Christopher J.H. Jones's Blog, page 9

Forgot Why I Was Doing This

So, as noted previously, I entered a couple of contests and didn’t win them.  No, worse than that.  There are several grades of winning for stuff like this, after all.  There’s the actual winning of it – where someone asks to see more of your work and/or offers representation to you as an agent or an editor – then there’s the “I loved your work, you were very close” rejection, followed by the “your pitch was very strong, here’s where you could have improved it just a little”, and even the “intriguing idea, but you need to fix some things”.  All of those are wins, although admittedly they don’t feel a lot like it at the time.  They give you feedback on where you can improve, which is a victory of sorts.

No, I got “interesting idea, I don’t think it’s right for me,” and nothing more.  This is the lowest level of winning, below which one cannot go.  I had three potential mentors selected; only one of them bothered even to send me the above form rejection.  If it is impossible to enter a contest like this and lose, and there’s some support for that position, I nevertheless came as close to losing it as it is possible to come.

This was confidence-shaking, as I outlined before.  I believe that ultimately, knowing the truth is better than not knowing it, which means that the revelation that my writing is not actually that good, and that I do not know how to effectively pitch it so that people are interested in reading it, will do me good eventually.  In the moment, though, it was a hard blow.  I’ve never had an article rejected.  Everything I’ve written and submitted for two years has been published.  Clearly I got a little bit outsized opinion of how good I was.

Learning that I’m not actually very good was hard.  But what was worse, I entered the contests and started following them as if they mattered.  The temptation, when you chase an agent or a book deal, is to think that an agent or a book deal is critically important, and to live or die on the acceptance or rejection of the pitch you make to acquire one.  I fell right into this trap.  It’s taken me two weeks to understand it and I haven’t come back out of the maw even yet.

The truth is that I’m probably not as good as I thought I was.  But then, I knew I would have to get better anyway.  I wasn’t writing so that I could get an agent, or a book deal, not that I would have said no to those things, but they weren’t the point of the exercise.  I wrote because I had stories to tell.  I wrote because I wanted to.  I wrote because I’m a better person when I do.

And I forgot this.

If that’s why I’m writing, then it doesn’t matter if no one is interested in representing my work to publishers.  It doesn’t matter if my novel is publishable.  It doesn’t even matter if no one wants to read it at all.  I forgot.  I’m writing because I have things to say.

I still have things to say.  I probably ought to start writing again.

Well, I Made the Suit.

There are two innovative competitions going on right now (one of them just finished) that bring agents and writers together to see if the magic will happen.  Call them speed-dating for single writers.  One of them, #pitchwars, involves sending in a query letter and the first five pages of the (finished) manuscript to a mentor (up to three, out of 31 possibilities), who then selects from the submissions and chooses one writer to work with for a month to get the manuscript ready for bidding on by agents.  I entered this competition, but I know that I will not win it.  The commercial aspect of the process, needing to find a manuscript that will sell, means that my slightly cross-genre book is unlikely to be chosen.  And it’s too long.  Kiss of death.  Though the results of the competition won’t be announced until next week, I know quite well that I won’t be one of the winners.

The last three days there has been another competition going on, a really innovative idea called #PitchMAS.  In this one, day one the writers can have their pitches critiqued and edited, day two the 35-word pitches are made on a blog, and bid on by agents, and day three the competition is on Twitter, at 140 characters only.  Agents troll the hashtag and request additional pages when they see something tasty.

I participated in this last one, too.  It was, in a lot of ways, very fun.  I met a huge number of really interesting people, writers like me, hoping to get their work noticed.  I commented on many of the pitches; there were a great number of books there that I think I’d like to read, and I told the writers so.  In the end, probably a third of the consistent pitchers got hits from agents.  Gratifying.  It doesn’t mean a lot, as there is no commitment implied or expressed, but it’s a start.  It says “I want to hear what you have to say,” and that is powerful stuff.  Heady.

I know from hearsay.  I didn’t get picked.  I pitched fairly regularly, five or six different ways – a useful process all by itself – but never got a reply or a query.  Not even a “hey, I liked that” from one of my fellow writers.  So I content myself with knowing that I tried, and that I did the best I could.  It is cold comfort.

One of the hardest parts of writing is being excluded from the party.  As excited as I was about my fellows being chosen – many, many of them deserved it far more than I do, and I am genuinely pleased that someone noticed their brilliance – there was still part of me wondering why my pitches were not good enough.  There isn’t any way to know.  Sometimes it’s the wrong genre for the audience.  Sometimes the pitch itself isn’t compelling.  With no feedback – and the only feedback Twitter contests give are yes or no – it’s impossible to know.  I can work on it, and I can ask, and perhaps I will.  Seems simple, right?  Let me ask you, then, when was the last time you went to someone and said, “my child doesn’t seem to be doing as well as I’d like.  Will you come and look at what I do as a parent and tell me where I’m screwing up?”

You have never done this.  You resent the implication that you should have to do this.  I do too.  I’m struggling to find the humility necessary.

