Comfort Zone Expansion

     Routine is the definition of comfort.  When we know what to expect, how to react, and there are no surprises, we feel comfortable.  I think most of us do, anyways.  When we know how to handle ourselves in any given situation, there is a calm that comes over us.  The routine might be work.  It might be your Sunday foray to church, or your Wednesday tee time.  We fill our lives with routine.  We have a desire to be comfortably tucked inside our shell of protection.

     I've been increasingly interested in others' motivation to leave that comfort zone and try something new and unknown.  Or, alternatively, I'm curious about how routines begin in the first place and then how they stick.  Nothing starts out as a routine.  It builds to that, but at some point, the newness of it wears off and the comfort zone expands.

     I have often been of the opinion that I hate anything new.  New people, new ideas, doing new things, all of it makes me uncomfortable.  And while I openly admit that I hate anything new, that is not necessarily the case.  Hate may be too much.  It's more of a lack of comfort.  Sort of like someone stabbing me with a knife in an area that is not life threatening.  I don't like it, it is not comfortable, but then once the knife is removed, I will heal and have a small scar from it.  Then I will call the police since I just got stabbed.  What is this world coming to, anyway?  You can't just stab someone and it's okay.  It's not.  It's not okay.

     But anyway, I really don't have a problem meeting new people.  I have a problem with unimportant surface conversations.  I guess when you first meet someone, you don't know them enough to have deeper conversations.  To me, that first bit is uncomfortable.  That digging in and trying to get to know someone is cumbersome and flawed.  I take a true comfort in routine.

     I like knowing the scope of most likely possibilities, and I like knowing that my knee-jerk reaction to an on-the-fly situation will have already been tried and true.  There is no fumbling around for some insight on the correct way to proceed.  I've been through a situation very similar before and already know how to handle it. Purposefully putting yourself in uncomfortable situations is a foreign concept to me.  I don't get why anyone would purposefully do that.

     Obviously I'm an inward thinker.  Perhaps those social butterflies are not inward thinkers, or maybe their confidence level is way higher than mine.  I certainly can't pretend to know the answer.  So, as per my usual philosophical, inward thinking brain slowly ticks...I try to imagine any and all reasons that someone would not hold the same beliefs about comfort zone expansion as I.

     Maybe people that purposefully seek a change in routine(I call it comfort) is because they are adrenaline junkies.  They must like that rush of uncertainty.  They must revel in that crazy chaos of change!  Okay.  So that's one reason.  Maybe another reason is despite the fact that it's not comfortable, they force themselves to do it because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that after the initial discomfort, they will now have a broadened idea of comfort.  

     I like the simple routine of things and I very much dislike monotony.  These things work in counterpoint to one another.  I guess when the scale of monotony gets heavier than the scale of routine and comfort, I stick a big toe just outside my routine; never too far, though, because I may need to pull in back in quickly.  So it really is, for me, that nefarious quote of my former mentor; "Change occurs when the pain of staying the same is more than the pain caused by making a change."

     The pain of monontony, for me and as of late, has increased to a level that requires me to make a change.  My routine has been broadening, little by little.  It will continue to broaden, too, until a time when I look back on my former routine and find that I am so far off the reservation, the view is scary, and looks to be too far outside of my comfort zone to ever make that journey back.  A broadened comfort zone is biased, then, based on how good our memory serves us, and mine's not so great.

   
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There Is No Mad Dash To Publishing

     When I finished my book, I thought, "Okay!  The hard part is over!"  I spent a lot of time writing, refining, editing, rewriting, adding, subtracting, organizing plot structure, characterizing, throwing bits of exposition and dialogue around...the list goes on and on.  Believe it or not, and maybe it's akin to self-inflicted pain, a little masochism, but that's not the hard part.  That's actually the fun part.  Really!  That sounds fun right?  People that write books NEED to find that fun.  If they don't, they won't continue to write.

     The point is, I thought I had reached the Mother Land!  Everything is downhill now, right?  The book has been written, now it's off to the printing press and the amazing word of mouth the book will receive will create sales from the ether!  My part in this is done.  Let the publishers market it and manage the rest while I get back to the fun part, the creation phase.  I guess, subconsciously, I knew there was at least a little more 'post production' work I would have to do, but I did consider, in my wide eyed and child-like innocence, that most of the work was done.  Wrong!  So here's my experience of the post work that comes after the super fun creation work.

     The novel is finished.  Well, as much as it can be, because let's face it, we, as novelists, could carry on forever revising and editing, making it just a little better.  But we have committed to letting it go, to letting our need for perpetual revising to just end.  I submitted my work to many different publishing companies.  What a short sentence that was to describe the angst involved it that!  It wasn't dealing with rejections that authors seemed to be plagued with.  I kept the attitude that submitting my work was half the battle.  I even planned on framing my first rejection letter as proof of the effort.    The hard part about submitting my work to different publishing houses was the formatting requirements.  Each publishing house wants specific guidelines followed for your submitted work and it is vastly varied.

