Forgiveness versus Vengeance is one of the central themes of my next vigilante justice thriller. From Luigi Mangione’s actions to burning Teslas, this is a timely topic. Many turn away from these highly publicized acts of violence with little more than a shrug. There are good reasons for this. In the battle between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, fear wins. Fear is the emotion poorly hidden beneath anger. It’s a neurological response, and schadenfreude is baked into our brain’s wiring.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” ~ Yoda
Yoda is quotable. It’s a good line (and you heard the Yoda voice, right?) However, I think he’s got it backward (which fits his typical grammar). Fear is a protective mechanism. Wariness of dangers increases our odds of survival. Frustration and fear lead to anger and resistance. The Jedi weren’t a bunch of pacifists. Hence, all the cool lightsaber duels. Those Jedi knights were down and out for quite a while but rose again to fight the Empire. I agree, don’t succumb to evil, but don’t be a chump, either.
For Mere Mortals, Forgiveness Isn’t So Easy.
Sixty-seven percent of people surveyed say they believe in forgiveness. Sounds good and upright, doesn’t it? Dig deeper. Fifty-six percent admit they don’t practice that virtue. I don’t blame them. Most would agree that forgiveness is healthy for the person doing the forgiving. However, no one instructs us how to forgive and forget. Instead., we get guilt-ridden platitudes that deny our humanity and our reality.
To err is human, to forgive divine, but we’re no angels.
I have an excellent memory, so how am I to forget? Frontal lobotomy? And if I forgive you your trespasses, do either of us learn anything? By refusing to forgive, I deny the offender the opportunity to trespass against me again. Sounds to me like carrying grudges is a safer course.
I asked my psychologist if she believes in forgive and forget. (When I say “My psychologist,” I refer to She Who Must Be Obeyed, AKA my wife.) She holds a doctorate in psychology and is the most sane person I know. That’s why I was so surprised when she did not hesitate to answer, “No.”
She acknowledges that forgiveness is difficult. In many cases, it’s an unreasonable expectation set by out-of-touch purists. The good doctor offered hope, though. She suggested, “Maybe the best you can do is to get to a place and time where you just don’t care anymore.”
“Or,” I countered, “write a massive hit thriller that’s packed with clever revenge fantasies to plague your real-life enemies!”
She’s going to start charging me for these sessions, isn’t she?
The writing workshop in Toronto is coming up in a couple of weeks. I am preparing to pitch literary agents for Vengeance Is Hers. Four agents I would consider partnering with are at the workshop. I have three others in mind, as well. Part of the prep work is to have the partial ready for their review. I have a sample ready.
Hot tip:
If you are pitching to agents or just want to give away a sample of your work for a book fair, a signing, or some other such trial by fire, get a QR code. I do have a presentation package for agents, but I won’t be lugging around a manuscript like some early 19th century peasant. I’m a modern ink-stained wretch. Instead, I’ll just give the QR code to link to the partial. If they want more, I’ve provided an email for further inquiries.
What’s New?
I have added menus to this website. Above, you’ll find links to my bio and what reviewers say about my work. The pitch and partial for Vengeance Is Hers is found under For Literary Agents. Of course, if you aren’t a literary agent but want a sneak peek of a badass story about a young woman on a righteous quest for revenge, enjoy a taste of vengeance!
She Who Must Be Obeyed and I had a grand day out on Saturday. Though the egg crisis has finally hit us (fewer eggs, higher prices), at least we got out. That’s unusual. She bought shoes, and I got free popcorn at Skechers.
The highlight for me is always browsing bookstores. Not all chains are alike. When I was a book rep, I remember walking into a chain store in Brampton. It was as if all they had were remaindered books. The inventory was a mile wide and an inch deep. The Chapters in the south end of our city is far superior to the Indigo in the north end. I would have thought their inventory would be basically the same, but not so!
Funny, when I first visited Toronto, SWMBO asked what more I wanted to see of her city. Easy! Take me to all the used bookstores! She replied that she had already taken me to all the used bookstores. My suitcase was much heavier heading back to Halifax.
When I look at these pics, I so respect all the work that went into writing and publishing these books. Since my brain works the way it does, I thought, what a great bookstore! And I’ll never live long enough to devour all the books I want to read! Damn! Well, I’ll put a dent in that TBR pile, anyway.
Because of my illness in December, my birthday was a bust. Compensation arrived when SWMBO bought a bunch of books for me! For starters, I am reading Getting Signed. It’s about finding an agent and landing a book deal, and it’s really helping me prepare for my upcoming pitch meetings.
Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore was my shrine until it closed. City Lights Bookshop in London is pretty good (and absolutely crammed). Fanfare Books in Stratford has stock that is expertly curated. It may be small, but they carry stuff you won’t find anywhere else, including my books! Another great one is Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia. When you walk in there, a pleasurable and leisurely afternoon of book browsing lies ahead.
Have you got a favorite bookstore? What is it, where is it, and what drew you to it?
Something I’ve noticed lately is the number of people who end conversations with, “Stay safe.” We didn’t used to say that so often, but we sure do now. Given all that’s going on, that makes lots of sense. Besides the carelessness of those in power, misinformation, and disinformation are a couple of reasons why we’re in danger. Today, I have thoughts on why that is.
Alternatively, you can skip to the bottom of this post for stress management suggestions.
In our stupid timeline, there is no social cost for being a rabid conspiracy theorist. RFK, for instance, says he wants to make sure vaccines are safe. That will be difficult to prove to him since he doesn’t believe existing scientific research. He is dangerous, and more people will die because of him. His reward? More power to enact his dumbassery.
More Knuckleheads
It’s so strange to see people arguing the world is flat. How does that flashback to the ancient world fit? As they argue, they’re bouncing the twit signal off satellites to their cell phones. We have so much information at our fingertips, but some of us are terrible at critical thinking.
Flat Earthers are easy to stump. Are all the pilots on Earth in on it? What’s their motivation? Is Big Oblate Sphere paying everybody off? Why? How? If the Earth is flat, why can’t I see all the aircraft at once with a telescope? And we don’t have a single picture of the great ice wall that keeps us from falling off the edge? Weird. What could the explanation be? Are the answers stupid? They’re stupid, aren’t they?
There is evidence that informed and bright is no picnic in the park, either.
But back to dumbassery. If the conspiracy theorists know something you don’t, they can feel superior. Go deeper, and you’ll find their fear. They are searching for a feeling of control in a world that is out of control. For that, I sympathize. I feel for them because they’re right about something. They’re trying to claw back some power wherever they can because they feel helpless.
In some regard, we are all helpless.
Things can go along great, but then a crack in your windshield shatters your budget. You feel good and strong, but then the doctor calls to talk about that recent blood test. We are all subject to the changing whims of global political forces. Hundreds of variables can affect your stress. A bit of delusional thinking can really aid in alleviating that problem. We feel more power when we ignore certain things (e.g. mortality, the underpaid underclasses, and that your cat often thinks about eating you).
Control is an illusion.
Jean-Luc Picard said that, so it must be true. But where does that leave us? How about we take our delusions of grandeur in a more useful and positive direction? Here are my humble suggestions:
Be more social. It extends your life. (As an introvert, I’m wary of this, but I’m trying.)
Support your friends.
Accept support.
Read more fiction that you know is fiction.
Read credible non-fiction books(i.e. not RFK’s book).
Ease up on the doom scrolling.
Make more jokes. Find more reasons to laugh.
Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do.
Self-care might mean a spa day, but a long hot bath or shower after a walk in the woods is cheaper.
Stretch and take more deep abdominal breaths to make your nervous system less nervous.
Help someone else, and you’ll feel better.
Start on that thing you’ve been putting off for months that will take less than twenty minutesto complete.
For bigger projects, just start on a small bit. Tell yourself you’ll only tackle it for a short time. You’ll probably get more done. Starting is hard. Continuing is easier.
Ask yourself, “Is this thing I’m doing giving me value?” (It’s okay to stop doing things that aren’t helping you.)
Ask yourself, “Am I setting myself on fire to keep others warm?” (I’ve done this one a lot!)
Those mistakes you made long ago? You regret them. The person who made those mistakes isn’t you anymore, are they?
To preserve your energy and sanity, stop trying so hard to change others. Start with you. People resent a good example less than a doofus slinging decrees.
People say love is the answer (though fudge yields the same happy hit on the neurons).
Give up on measuring your accomplishments by other people’s metrics.Your happiness is not about what you should want. It’s about what you really want.
When the oxygen masks drop on the plane, you put the mask on your face first so you can breathe. Only then can you assist others. Take care of yourself.Stay safe.
One of the strangest turns in the news came this week when an alarming and easily predicted future became mundane history. Trump posted, “Long live the King.” That wasn’t surprising. However, some of his cult members backed him by celebrating. “Trump is king!” Many of these same folks post 1776 in their social media bios. Knuckleheaded knuckledraggers may know their country’s history. It seems they’ve abandoned the values they claimed they most cherished. Monarchy is back, baby! Get used to it!