I wrote a while back that humiliation is not humility.  One may choose to be proud even when humiliated.  Well, I am humiliated, and trying to choose to be humble, weighing the cost of destroying something that I thought had value, and starting over again, against just doing the things that so far have made us reasonably well off. Especially since the starting over again has no promises of success whatsoever.  Just as this attempt did not.

The emotional toll is impossible to describe, except in metaphor.  Remember the first broom lesson in Harry Potter?  All the kids are there, first time with a broom, and some kids get it right away.  Some kids struggle a little (even Hermione).  And then there’s Neville.  We’re meant to focus on Harry, who absolutely deserves just a little something to go right, but I watch that scene and my eyes are on Neville, there on the ground, with a rogue broom nearly pantsing him in front of everyone.

Similarly, I’d like to celebrate your book deal, sincerely I would, and in my best moments I even wholeheartedly do.  But (to use just one recent example) you’re nineteen years old.  Forgive me – please, really, forgive me – if I wonder whether your paroxysms of joy and relief aren’t just a weensy bit…what?  Ridiculous? Pathetic? Offensive?  “I’ve waited for this day all my life” is a lot more compelling when you’ve lived one.  To be asked to prom is awesome.  To not be asked is excruciating.  Until the latter has happened to you, I doubt that you understand how lucky you are that the former ever occurred.

I write mortgages for a living, and I’m good at it.  I make a good living and I do it by helping people, which I’m pleased about.  Recently, I’ve been finding myself in meetings checking Twitter to see how the other entrants to these contests are doing.  It gives me a secret identity, almost.  I was involved in things the others were not.  Creative, awesome things.

So I made the super suit, and I went to the party with all the other superheroes, and discovered, by the end, that I didn’t actually have any super powers.  The other kids are flying and shooting fireballs and electrocuting bad guys, while I…well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?  I don’t know what my super power is, let alone if it’s truly super.  I run pretty fast, and I can jump high.  I thought that was good.  It’s not, though.  It’s just not.  Try again, obviously.  Of course I will.

Today, though, I’m going back to work as Clark Kent.  I can still do my job as a mild-mannered loan originator.  It’s still honorable work.  I’m happy to have it.  But some of the thrill is less now, more fragile. Where I was excited before, now I’m hesitating, unsure of myself. Today, right now, I wonder.  When I remove my glasses, can I still fly?

Will I ever?

Phase Two Begins.

When I started writing, I knew it would be difficult.  It’s hard to write.  Constantly accessing the voices in your head, asking them to speak, and transcribing when they do is the type of behavior that gets many people arrested.  Maintaining the firewall between what really is, and what must seem so real that people will believe it, is complicated and exhausting.  Pouring time into the process is necessary, and since most of us are adults, we have to borrow that time from other things, usually things we either enjoy or are constrained to do in order to eat.

In point of fact, I wasn’t at all sure that I could do it.  As exhaustively chronicled here, I love to write, but I am not a fanatically disciplined person.  Since discipline is even more critical to writing success than creativity, I was reluctant to proclaim that I would be able to be a writer for more than a month or two – since I had never been able to do it before.

Turns out, I was able to.  I do have the necessary discipline, all things being equal, to be a writer.  It impinges on my family life to an alarming degree, and it causes other problems that may or may not make it worth it.  But I can do it.  That, at least, I know.

Being a writer and being an author, though, are two different things, to me.  I am a writer, because I write.  I am not an author – by my own very personal and subjective definition – until someone publishes my books.  Someone not me, or my father, bless his soul.  I would like to be an author, I think.  The path to that is rocky.

One of the ways through it is to sign with an agent, who then represents the work to publishers.  I like the concept of agents, as I use that same essential model in lots of other places in my life (as a loan originator, I am the agent for my clients on their mortgage file).  I think, for some of my work, that I would like to have representation.  At the very least, I want to understand how that part of the industry works, and not just from hearsay.

Repairers is good enough, I think, to make it over the bar and into real publication.  Alpha reading on it is supposed to be complete today, though I can already tell that most of my readers won’t get their edits to me all at once, today or any other day.  So a little at a time.  Part of me is excited for this.  Part of me dreads it.  But I have to do it.

If nothing comes of the book, and it very well may not, then I’ll go the Jones Ink route and have the book published under my own imprint.  I’m going to collect rejections, though, first.  Meanwhile we’re about halfway finished with Steal Me Out, Steal Me Back, novel number 3.  And the final edits on Producing on Purpose are done, so that comes out next week.  And, and, and.

Wish me luck.

 

 

You Feel Good, and Other Lessons from a Month with No Leg

I had my knee crushed about six weeks ago.  Tomorrow I go see if the doctor will let me try walking again,  so we will shortly enter a new phase of life, and before we do, I want to tell you some things I learned about you while I couldn’t walk.

Yep.  Stuff I learned about you.  Because, see, I was you a while ago, and I haven’t been for some time now, so I can see the contrast.  I had an out-of-your-body experience, which I shall now tell you about.

