This is about the only real selfie that you will see on any of the social media platforms that I use. This was taken between 2004 and 2013, as this was used on my very first blog "Cedar's Mountain" (you can find the link in one of the tabs above this post).
Before I get into the topic at hand, I want to make an observation: does anyone find it how remarkably obtuse some spammers can be when they ignore a caption that states comment moderation is enabled and post just the same? You would think that they would program their bots to ignore blogs/websites that have that policy enacted and just hit the ones that don't moderate. Right?
Back to the topic at hand: Inertia.
For the past month, I've been pretty much stuck in a holding pattern with publishing my upcoming novella. I was becoming so afraid of pulling the trigger (aka severely third guessing myself), so I started doing all kinds of things to avoid pulling that trigger. Things like:
1} Getting the short story bug and writing almost one dozen stories for maybe a short story collection in the future, although one of them is calling out to me saying "expand me to a novella", and I may do just that in the future, as soon as I can figure out how to work in that short story.
2} Beefing up my c.d. collection. I've temporarily stopped purchasing music from Amazon, and not because of some altruistic vibe of shopping locally, but simply because current life events have dictated that my frivolous Amazon spending be directed to non-frivolous Amazon spending.
But I did shop locally, as in I supported my public library by purchasing gently used c.d.'s (most of which were $1). I'm always of the opinion that used c.d.'s are the way to go if you're intrigued about a particular artist, past or present, but not intrigued enough to drop $10-$20 on a new c.d. in order to satiate that need.
3} Beefing up my DVD collection. Most of the DVD's that I've purchased came to my attention directly due to pay-cable t.v (e.g. HBO, Showtime, Encore) going through spurts of overplaying movies for a couple of months to gin up interest before taking them out of rotation (before the advent of streaming, most of the major pay movie channels had over a half dozen offspring that required content)
The movies listed are ones that I did not see first run, but saw on cable, which due to overplaying, got me hooked: Quigley Down Under (cool western featuring Tom Selleck); The Shawshank Redemption; Kung Fu Hustle (The gentleman who did the fight choreography for Crouching Tiger and The Matrix did it for this one); Falling Down (in my opinion, a truly underappreciated Michael Douglas film. Fun fact, it was filmed during the King riots of '92); Major League: Back To The Minors (fun fact, the Buzz are based on the real AAA team, the Salt Lake City Bees); and everyone's favorite spaghetti western: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
And finally, 4} re-re-editing a previously published novella. Or, that was the basic idea. Two years is a long time to go from not appreciating the original rewrite (went from the normal 3rd person/past tense to 1st person present tense) to having serious thoughts of leaving the bulk of it alone and just perform some continuity tweaks.
The short version, I have a previously published novella, A Taste of Pain, that ultimately I was not happy with the end product in a myriad of ways. In short, it should've been published as an e-book exclusive, without all of the fluff at the end (e.g. chapter samples of two other books to pad out the page count), which is one thing I'm giving serious thought to. But in regards to leaving it alone, after sitting down with the intent of re-re-editing it back to a traditional voice*, after tackling the first couple of chapters I came to the sobering thought that this story was flowing pretty good in 1st person/present tense view. Like it was a lot more personal/intense in that particular viewpoint than others.
*3rd person/past tense is usually the traditional method. But let me warn everyone, I've actually written stories in all three voices, because you know, I like to challenge myself.
The good news to all of this, is that the reason for the inertia has fundamentally changed. The original reason of being afraid to pull the trigger (my choice) has been replaced by simply waiting to receive the first version of a book cover. Only when I approve the cover for the e-book will the book formatter be able to start the process on their end. Until then, the inertia remains stuck in the same holding pattern, yet now, it's not by choice.
Contentment is a concept that has numerous paths to explore and no single path is the actual chosen one.
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Lay it on me, because unlike others, I can handle it.