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Ongoing Thoughts 14:
By William E. Steinman:
Approval:
Do you crave the approval of people who are important to
you? I know I do. But, in thinking about it, I realize the only approval I can
get from most others is conditional approval. They will approve of me if I
behave in a particular way. If I must be contrary to my own nature to gain that
approval, I must wonder about the value of it. If I want to move on with my
life, I must make the decision that conditional approval is not acceptable. The
approval of Mrs. Gaffer is unconditional. She accepts me the way I am, warts,
wrinkles, and all my bad behavior included. For sure, she sometimes tells me I
ought to lay off the booze and shape up, but it is not a condition, just
advice.
This issue came into focus for me in regard to a particular
book reviewer. I have been submitting my books to Midwest Book Reviews for many
years and I have received several favorable reviews. That same person has also
ignored some of my best work. He does not give bad reviews. He simply ignores
work he does not want give a favorable review to. Recently, he ignored my last,
best, and most important book. I thought about it and then I looked at the
pattern of his behavior. I realized that his approval was not about the
literary value of my writing, but about his own personal philosophy. “Well,
I’ll be damned,” I said. I also wondered why I had not noticed this
before. The answer is simple. Like any teenage fool, I was flattered by the
attention. Duh!
Now I must put my money where my mouth is. Since I find
conditional approval to be unacceptable, I must stop seeking reviews from a
person who will not give a bad review. I would like to believe I could handle a
bad review if I knew the reason for it. I may or may not agree with the
reviewer’s opinion, but I can accept that he has given his true
evaluation. He thought my writing was somehow flawed. To be valid, a literary
criticism of a book cannot be based on some concept of morality. It can only be
based on the literary value of the work regardless of moral issues.
Where does that leave me? For sure, it leaves me with no
book reviews at all. It gets me back to my going in ideas when I first started
to write and publish. I began with a very rosy picture of the publishing
industry. I thought good writing would get attention and good books by good
writers could be produced with reasonable effort. It did not take me long to
discover the stonewall siege mentality of the publishing industry. For a new
writer, no matter how gifted, no amount of effort is sufficient. It requires
incredible luck and a great deal of sucking up. Sucking up is something I am
incapable of. If I could, my life would be considerably easier, but even
thinking of it makes me want to puke.
Consequently, way back then I decided I would do just as
well doing everything myself. I could write, publish, and market my books
myself and reach the public. It has not worked out that way. I have not sold
enough books to pay for my postage. I have documented all of this in my essays
“On Writing and Publishing” in my archives. Most of it is still as
true as it was when I wrote it. My plan was to edit those essays and turn them
into a book. I may do that in the future. The tentative title would be
something like “The Stone Wall of Silence.” That will come later.
For mow, I have too many other irons in the fire. Since I seem to be going
blind, my most important issue is reversing that. I have written about this
effort in this series.
In the meantime, I do want to continue writing and
publishing. To manage that, I have decided to reduce the effort of publishing.
Concerning that, I find that my marketing efforts must end. It takes too much
effort for no visible results. I will continue to write and publish and just
give the books away. That is essentially what I have been doing anyway. With
that decision, I find I will no longer need barcodes, ISBN numbers, or Library
of Congress numbers on my books. That is time and money saved.
Library of Congress numbers are just numbers issued by the
Library of Congress so they can catalog books as being in print. It is mostly
for librarians who are profoundly uninterested in my work. So what? The ISBN
number is a number assigned to a book by a huge bureaucracy known as R. R.
Bowker. They keep track of all the books in print, so they say. This is for the
convenience of the book wholesalers and retailers who are also profoundly
uninterested in my work. So what again?
So, here I am, back at my original philosophy, which I
forgot for a time. It is time to renew it. I write and publish because I want
to do it. I write what I want to write and no one tells me what to write or how
to do it. For that, I do not need the approval of anyone else. Some people do
read what I write.
I still appreciate friendship. My best friend has never told
me whether he approves of me or not. I have never asked him. We enjoy doing
things together and we accept each other as we are. I do not ask him to be
different than he is. He does not as me to be different than I am. That is the
essence of true friendship. With that kind of friend, one is sufficient. I do
not have to call acquaintances friends just because I like them. It is about
perspective.
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