1. You feel good.  No, wait.  You feel fantastic.  You do not realize this, because you think you have aches and pains and an upset stomach.  But the truth is, you feel absolutely incredibly well.  Please try some experiments with me, and you will know I am right.

First, bend one of your knees.  Either one.  See how it does that?  How all the muscles and tendons and ligaments do the thing they do and the lower leg moves toward the upper leg almost by magic?  See how that does not hurt?

Now bend an elbow.  Wiggle your fingers.  Breathe in and out.  Smile.  Frown.  Stick out your tongue.  Tap your foot.  None of these things hurt.  You can do them over and over and it works, every single time, painlessly.

Stand up.  WALK.  See how that goes?  Do you have any idea how impossible it is that you can do this?  You’re balancing an entire person on two little tiny platforms, and moving that person around, and yet the tower of person above does not fall over.  And again, please note, it does not hurt.

Without in any way minimizing the fact that some of you actually DO hurt when you do some of these things, by far and away the vast majority of you do not.  The truth is not that you have a bellyache or a hangnail.  The truth is that you feel so bleeping great you can’t even process it because you would be constantly laughing for joy.  Which also, let me point out, does not hurt.

2. You have acres of free time.  You do.  I know, again, you’re thinking to yourself that you’re busy, and maybe you are, but that’s easily remedied.  You really have acres and acres of time, so much time you can’t, seriously, fill all of it.  You will try.  I know you.  You will even reach moments when you think you have done it, but you haven’t, and you never will.

I know this because I have acres of free time.  Yes, I do.  Yes, with my eight children and my three businesses and my writing and speaking and teaching and my three choirs and all the messy rest, I have so much free time I have a hard time figuring how to justify to my God the wasting of it.

24 hours is a gigantic, incredible amount of time.  You get one set every rotation of the earth (give or take, science geeks).  Every rotation.  You cannot possibly fill it all, even if you sleep a lot (and again, I know this from recent experimentation).

If you want proof, break your leg in a major way.  What happens is this: all your life gets emptied out in a pile on the floor in front of the chair you have to sit in because otherwise your rib gets dislocated and you can’t breathe, which is a serious problem for both 1 and 2 above.  That’s what happens.  As if your life were a box of cereal and it was all in this neat container and now it’s in a pile on the floor, mixed together like the pink hearts and yellow moons and khaki filler bits of Lucky Charms.

Sublesson A: You do not really know what bits are what.  Some of the things you thought were the marshmallow treats turn out to be filler bits, and vice-versa.  When they’re in a pile before you, inert, waiting for you to pick them up and put them back in the box, you find that you don’t know which to start with.

Sublesson B: When you put them back, all the ones you actually need to, there will still be a gigantic pile of them on the floor that you realize you don’t know why they were ever in the box.  And that sentence is not English, and yet you understood exactly what I said.  See how incredibly great you feel?

As impossible as you are going to tell me this is, the fact is that you can do this without having to have your tibial plateau crushed.  You can, in fact, pour your entire life onto the floor and only pick up the bits you really want to.

Sublesson C: Almost none of the bits will realize that you dumped them.  You think far, far too much of yourself.  You’re so ridiculously not important to pretty much everything that if you wished, you could give yourself a complex, but you won’t do that, because you left that bit on the floor.

Sublesson D: SOME of the bits really need you, and they are not the bits you think.  Here’s the fun part: they will let you know which bits they are.  You don’t have to worry about it.

Back to the main point.  When you have an empty schedule, you can fill it with nothing.  Nothing is a very useful thing to fill your schedule with, and I recommend it.  For me, it was forced, because my entire schedule, routine, everything right down to where I put my wallet and how I pray to God was based on mobility.  So I stopped everything.  My schedule was blank.  What I added back was only what I had to, and not even all of that, because I couldn’t do even what I was sure was absolutely critical.

I was wrong about almost everything.  So now I can sit at my kitchen table and write this blog post and not stress about it, because I have had it demonstrated to me that I don’t know a thing about what is and is not critical.

There turned out to be so much time in my super-busy life that once I added back all the bits I really liked eating, and all the bits that were important and couldn’t live without me, I found that I could still sit for hours and contemplate the summer sun.  You can too.

3. You can do what you want.  Yes, you can.  This is belabored over and over in the blogosphere, but most people don’t mean it the way I mean it, so just a couple points of clarification.

You cannot do everything you want, and you cannot do what is impossible, and there are impossible things, regardless of what you hear.  That said, you can choose to do what you most want.  You are not constrained.  I will take you through a personal example so that you can see what I mean.

I want to write.  Writing does not pay me a lot yet.  I have eight children and a wife I expect to be canonized any day now, and they need food and clothing.  Therefore I do not want to write all the time, because I want to feed my family more.  See?  Contrariwise, I do not want to do mortgages for the rest of my life.  One, because it’s not that enjoyable, and two because the government makes it daily less and less enjoyable, and one day soon will make it impossible for people like me.  However, I want to feed my family, so I continue to do mortgages, and I will as long as what I want lines up like that.  But not one minute longer.