Reminds one of the so-called evangelicals who, last year, decided to let go the gentler teachings of Christ. Jesus was “too woke” for our troubled times, apparently. They still call themselves Christian, just meaner and in a roid rage, I guess.
What feeds this nonsense? Bias.
There are many types of cognitive bias that affect us. There is hindsight bias, loss aversion bias, the gambler’s fallacy, and the beastly Dunning-Kruger effect. The D-K effect plus confirmation bias is a lethal combination, dangerous to civilization.Those are the better-known afflictions. I have a couple of favorites that may not be on your radar:
Survivor Bias
Survivor bias goes like this: “We live in a land of opportunity! I make a lot of money, so why can’t everybody else?”
This bias plays into the myth of the self-made individual. It ignores a plethora of historical, systemic, and personal variables. This bias turns the principle of fair financial compensation into a cruel game of keep-away. When interviewed, successful people often extol the virtue of hard work. Only a few self-aware ones say, “I worked hard, but I got incredibly lucky! I made it, but I’m not altogether sure how, but I know I’m an outlier.” It’s much more tempting to believe “I built X and now own a couple of yachts because I’m a genius.”
Lots of people work hard and are never adequately compensated. If success were so easily replicable, more people would attain it. For instance, if you’re a nepobaby who won the genetic lottery, the path to stardom is paved with pillows. Nobody who catches those breaks talks about that. When asked the secret to their success, I’ve heard actors say, “I know my lines and I show up on time.” Learning a script can be difficult, but showing up on time? You mean like every other employee on the planet? That’s blind privilege talking, you handsome dunce. That’s survivor bias.
Survivor bias doesn’t come up first as one of the more lethal societal ills, but it is dangerous. It feeds a delusion that’s used as a cudgel on the oppressed and unfortunate. If the poor deserve to be poor, you only care if you’re poor. Not much room for kindness and mercy there, huh? Survivor bias makes its believer a terrible person and everyone else worse off.
Normalcy Bias
An author friend messaged me to ask, since I write apocalyptic novels, does our current political situation feel like I’m living in one of my books? I’ve written about the many ways empires fall. My back catalog includes zombies, vampires, AI domination, killer robots, alien invasion, meteors, climate crises, disease, nuclear conflagration, mass poverty, and famine. Lots of fun to explore in fiction, right? What’s unfolding now, though? I couldn’t write it because so much of it sounds outlandish, too dumb, and replete with hissy fits. Nuclear stockpile inspectors and warhead assembly experts getting fired en masse sounds too silly, doesn’t it?That happened. Then somebody said, “Oopsy! Get them back! Where are their email addresses? What do you mean you deleted their email addresses?”
The doomsday clock is now 89 seconds to midnight. The world is teetering toward all your worst nightmares. Still, we carry on, believing that cooler heads will prevail. That, my friends, is normalcy bias.
The courts decided they couldn’t allow a presidential candidate to go to jail for even one day for his crimes. He should have been confined for contempt and endangering officers of the court, at the very least. Didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. That was normalcy bias at its dark and dirty work. You’ve always been told no one is above the law. Obviously not so.
The objection always comes to changing circumstances: “X can’t happen because it’s never happened before. It would be unprecedented!”
This is a recurring theme in my fiction (and my answer to this complaint):
Everything is unprecedented until it’s not.
Normalcy bias keeps you dangerously comfortable. It assures you that the health insurance you have relied on will always be there for you. Why? Because it always has been. To lose it would be unprecedented! (See above.)
Normalcy bias kept endangered people from fleeing Germany before World War II broke out. Normalcy bias assures people that all their investments are safe until the stock market collapses. Normalcy bias made Canadians, Mexicans, and all NATO allies feel that the United States government would be their friend. The news reveals the truth: People have friends. Governments have interests.
Human behavior, mental illness, and neurobiology are interests I try to monetize by writing novels with flawed characters. Sometimes, they suffer mental health issues like mine (anxiety, for one instance). Other times, they use their knowledge to manipulate others. It’s fun in fiction. When cognitive biases dominate our media intake and the political sphere, ignorant people transform into monsters and innocent people suffer and die. Our biases make us more vulnerable to personal and systemic failure. Ignorance can be cured easily, but stupid is much more complicated.
Biases kill.
(On the other hand, when I meet with literary agents in April, I’ll pull from my bag of tricks in the pitch meetings to sell my next book, but that’s another post. Villainous laughter: Mwah-ha-ha-ha!) In the meantime, have you read All Empires Fall yet?
