsive additive prone personality this shouldn't be surprising.  So here's the run down on this thing they call twitter.  Some folks just tweet useless nonsense or you can follow tweets around an event to get the 'in the moment' play by play of what's happening.  For example I followed the New York City Occupy Wall Street tweets to try to find out what their message and purpose was.  It didn't take long for me to figure out they really didn't have one other then Wall Street is bad and the 1% suck.  But I've now seen Twitter in a new light.  I'd never thought of it as a place for professionals of the same feather to flock together to share knowledge and gain recognition.

Fortunately I read a couple books about marketing eBooks that stressed the necessity of developing a Twitter following and most importantly for me these books also went into detail about Twitter etiquette for professionals.  Yes that's right, there is a particular etiquette if you want your peers to take you seriously.  First off add value with your posts.  With the fever only an ex-tweeker meth head can muster up, I comb through tweets looking for links to blog posts and articles that are informative and well written for me and my fellow Indie Authors.  I can do this at a quick intense pace for a long period of time, with an intense obsession.  I really get into it!  And the pay off?  Another follower!  Oh yes there's nothing like turning on the computer and checking my email only to be delighted and elated by three more followers!  Woo Hoo!  Of course you do have to screen out @Bubbles who just loves to fuck.  Yes blocking bubbles immediately is imperative in order to not let your Twitter get filled up with inappropriate spam.

Another important piece of etiquette I learned from Mark Coker's book (the guy who developed Smashwords) on eBook marketing was to not continuously talk about your book.  I just gets boring.  There is an author I'm following and every day she just asks you to buy her book in a little different way.  Boring.  I'm really glad I learned that before I started Tweeting.  In order to get real followers you've got to give them good content.  The original blog posts that I write will always be tweeted but I can also reference other folks too.  This Tweet thing is like a spinning wheel.  I can give it a good spin with a few new Tweets and it will keep going for a while but eventually it will slow down if I don't jump back in and give it another spin with some good interesting content Tweets!  And then maybe- another follower.  I'm hooked!  Tweeking on Twitter!  What's your experience?  Did you get hooked immediately like me?   Did you struggle?

No Complaining

So I've been reading Joe Vitale's new book 'The Awakening Course'.  I'm always up for a new trick or two to help me be happy.  Happiness and feeling good has been a life long endeavor for me.  Drugs and alcohol used to be my only source of feeling good, 'Better living through chemistry' was my motto.  Selecting the right mix of drugs, the right amounts, in the right order was an art form I took very seriously, until drugs completely stopped working and nearly destroyed my life- bummer.  But my pursuit of happiness hasn't stopped.  Now I read self-help books, work on my recovery, and keep an open mind to any kind of new age hooped up wacked out suggestion about being happy.  So in Joe's book, not that he's wacked out, he suggests that I make a commitment to not complain for thirty days.  Well I'm a pretty positive person so I figure I can do this.  It's a lot tougher than I imagined

I was really serious about this attempt to not complain for thirty days, so I put it out there to my friends on Facebook and challenged them to call me out if they heard me complaining.  Shortly after I made this deep commitment to an endeavor I was sure would heighten my awareness of my thoughts enabling me to carefully and particularly discard the negative in my brain before it was spewed out to the world, my teenage son came downstairs.  The downstairs in our house is what I call 'command central'.  There are several computers, a TV, video games, and musical instruments, often with too many media outlets and screens going all at the same time.  So as I'm comfortable and quietly clicking away at my lap top, my son comes in and puts on the TV, loudly, and sits at the desk and turns on the desktop.

"The TV is way too loud it's annoying, please turn it down!" Opps, the first thing out of my mouth and it's a complaint!  He begins to play one of his war games on the desk top next to where I'm sitting and his computer obnoxiously start bellowing out noises of death.  You know, Ooooos and screams of dying people coupled with the sound of their squished beaten bodies and let's not forget the constant gun fire and explosions.  I just wasn't on the spiritual beam that day I guess, and from my mouth spewed more complaints about the sound.  Yikes!  What's happening?  I was able to stop myself.  No more complaining, I thought to myself.

The next day I did much better but I was in a cube only interacting with technology.

Why I Wrote SICK

Why I wrote SICK.

After years of debauchery, addiction, bad choices, and confusion I found recovery and began a life consistent with someone who would be considered a productive member of society.  This was painfully weird for me at first and still is a bit awkward.  In pursuit of a legal means to support my son, I went back to school and attained a few degrees.  The most intense being a Masters Degree in Financial Economics.  Soon it was time to get a job.  The idea of working was also painfully weird for me but by that time in my recovery I had seen it done by others.  One of my first interviews was with Sovereign Bank.  They showed me the cube in which I would be working.  It was a solitary dark space with high confining walls around it.  I cried all the way home.

I did find work in a reputable investment company in a cube that was a little less dark with walls a little less high.  It was, however, positioned down a back cold alleyway filled with stale air.  Despite this I commence to assimilate into the corporate environment working my tale off learning as much as I could as fast as I could, accomplishing a lot.  My boss was a tall well connected man.  Before long his deep rooted low opinion of woman was unmistakable.  A smart man, his detrimental belittling and minimizing of my abilities were subtle, never saying or doing anything that could be outwardly pined as sexist.  This wore on my spirit and had residual effects on how my all men colleagues treated me.  Finally this culminated into my boss deciding to demote me from a salary to hourly employee without reason.  He said it came down from corporate but the other two men who were my equals were not affected and remained salary.  I thought to myself, no matter how much money I make for this company, and I had made a lot, I'm never going to get anywhere under this man.  So I began to write.