Here’s the kicker: I probably could make a lot more money doing mortgages, in the short, medium, and long term, than I can writing.  But I don’t want to do that many mortgages.  The marginal benefit of that money beyond the just-over-subsistence level is almost zero. I now refuse to chase clients I don’t personally like (or who don’t like me).  Almost all of my work is with people I know, and people they know, that I can build a relationship with that makes both of our lives better, with the mortgage as a side-effect.  In other words, I do what I want, but at different points on the time and money spectrum, what I want changes.  It does for you, too.

Sublesson A: You’re doing much more of the work you don’t like than you have to.  You’re worrying a lot more about the money you might leave on the table than the life you’re not putting on it.  You do not need all the stuff you have.  You would be happier if you traded it for more time to do what you really want to.

Sublesson B: You do not know what you really want to do.  Yes, Lorri, I hear you.  YOU do.  I get that.  But you, all you other people, you don’t.  You really don’t.

Two days before the knee incident, my wife asked me what I really wanted to do, using the “if you had a million dollars in cash, what would you do?” scenario.  I struggled with that.  I hadn’t actually looked up from what I thought I had to do long enough to see if a) I still really had to do it and b) I still wanted to.  38 hours later I got to find out, because I could only pick just a couple things to do every day.  We did not starve.  I found that 80% of the things I was doing were not just soul-crushing, but totally failing to produce the things I was doing them for.  I was doing neither what I ought, nor what I liked, with apologies to Screwtape.

I was a hymn-singing, Bible-loving, Rotary-going small businessman who was living the dream, and I actually did not know what the heck I really wanted to do.  I had to reverse-engineer from what I wanted to be, to what I had to do to become that.  There are lots of techniques.  Pick one and use it.  You’ll find it uncomfortable at first, because those are muscles you haven’t used, sometimes since you were a kid.  You may find, as I did, that for DAYS you say things like “I can’t believe this.  I don’t actually know what I want.”  My have-to had essentially crushed the air out of my want-to.  I had to re-inflate it.  But it will re-inflate, if you give it time, and you’ll learn interesting things when it does.

So rejoice, my friend.  You feel great.  You have tons of free time.  And you can do with it what you want.  What else, really, do you need?

Maybe it’s just me. It’s gotta be me, right?

Yesterday my family watched a CNBC program on an interesting project called the 20 Under 20 Fellowship sponsored by the Thiel Foundation, a creation of Peter Thiel, one of the masterminds (or at least most visible beneficiaries) of Facebook (I’m not linking to that; you just came from there).  On its face, the entire thing looked like a laudable, even exemplary idea: take the entrepreneurial explosiveness of teenagers and use it to fuel new ideas and companies, with the inventors/thinkers themselves as the driving force.  The twenty winners get a whole range of prizes and perks, from networking with the Silicon Valley elite to investment capital to $100,000 in cash.  They get to work full time on their dream for the next two years, at least.  Which means, of course, that they can’t be going to school.

Ay, as Hamlet would say, there’s the rub.

This Fellowship has gotten some ugly, vitriolic criticism from people that apparently think the program amounts to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.  There were, on the show we watched, several people, parents, some of the kids, and others, that were not just skeptical but downright hostile.  “Nothing can ever replace a degree,” one of them said.  “I’m really not happy about so-and-so dropping out of college.  That’s a pretty big sacrifice,” said another.

Excuse me?

Background and biases: I am a teacher of history and politics (and music!) at two private schools.  I have a B.A. in Classical Civilization/Roman History.  My father has a Masters in Education from Stanford and a B.A. in History from Columbia, and teaches government and politics at two local universities.  My mother still teaches sixth grade at the age of 72.  We are as pro-education a family as one could find.

I think the quality of education in the United States is fairly good, considering the massive bureaucracy that has accreted around it.  Our universities are still excellent, especially the graduate programs, as evidenced by the fact that the entire world sends its best students here whenever possible.  The entire system costs too much, however.  Cartoonishly too much.  I also believe that the purpose of education has been buried so deep that it will be next-to-impossible to exhume, as this show demonstrated to me forcefully.

What is the purpose of an education?  If I were to ask this in survey form, and provide several possible answers from “to give one options in life” to “to get a good job”, what we would see is 85% of the latter answer.  It is the boldly stated purpose of American education to qualify our kids to get a job.  Once, the idea was that an education was the purpose of life itself, the entire reason for our being on this earth in the first place.  No matter what your religion, you can’t think you’re going to take anything else with you when you die, can you?  Now, though, learning to think, to analyze, to appreciate, is just an adjunct to schooling.  What matters is a) the grade and b) the job at the end.

Two problems, right away: 1) “grade” by its own definition is supposed to be used as a unit of separation into good, bad and ugly, and 2) there aren’t any jobs.