The misuse of words grinds my gears. I have a short list of the worst offenders I’ve heard recently.
“An exuberant amount of money.” No, it’s an exorbitant amount of money.
“Pundint.” You mean to say, pundit, no second n.
Erudite sounds like it looks: Air-oo-dite. It’s not “aeriodite.”
You don’t “flaunt the law.” You flout it.
Library has an r in it. Not “Lie-berry.”
Elon Musk AKA Phony Stark, is not an inventor. He’s an investor who considers you not at all. (That’s not altogether fair. He thinks a lot of you are parasites.) Which misused words irk you?
Some people will not like this post, but I’m going to be real with you. Not all “vanity” publishers are con artists. Many writers call it evil to publish novice authors for money. They’re speaking from a privilege that doesn’t always address reality. If you reject nuance, this post won’t be for you.
We’ve all heard Harlan Ellison’s rule, “The money flows to the author.” It’s a solid principle in traditional and independent publishing. However, not everyone is playing the same game. That brush is painting a broad red stripe across innocent people who are trying to help the helpless. For flailing writers, paying to publish does make sense sometimes.
To find out if something on offer is a scam, I suggest consulting Writer Beware. It’s an excellent resource to identify dishonest actors across the publishing industry. I’m not talking about scams today, though. I’m talking about getting books to market that would never see the light of day otherwise.
See It from the Novice’s Point of View
On this subject, veteran writers are often eager to jump in with condemnations. Anything that smacks of pay-to-publish or so-called “ego publishing” offends them. “If it wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise, it should stay in the dark! Don’t publish!”
Would you say that to my dearly departed father and father-in-law? They published their autobiographies in their twilight years. They weren’t vying for the New York Times bestseller list. They looked back on their lives and wanted to leave a record behind for their families. True, they could have tried going through a local printer. That would have been more expensive than publishing a “real book” through Amazon. They got a kick out of seeing their memoirs on Amazon.
For my father-in-law, this project was particularly important. His childhood experience as a Japanese Canadian imprisoned by his own government during WWII spoke to his community. As his memory failed, his little memoir became dogeared. He went through it again and again, and would sometimes exclaim, “I know this story!” He passed away last year, but his memories are preserved. That memoir is still a comfort to our family.
Addressing The War on Fun
Let’s clear up one common objection immediately. There’s no such thing as “cluttering up” the digital marketplace if that’s your worry. There are a zillion blogs on Earth, but no one labels them clutter that gets in the way of discovering something more meritorious. Amazon is, first and foremost, a search engine. You won’t find these books unless you search for them hard, and that’s on you. Books that don’t sell are relegated to niches deep in the archive. You won’t see them, so no harm, no foul.
This is rarely a service I’ve provided to authors of multiple books. No one knows which book will take off and be a hit, but this kind of work is almost always a one-off. One IP ended up becoming a documentary and a movie, but that’s very rare. The author was new to book publishing, but he could write well and had unusual experiences to share.
Gatekeepers cry, “Learn the ropes! Take courses! You can do it all yourself! Learn how to do it like I did!” My dads didn’t have that kind of time. They had a lot of abilities in their fields of interest, but knew nothing about how to get what they’d written between covers.
I helped out my family for free, but I’ve been paid for it by others. I never called myself a vanity publisher, but that’s pretty much what it amounted to in most cases. I provided services to novice authors who were clueless about the book business. Most had neither the time nor inclination to make a career out of writing. It was for personal satisfaction. Publishing a book was a bucket list item to show off to their friends. For some, it was a business card to complement their business ventures and establish their expertise in the eyes of customers.
(Note: Everyone I worked with kept all their rights, no matter how much work I did. If you’re considering paying someone to guide you through the publishing process, hold on to your rights in the agreement. It will cost you more, but in the end, your name is on the cover.)
What does a Publishing Rabbi or a Book Shepherd do exactly?
I called it book consulting and project management. My services included educating novices about the publishing process, working with editors and graphic designers on the author’s behalf, and providing advice on covers, metadata, blurbs, and marketing. I’ve helped polish manuscripts for publication, sometimes ghostwriting. In other cases, my “edit” was really a rewrite to make a manuscript more salable, more organized, or more coherent. It was a lot of work that often took time away from my creations, so yes, without shame, I got paid for it.
Not everyone wants to write for a living. Not everyone can. That doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t have a book with their name on it. It might be for their bookshelf and theirs alone. That’s okay. It’s not a scam if it’s what they always wanted to fulfill their heart’s desire.
