First up, I got some new digs online for PAWNBROKER. If you get a chance, check out www.pawnbrokernovel.com and let me know what you think. If you like it and want to help spread the word, that's awesome and appreciated.
Patriotic American though I am, for far too long we've been fed some nonsense as part of our national ethos. What?!? Yup. Here's the lie: "You can be whatever you want to be." How many times have you heard that or a variant of it? It just ain't so, my friends. (This has nothing to do with politics, so there's no need to tune out. Read on.)
I'm 1000% for encouragement to excellence, for each one of us being the best we can be, for each achieving all we possibly can. The problem is this noble idea has been so distorted through the years/decades as to now be the source of real societal problems. By fostering this nonsense, we have created a country full of people who chase dreams outside their talent sphere. When you waste years or decades pursuing something you just aren't capable of, you deprive yourself and the rest of us of the gifts God did give you.
Example: I love football. A lot. Passionately. I WOULD LOVE TO BE A FOOTBALL STAR. There, I said it. There's just one big hitch: I'm 53, slow, and probably not the most athletic specimen you've encountered. So what? I was taught my whole life--and this teaching has been vastly expanded and exaggerated over the decades--that I could "be whatever I want to be." See the problem? Reality? It's a lie. I cannot be a football phenom like Johnny Manziel. I could train and practice and study for the rest of my life and even if I had a time machine to dial back my years, I still couldn't be Johnny Football. It's not a gift I was graced with, and to pretend otherwise would be delusional.
We see this issue on dramatic display each year when American Idol broadcasts weeks of auditions from those who are certain they're stars despite the fact that they shouldn't even be singing in the shower. Aside from the few obvious ones who will do anything to be on TV, including intentional self-humiliation, these people are devastated or angry or blown away when the judges tell them they suck. How can this be? Have they never heard themselves? Maybe, but what they've for sure heard is, "You can be whatever you want to be." It's so ingrained in our culture now that it's lost any context of common sense. If that isn't bad enough, there's the whole American Idol industry, perfectly willing to put these people through to the next round of judges over and over and over and over for the explicit purpose of eventually having them make idiots of themselves on global TV.
A bit closer to home, nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in today's publishing environment. The barriers of the past are gone. Anyone can publish their own work almost instantly. There's a lot to like about this new paradigm and I'm sure I'll feel like commenting on it more than once, but my point now is this: Instaselfpublishing has enabled a globe full of wannabe writers to elevate themselves to self-published authors with the click of a button. The result is a system loaded with...well...what do you think it's loaded with?
We see this issue on dramatic display each year when American Idol broadcasts weeks of auditions from those who are certain they're stars despite the fact that they shouldn't even be singing in the shower. Aside from the few obvious ones who will do anything to be on TV, including intentional self-humiliation, these people are devastated or angry or blown away when the judges tell them they suck. How can this be? Have they never heard themselves? Maybe, but what they've for sure heard is, "You can be whatever you want to be." It's so ingrained in our culture now that it's lost any context of common sense. If that isn't bad enough, there's the whole American Idol industry, perfectly willing to put these people through to the next round of judges over and over and over and over for the explicit purpose of eventually having them make idiots of themselves on global TV.
A bit closer to home, nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in today's publishing environment. The barriers of the past are gone. Anyone can publish their own work almost instantly. There's a lot to like about this new paradigm and I'm sure I'll feel like commenting on it more than once, but my point now is this: Instaselfpublishing has enabled a globe full of wannabe writers to elevate themselves to self-published authors with the click of a button. The result is a system loaded with...well...what do you think it's loaded with?