This leads to some interesting results (I really am coming back to the 20 Under 20 Fellowship).  Eventually, since the only things that matter are the grades and the job, you get grade inflation, where every student is an A student (and where anything less than an A might as well be an F), meaning that, as Dash says in The Incredibles, since everyone is special, no one is.  The other thing that happens is that kids get to the end of the pipeline and have to spend summer Occupying Wall Street, because they can’t get a job, and they’ve apparently been taught that it was their right to have one.  Someone should be forced to give them one.  Look, I have a degree in Comparative Literature from Brown.  You must employ me, despite the fact that I can do no useful work.

How, when there are four B.A.s on every streetcorner, does one then secure one of those jobs out there?  One must differentiate oneself.  As the current thinking goes, two ways to do this, one of them useless and one destructive.  First, get perfect grades (useless).  That doesn’t work, because that’s what everyone else is doing, and frankly, the hiring manager at Deloitte doesn’t care if you were sixth in your class at Princeton or sixtieth.  You’re massively overqualified and shockingly underexperienced regardless.  Second, get more education.  Get a Masters.  It will take an MBA to get a job as a night shift manager at Wendy’s, one of these days.  The reason this is destructive is the huge amount of debt ordinarily required to get one of these even-shinier pieces of paper.  Student debt of $250,000 to $400,000 (which many of these kids admit they are facing) cannot be justified by ANY possible salary.

So here we are, and along comes this fellow that proposes something different.  Why not, he asks, take a great idea that could be productive right now, and do something with it right now?  What is the purpose of an education?  If it’s to get a job, why not get a job right now?

Parents and educators, at least the ones that were quoted in the program, cannot see this.  They still appear to think that one must use one of the destructive or useless paths through the educational system.

But of course this is nonsense.  Most people, even most really smart people, won’t work in their field of study their whole careers.  Liberal arts majors, like me, become disoriented if they work in their field of study for ANY of their career.  And did I mention that there are no jobs?  For new college graduates, by far the best possible job security is not the degree, but the ability – and above all the willingness – to make a job for themselves.  To innovate, to create, to produce.  Not to Occupy.

This really is an option.  I’m serious.  It’s possible to start a business, although I do have to say it’s a lot harder than it ever has been, even during the Great Depression, when economic hardship wasn’t compounded by fanatical zoning and other regulatory Nazis.  The ability to start a business is the best job security there is.  It’s not close.  It’s not debatable.

But Heaven forbid a kid should get some hands-on tutoring in that from someone that made a billion dollars at it.  Much better to be taking classes in theoretical physics from a professor that has never had a job outside the friendly walls of the Physics Building.  Right?  Um.

I should also point out something one of the kids said, which is that once you have seventy or a hundred grand in student loan debt, you can’t start a business.  You can’t go to work for a startup.  These kids may have in their heads a cure for cancer, and we’re telling them they better stay locked in a system that practically guarantees the they’ll never get it out of their heads and into practice.  I hear this and I wonder if we don’t deserve all the misery we’re getting.

I have an advantage in adopting a variable way of thinking about an educational path.  I left college for two years.  I didn’t go start a business, and nobody gave me a hundred grand, and I didn’t hobnob with Silicon Valley entrepreneur millionaires, so my experience wasn’t terrible analogous to what these kids will have, but the two years I spent – on my own dime – living in communist Hungary and eating wienies roasted on a fork over the gas stove was pretty educational all the same.  I have to say this: of all the education I ever received, the cheapest and most practical was the two years I spent in Hungary.   Nothing that I learned in college came close.  Nothing I learned in high school came close.  The best education I ever received was not in a school.

Oh, and this: they took me back.  No, really.  When I was done with my two years overseas, the university readmitted me and then threw about a year’s worth of credit at me for being trilingual all of a sudden.  My father lost three academic years at Columbia slogging around the hills and vales of France (according to him, best thing he ever did educationally).  Columbia took him back.  Not one of these kids is going to have a momentary difficulty getting a degree should that become a necessity, or even interesting.  You can get back on the train.  People do it all the time.  There’s not even the smallest chance that a kid that wins this prize is going to lose anything – ANYTHING – by doing this fellowship for two years.

These kids have an irreplaceable opportunity to do something amazing.  For instance, one of these kids built a fusion reactor in the garage and became the youngest person ever to achieve nuclear fusion, at sixteen.  This kid cannot, he MUST not, be allowed to think that he has to go to class for a predetermined amount of time to become something, that he will be a failure if nobody hands him a piece of paper that he will put in a box in the attic and never see again until he moves from one house to another.  These kids have ideas that can make tens of thousands – millions – of people better off right now.  By all means, in a world that is drowning in hopelessness and misery, let’s make sure none of those ideas get any airtime, at least not until the kids have had a chance to take Art History 102.

I believe in a lifetime education.  I do not believe that I have to get it at an accredited university.  I begin to believe that I CANNOT get it at an accredited university.