My story is one of addiction and survival of domestic violence and abuse.  Through pain I've grown and recovered with hope to clear a path in some small way for other women to come up behind me.  This is why I choose to tell my story.  While the escapades and criminal activity may be interesting to some, the real story is the little bits of awakening woven in here and there, about the insidious devastation of abuse.  My desperate attempts to understand how a human being can so deeply hurt the one they say they love were sometime futile but sometimes revealing.  It's just sick.

The other day a friend of mine stuck in the cycle of abuse referenced a part of my book where I made an attempt to break the cycle.  She said this gave her strength to make an attempt to break the cycle in her life.  That was it.  That was all I had hoped for by writing this book.  Just one person was enough for me.  So anything else that happens with this book is icing on the cake!

Being in recovery I have had the opportunity to work on the situation with my boss and the resentments I've carried.  At first my thought led to questions like, how could this be happening to me?  Hadn't I been through enough?  Didn't I deserve to be treated equally and be judged on my merits?  Later my work turned towards things like, where could I have stuck up for my self more.  I believe we attract what we have in our lives and there was something about me that attracted one more sexist man into my life.  The process of writing my book has helped me get rid of that last little bit of victim I was holding on to.  Deep into my writing my boss was replaced with a women who, although only my boss for a short period of time, empowered me.  The fact that she demoted my prior boss and took away all of his direct reports was nice too.  Today I have a fair respectful male boss.  But the truth of it all is that from my despair came the strength and determination to follow my dream of telling my story and empowering women who experience abuse.

If you've read my book, stay tuned, I'm busy writing the rest of the story for you.  You won't believe what happens next…

 

SICK now available on Smashwords!

The day has come folks!  SICK has now been published on Smashwords for immediate download to your computer.  See the link to the left.  Stay tuned for Kindle, iBooks, and Barns and Noble.

eBook Editing http://cypresspr.com

Need an editor for your eBook?  Look no further! Cheri Young, founder of Cypress Marketing Communications can not only edit your book but she can write your press releases, built out website content, and manage your marketing communications platform.  Thank you Cypress Marketing for your partnership and expertise on the SICK book project!

Cypress was founded in 1999 by Cheryl Young, APR. Services provided include:

• Marketing communications program strategy, planning and execution

• Project management

• Writing and editing

• Creative (copy, graphic design)

• Collateral development (literature, brochures, video, exhibits)

• Presentation development and delivery

• Translating technical information into accessible marketing materials

Cheryl Young has over 20 years of experience specializing in full-service, integrated marketing communications programs, with a particular focus on environmental communications. Cypress has always been dedicated first and foremost to client service — nurturing positive, long-term client relationships, characterized by mutual trust and respect.

 

Narcissism- what is it really?

Excerpt from SICK

Someone told me Greg was narcissistic.  I wasn't really sure what narcissistic was when I first heard it.  Immediately I looked it up and it is simply defined as a personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness.  Well I guess Greg was egotistical.  He definitely had an exaggerated estimate of his abilities.  There were times when a drug run would come off really smoothly and he would boast about how good he was at what he was doing when I was the one that ran all around and orchestrated the logistics.  He thought I was stupid and that he was the master of the world.  Constantly he reminded me, in great detail, of how stupid I was and why.  I really believed he was a lot smarter than me at the time.  Greg was vain.  He would dress himself up in the most expensive clothes with watches that cost thousands of dollars.  Then he would look in the mirror and admire himself.  Greg spared no expense in adorning himself with the best.  This all fed into his conceit.  And was he selfish?  Oh yes, to the extreme.

But all of this didn't really explain the depth of self that overwhelmed Greg.  And it wasn't always self-love, often it was self-hatred as well.  I looked further into this narcissistic thing and discovered the source of the name.  Narcissus was a character in Greek mythology.  He was a hunter known for his beauty and he rejected those who tried to love him.  A Greek goddess named Nemesis was deeply in love with Narcissus and was desperate for her love to be accepted and wanted by Narcissus.  One day while Narcissus was hunting in the woods Nemesis followed him and put a spell on him.  The spell would cause Narcissus to fall in love with the very next person he saw.  Nemesis was certain it would be her but before she could approach him, Narcissus bent down by a pool of water and saw a perfect reflection of himself, falling deeply in love with what he saw, himself.

Upon even further research I found that narcissism was also considered a personality disorder consisting of excessive preoccupation with power, prestige, and personal adequacy, and that there are varying severities.  Then I found it.  Pathological narcissism!  What stuck out to me the most and stopped me in my reading, more so than the character traits of blaming, self-absorbed, and intolerant, was this statement –unaware of others' needs and of the effect of their behavior on others.  What this told me was not that Greg didn't care about trying to be a good father but that he was not capable of providing the nurturing care and empathy that my Bubby so desperately needed from his father.  But again, on that beautiful blue-skied day at my secluded mountain home I didn't know any of this.  Not yet

Authority Publishing

Thanks to Stephanie Chandler at Authority Publishing for the great cover art and consulting.  Looking forward to continued partnership with my book project SICK.

http://authoritypublishing.com/