Spit and polish or spit and scowl?

This post is inspired by another blog post from writer Tony Noland, who was in turn inspired by the article, "Faking it : The art of perfection in social media", by Lauren Fisher. The article is talking about how many people are faking a more positive self-image than they ever would before, mostly for fear of turning people off of their "brand." Tony's post talks about the separation of a social life with a professional life, but I want to tackle this from my own perspective as an alternative indie in a landscape of indies. (Which I mean broadly to cover all indie artists in all media forms.)

For one thing, it should be obvious even with a casual glance through my posts that I have never been concerned with cultivating or projecting an image of moral goodness. Quite the opposite, I want you to understand my experiences so you grasp that I'm writing what I know, even if what I know is pretty damned disturbing by any rational definition.

I've tried labeling myself as an indie alternative writer, and I've tried to make clear how I'm covering the kinds of characters that other writers are perhaps afraid to tackle because they fear the heat of being told they've gone too far.

But for as much as I've told my audience how I want them to see me and my characters, I've had a third party narrative assigned to me that isn't remotely close to reality. When I violate the spirit of my "character" to outsiders, I get lectures about how I'm not promoting myself right, or how I'm not taking the right tone in presenting my case.

So to my mind, how this looks is, all of you people who choose to tell pretty lies to make fake friends are jumping on me for not drinking your Kool-Aid and joining your cult. And maybe that's not how it really is. I'm just saying, that's how it looks from my angle.

People are so concerned with what should be public and private, or what kind of attitude everyone should project, regardless of their product or shtick. If Poe and Howard were alive and online, they would be hounded by their friends and family to just cheer up and stop being a downer all the time. (Actually, I doubt Poe would be anything but a POD joke after y'all found out he married his cousin.) Even other people struggling under mental illnesses these days are ready to join in the fake positive vibes for the sake of making sales or friends. And some of the people saying "It's not all bad," I feel so bad for because they are deluded. It is bad for them; real, real bad, and they still won't stop with the positive vibes. It would be admirable if they didn't ruin it by lecturing me to do the same thing.

Anywho, I don't want friends that come from my online rambling. Or, I do, but not faceless online friends who like me just because they think I'm funny. Those kinds of friends can become disillusioned all too quickly when they realize my jokes about mental illness aren't just sarcasm. They assign a false value to me as a good person, and then everything I do that makes them uncomfortable is a tick off my virtual score. When I get close to the bottom of my quota, many people even write to me and warn me that I need to act right if I expect them to stick around. Again, to me, this is saying "I don't like the image you're projecting. Lie to me in a way that is pleasing or I will threaten to withhold sales."

When it comes to sales, I don't just want someone to buy my book and toss it in a pile just because we know each other. I have plenty of friends on Twitter who will never read my stuff because it isn't for them. I don't jump them and say "Hey, you, if we're REALLY good friends you'll read my stuff!" We can be friends even if they never check out a blurb. In fact, just recently someone said, "I don't think your books are right for me." And, knowing them, I agreed that I had nothing up their alley. And, we're still friends. Gaspers.

Only a shallow person would say, "Hey, I pretended to like you, so now you should do the same and buy my books!" Despite my jokes, I am not a shallow person. In fact, it should be clear that I have frightening depth in areas most people will never explore in person.

When someone buys my book, I don't want them going in expecting to read about heroes and good guy versus bad values. Unfortunately, I can't convince people to leave their preconceptions at the door. So even if I say "this is a book about a monster," many people ignore me and think I'm just downplaying my stuff. That I'm not seems to be an even ruder shock. But I can't write about the stories that appeal to mainstream folks. That's not the life I lived, and it's not the kind of stories I want to tell.

But, the thing is, even if fake positive online behavior is destructive and a little neurotic, many folks have taken me to task because my choice to be more open and honest is seen as negative and harmful to my "brand." I really don't see that. I write about troubled but self-aware people and disturbing subjects. I claim to be cut from the same cloth, so I fail to see how my behavior is disparaging my online character.

I try to keep my work from being too dark by injecting my quirky humor into my stories, but once you get past the jokes, the subject matter I'm exploring should make a reader squeamish, even in my lighter works. I'm an alternative indie writer, a rank amateur who would never pass myself off as avante garde or ground-breaking. But I CAN say I'm doing something different. Whether that something different can be seen as something helpful by others is not for me to say. I can only offer what I have inside me.

While everyone else works on perfecting that great first page to suck readers in instantly with a likeable main character, I've instead been working on perfecting the slow, awkward introduction to someone you probably wouldn't want to know in real life. While others cultivate an air of knowledge about their promotional methods, I'm the first to admit I don't have a clue what I'm doing. And while others work so hard to present themselves as wholesome, trustworthy professionals, I'm still wearing my spikiest armor with my war face on. Like my aunt Joyce sometimes said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me!"

And maybe I'm doing it wrong, and all those people spit polishing their images online are doing it right. But while I was being nice and blowing sunshine up peoples' butts, I got worse traffic, and worse sales. These days while I'm being a whiny whiner and applying tarnish to my image, I'm making regular sales each month. Just, you know, not on the titles I'm promoting. (Still don't grasp that, but thanks for the sales anyway.)

It does often bug me that my negative missives generate more attention than anything good I do. But hell, I'm not a good person. If I complain at you to look only at my good side, I shouldn't be surprised if you have to struggle to think of something nice to say. I'm like Halliburton asking, "Hey, can't you find something nice to say about the rape clause in our contract? You should tell people about how many men it's helped to get laid!"

But maybe there's a middle ground somewhere in between, where I'm not all doom and gloom 100% of the time, and my readers can one day accept that "alternative indie" isn't just my attempt at a pompous individual streak.