There is a new baseline in the US economy, and we are on it.  This is average.  This is normal.  Barring the truly unlikely willingness of the US electorate to bite the fiscal bullet, we are not going back to the way things were.  The only way for the teen of today to make sure he’s got productive work to do is to do productive work, job or not, as much as possible.  To me, the 20 Under 20 Fellowship is one of the most creative ways to teach that.

Education in the US has several problems, and they are going to be difficult to overcome.  There is more student loan debt in the US than credit card debt.  The value of a college education and the cost of it are rapidly losing touch one with another.  Driving this is the maniacal insistence on a degree as the base qualification for citizenship, almost, in the American polity.  It has to stop.  Shortly, of its own weight, it will stop.  It won’t be pretty when it does.

I applaud Peter Thiel, himself a refugee from the educational conveyor-belt, for trying something new in the midst of a system increasingly broken.  I wish him the best, and hope that from this Fellowship come some of the most world-changing ideas ever put into practice.  If the concept itself has started a discussion about what is truly important in an education, then it’s off to a good start.

3 Lessons to Learn

Warning: this post is bitingly, sarcastically, and nastily political.  If you take offense, I don’t blame you one bit.

There are three things I learn, and that I think we all should learn, from today’s Supreme Court decision about the national health insurance bill, called (erroneously but usefully) Obamacare.

1. We have to grow up.  A lot of people I know have been expecting the Supreme Court to fix something that is, let’s face it, a huge expansion of federal authority and control over our lives.  But they didn’t.  According to Chief Justice Judas Roberts, the authority to tax us for NOT doing something is perfectly within the power of Congress.

Therefore, however, it is within OUR power not to be taxed like that.  We control the Congress.  It matters whom we elect.  If we get law like this, we asked for it.  It’s time to grow up and start taking this politics thing seriously.

2. The political situation is different, now, fundamentally.  Congress has never before taxed the absence of something.  Now they can.  Don’t eat your broccoli?  Tax.  Too many super-size meals? Tax (don’t think that Mayor Jozef Bloomberg of New Stalingrad hasn’t thought of this).  Congress has, in the past, used the withholding of federal funds to compel states to behave a certain way (55mph speed limit, for instance), and they did that again with the Medicare expansion, which is also in this bill (see below), but this time they’ve mandated a behavior by taxing the absence of it.

Apropos of this and #1 above, we now can give up the pretense that the Constitution is going to protect us from tyrannical government.  It will not.  We will protect ourselves, or we will have no protection at all.  This was always so, but several million people are just realizing it this morning.  On both sides of the argument, let me add as a warning.

3. We’ve stepped off the cliff at last.  Greece, Spain, France, etc. are in the early stages of complete meltdown economically.  This means COMPLETE meltdown, with the cessation of government services and the abandonment of civilization as we know it.  France has recently doubled down on the policies that got them into this mess in the first place, and is trying to fix double-digit unemployment by raising the minimum wage, sort of like using donuts to give you the energy to go running.  The worst part of Obamacare politically is the individual mandate, but the worst part fiscally is the expansion of Medicare.  Medicare will now, with its partner Social Security, bankrupt the United States.  There’s no way out of that except repeal.

One of the reasons I like sports is that there is a winner at the end, determined by the score.  There isn’t any wiggle room.  If I’m faster than you, the clock will show it.  It doesn’t matter whom you’re connected to, or whether you’re prettier or richer.  If I can outscore you, I can win.  The only thing like that in politics is money.  Ask Stockton, CA what happens if the bill comes due and you can’t pay it.  That is happening in Athens, and it will happen here, state by state.  I actually think someone will go down the tubes before California, but they will go, especially now.  There isn’t any more money.  They cannot get it from taxes.  Tax increases on this economy will be revenue-negative.  We’ve reached the top of the Laffer Curve.

The good news is that now people can see that we are over the edge.  Some will not care, and those people will vote for Obama.  Some will, and they’ll vote for someone else (mostly Romney).  We will have, in November, a good old-fashioned argument.

May the best man win.  But more than that, God help us all.  We need it.

I’m a Believer

Saturday I served as a judge for the Draper’s Outstanding Teen Pageant, part of the Miss America pageant system.

It’s my second time as a pageant judge, and I have to say, I am a true believer in the pageant system, at least the one done by Miss America.  Like a lot of men, I had a really screwed up idea about how the system functions and what it’s for.  I see the bikini shots of the contestants, and figure this is about cheesecake.

Nah.

Now, look, obviously there’s a component of the competition – a major component – that is about how the contestant looks.  In the Miss competition (as we in the biz call it), there is a swimsuit portion of the competition.  One of my co-judges was a former Miss Utah and the winner of the Miss America swimsuit competition at the big pageant.  Nice gal.  I liked her.  It is absolutely true that beauty is a key component of the competition.

It’s also true, though, that not only is it not the most important part of it, it is not important by itself in any context.  It is much more of a by-product than the point of the pageant itself.  I mean this sincerely.  The contestant that is now the reigning Miss Draper’s Outstanding Teen is a delightful girl that was not the most beautiful girl on the stage.  There were a bevy of very lovely young ladies there.  Any one of them would have well represented the city.  But the winner has to be so, so much more.  This winner was.

The first attendant was absolutely brilliant in her interview and hit the only home run in the on-stage question.  She’s pretty.  It’s unlikely that you’d choose her as a beauty queen, however, on first acquaintance.  Only after you look at her long record of service in the community and hear her discourse on Multiple Sclerosis, its effects and diagnoses, and see her exceptionally athletic dance routine, will you say, “this is a winner.”  But she is.

The second attendant is probably the most unlikely pageant winner I’ve ever judged.  She is, first off, short.  This is not an asset.  By short, I mean 5′ at the most.  She is a brunette.  Her hair is pixie short as well.  She has a bubbly, almost giggly personality.  But she scored very high in the talent competition, where she covered for a not-spectacular voice by lighting up the stage with her infectious personality.  She was Miss Congeniality, as voted by the contestants, but all five judges would have given it to her as well.  She won on force of character and personality.  She’s one of the most likable people in the world, in my estimation.  Oh, she’s cute, too, but she’s not beautiful in the pageant-style you’re thinking of.

The young lady that belonged on a poster, who came out in an evening gown that is still making my heart race, who was voted Most Photogenic, did not place.  She competed, and she did very well.  But she got no crown.

The fact is that the level of skill required to perform in the pageant with any chance of victory is incredibly high.  The average person on the street – I mean ANY age, and ANY street – simply can’t do it.  I was a very accomplished teen.  I won awards and did lots of community stuff, and I’m telling you, had I been female, I would have been crushed in even the least of the competitions I’ve seen.  I just don’t have the level of expertise talent-wise, or the service resume that would make me competitive, even if I were Adonis, which of course I am not.

I had my wife and daughters there in the audience for the pageant, and I was proud that they were there.  One, at least, of them intends to compete one day.  I think she should.  Unless she runs for Senate, she will never have a tougher speaking performance than the private interview, where five accomplished and intelligent judges grill her about everything from disease to social media to politics.  For ten minutes.  Just you, no notes, nothing, for ten minutes.  No idea what is going to be asked of you.  With people writing things and comparing you to a dozen others.  It’s the job interview from Hell.  If you can ace that – and a couple of the ladies absolutely did – nothing like that will ever scare you again.  If you can connect with five strangers in a terrifically stressful situation, you can do practically anything.

That’s what I get from these pageants.  Yes, the contestants tend to be beautiful.  But they’re expressing on the outside what they are on the inside.  They’re beautiful outside because they’re beautiful people.  Five minutes in the interview room will show you this.  You fall in love with who they are, not what they are.  My hat is off to every one of them that had the guts to try it.  So few do.

I love being a pageant judge, and I recommend to you, if you have a traditional, this-is-exploitation idea about how they work, you try it one day.  You’ll find you’re just dead wrong.  I did.

Milestones

Several milestones to talk about.  This has been a big week.

Last week, I had an epiphany that led to the creation of a book plan for the nonfiction books.  It was triggered by the comment my son made to me that I blogged about in Encouragement’s Awesome Power.  It made so much sense to me to look for the invisible rewards that were available for free, everywhere, in every activity I was engaged in.

Over the weekend, as I considered that epiphany and the consequences of it.  I know I have a living to make, a business to run, and a lot of obligations that come with those things.  And yet that’s not what I’m here for.  I’m not here to run a business, except as that business is part of what I’m supposed to be doing, that makes me what I’m supposed to be.  The success of that business is not my job.  To a large extent, I haven’t any control over it.  All I can do is the work.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past while not really being able to access what I actually want, because I thought of that as being mostly irrelevant.  There were things I had to do.  I had to make a living.  Period.  That meant that I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted, so what I wanted didn’t matter.

Well, it does.  It does matter.  And I have a certain obligation to pay attention to what I want as an indicator of what I should be doing.

I want to write.  I do.  It’s not just something I can do, it’s something I MUST do, so I am going to do it. It occurred to me that I had a book arc for my nonfiction series Knights of Insanity, and I might as well have one for the nonfiction series too, since there is a logical progression of those ideas, too.

So Even Your Mother is out – now also available in paperback – and the next book is How Not to Suck, which is 90% written and just has to be second-edited.  Then there’s Oiling the Machine, which is 30% written, and the fourth book becomes Seeing the Invisible Man.  The last one is Far Green Country, but that one might be a standalone.  Regardless, there is a draw to putting this kind of arc together, as the project takes on momentum of its own.  It’s exciting to move from one to the other.

I don’t know if there’s anything that will happen from all this.  I might not sell more than a few books here and there.  But I will be writing them.  I will.  This is actually going to happen.

And I published Even Your Mother in paperback.  A real book.  I’ll have more on that milestone, and what I learned from it, later.

Encouragement’s Awesome Power

This morning, my wife slept in (she had the night shift, and there are sick kids), thus I drew the early shift which includes breakfast and getting the kids out the door to school.  After hunting for several minutes for the 5-year-old’s shoes (out by the trampoline, which I really ought to have been smart enough to think of), and with the ride to school honking in the driveway, I bent down to tie up the laces and get him out the door.

And my sweet child looks at me and says, “you can do it, Dad.”

For me, tying shoes is a last-century skill.  Been doing it for roughly 40 years (although at 35 I got tired of tying grannies and retaught myself to tie square bows instead).  Not a new thing and not something I think of as difficult.

But Thanner is 5.  Tying shoes is a wondrous thing, not at all certain of success on every attempt.  For him, it’s a thing that needs a boost.  So he encouraged me.

For an instant, because I am not nearly as nice a fellow as I like to think, I wanted to say, “I don’t need cheering on, here.”  I was a little annoyed, because the morning rush was on in full and I was deeply cognizant of my lack of skill in handling it.  Finally we had reached something I knew I was going to be able to do, and here’s this kid acting like I need help.

Fortunately, I am not a total moron.  I bit that reply back, then realized that I did need encouragement.  I needed it, yes, in toto, for all the things I’m doing today, many of which are not excessively pleasant.  I needed it in the cosmic sense that everyone needs to hear he can do it from time to time.

But I realized something else then, too, and that was that for that one second, that task became better.  I don’t think I tied a better knot than I otherwise would have, but I know that I enjoyed the tying more than I would have expected.  I’d have tossed that off without a single thought, but then my dear son said, “you can do it, Dad.”

And I could, and the doing could mean something to me.  I’ve been thinking about that, before and since.  There’s something important going on here.

Four Things I Learned from the Book’s First Month

Even Your Mother Won’t Call You Back is one month old.  That milestone causes me to note a few things I’ve learned from being a new author.

One, it’s very possible to get an impressive Kindle rank without very many sales.  Kindle ranks the universe of books for all, but if you get into the top 60,000 or so it adds the primary category rank for your book (Advertising, for this one), and if you get into the rarified air of the top 40,000 it adds sub-categories.  I hit 30,000th at one point, and had two subcategories, in which my rank looked really great (23rd in Advertising).  Only Amazon and I know how few sales that actually represented.

Two, the source of sales has been noteworthy.  My family has bought, I think, two copies, not counting mine.  I have six sisters and a brother, mom and dad still living, and two brothers-in-law.  There are 20 people that are fans of the Chris Writes Facebook page.  Let’s just say that adding those people to my sales totals would substantially increase my rankings.  Few of the people in my natural market have been buyers, though I’ve had decent sales from my company, and some from Facebook friends.  If half my friends on Facebook were to buy the book in the next week, I’d make the top thousand with ease.  Getting them to do so, as the book predicts, is impossible, without burning valuable bridges.

Three, I’ve been gratified by the reaction to the book from people that don’t have to lie to me because I sign their checks or see them at reunions (not that I think they ARE lying to me).  Notably Melanee Evans and Sam Stoneman, people I know from very different arenas in my life, have had very similar responses.  Both positive, but both also with a faint air of surprise, and genuine enthusiasm, as if they bought the book somewhat out of a sense of duty, and were pleased to find that they actually liked it.

I understand this.  It’s sort of like going to a party, and the hostess hands you a cookie, and you take it and get ready to tell her how good it is.  But then it actually IS good, and you have to repeat yourself several times so that she will understand that you mean it, and aren’t just being polite.  It’s that sort of reaction.  It’s flattering.  I do think the book is good, and useful.  I hope it is.  It’s certainly been educational for me.

Lastly, it’s been interesting the level of deference I get and the credibility I am afforded, even by people that have done approximately the same thing I have.  It’s true, doing the book has taught me things that are quite valuable.  I know how to take a book, in essentially any format, and make it Kindle-ready in a couple of hours.  I have ISBN numbers I can use for subsequent titles, mine or those of others.  I know that process.  I can design covers.  I can upload and manage the title.  I’ve now written, edited, printed, formatted, e-published and sold a book, both IRL and on the web.  That makes me an expert.

Really, though, I guess it does.  Everyone wants to write a book.  No, that’s not right.  Everyone wants to have written a book.  The daunting part used to be getting a publisher and a contract, and the assumption was that most people didn’t write because they didn’t want to go through the hassle and then ultimately fail to get published.  There’s something to that, but not as much as I used to think.  Now, the publishing hurdle can be overcome with a couple of pieces of software and two hours’ work.  What stops people now is that they actually don’t write.  They think they want to; then it turns into work and they discover that the reason they aren’t writers is that they don’t like writing very much.

I’ve done it, though.  I got all the way through.  I thought it would be a monumental task, but like many other such tasks, I discover that it’s much more impressive on the front end than the back.  If you haven’t done it, it looks like a real bugger.  Once you have, though, it just looks like work, and not particularly hard work, at that.  I get a lot of people giving me credit, more than I deserve, I believe.  Just because I FINISHED.