     From margins to headers, to page numbers to title pages, here's what I ran into:  publishing company "A" wants a header with your last name and email address at the top of each page of your manuscript.  Publishing company "B" wants no page numbers and only wants the title of your manuscript at the top of each page.  You phone number and email address must be on the title page.  Publishing company "C" only accepts manuscripts with one inch margins and your last name should appear on the top of the page, left justified, but only at the beginning of each chapter, etc...the specification went on and on.  Because of it, I found myself spending massive amounts of time before each submission reading though the requirements of each house and formatting my manuscript to their specs.  After all, I didn't want my book slush piled(can I use those words as verbs?) just because I didn't follow the requisite formatting guidelines for that particular publishing house, right?  So I trudged through it, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting...oh! And not to mention the time spent before all that finding a publishing house that accepts the genre I write in.  No sense in sending a publisher of romance novels a sci-fi, right?  The process was grueling, and not fun, especially when all I wanted to do was to get back to that fun creation stage.

     Eventually, two publishers wanted to publish my work.  I guess they saw my magnificently formatted content and thought, "Hey, if nothing else, this guy can follow formatting guidelines!"  Never mind about content!  No, I'm sure(telling this to myself, now...) that the content was the driving factor for acceptance.  So I was emailed a contract to peruse.

     Upon reading the contract, I was simply not impressed.  I would make less than a dollar a book sale.  I would be required to purchase a minimum of forty books, and I would have to market it on my own.  Is this what publishing houses are doing nowadays?  So I took a step back for a moment.  Here it was, the coveted book contract, the pinnacle of what I was after, and now the feeling was simply flat.  It took the air out of my sails, that's for sure!  I weighed the options and decided that I would explore the idea of self publishing.  

     The main thing I was after when I decided to sell my book wasn't money or fame or really any of that.  It was a simple thing really.  It was simply the confirmation that I was a good enough writer to have my book published one day, at some point, to call myself an author.  So after the mad formatting and submittal dash, after I received the contract to simply sign and send back, I realized that the contract itself was confirmation enough.  A publisher saw my work and decided that I was good enough to publish.  I understand and acknowledge that publishers are taking a huge risk on a new author and spend little of their budget on marketing for first time novelists.  I wasn't offended at all, just surprised that that's how it worked.

     I decided, after some research, that if I were going to self publish, I would still be responsible for marketing and trying to sell my book.  No advantage to having a publisher there.  I would make more money on each sale.  No advantage to having a publisher there.  The only advantage I saw was the professional name behind my book, and the professional formatting service they would provide to make my book look as professional as possible.  Unfortunately for them, the process of submitting my work made me an expert at book formatting!  I decided to self publish and see how it went.

     So four months after I finished my book, I had still not published, and decided to self publish.  I mistakenly thought the majority of time to publish a book was the writing!  Not true at all!  That's the fun part.  The next part in the process is what everyone in the self publishing world calls 'discoverability.'  The journey was just beginning.  I will expound on this process and what I experienced in my next blog.  Hopefully, this blog will serve to demystify the publishing and querying process.  I hope it will help anyone on a publishing mission to understand the process as I have come to understand it.  Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss the process of discoverability.  In many blogs of this type, people never tell you the hard sales numbers.  As I work through the process, I will be transparent with this.

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Inspiration: Create. It.

     There is a stark contrast between letting things happen to you and making things happen for you.  I think most of us, most of the time, just idly let things happen to us.  We are more reactive than proactive.  This is not an insult, just an observation of human nature.  None of us are always firing on all cylinders.  It's just not possible.

     This week, I decided to write an inspirational blog.  Well, semi-inspirational, since I plan on throwing in a little shot of reality too.  I often find that inspirational allegories are so outside of reality, they often work in contradiction to what they're trying to achieve.  Nothing can ever be absolute, and one could look at these snippets of inspiration in two ways:  

     1.  Take it for what it is.  You know you'll never quite achieve the perfection of whatever inspirational quote you're reading or trying to achieve, but you know in trying to get there, you will at least be a little better off than you were before.

     2.  The inspirational words aspire to a too perfect view and you are defeated before you even start.

     I think most of us try the former, but lately, I've been on the latter.  And that's not to say I'm in a deep state of depression or have a defeated worldview.  I'm just being realistic.  Inspirational quotes or memes or sonnets or blogs--whatever(you get the idea here)--so often serve to remind me what I'm not doing that I should be doing.  Granted, that's probably not what the writer had in mind.  

     Here's an example: "Don't let outside influences halt your personal motivation.  You can do anything you desire."  Not a great one, but nonetheless, it's meant to inspire and motivate.  And let me know if I'm reading too deeply into it, which, nevermind, I know I do that sort of thing on a regular basis already--BUT most people read something like that and gloss over it, never giving it another thought.  Most people will read it and go, "Hmmmmm.  Well, yes, that's right, I shouldn't let outside influences control me or get me down."  But then not another thought is spared about it.  

     I, on the other hand, consider it, weigh it, analyze it, and quite probably I am thinking way too deeply into it than intended.  How can an inspirational quote start with the word Don't?  Seems to start off negatively there...

     Also, I have a real problem with the idea that some stranger is trying to tell me what to do.  But by the suggestion of the quote, I shouldnt let this quote(which is an outside influence) halt my personal motivation.  So I guess if I'm trying to follow and enact this in my daily life, and if this quote is serving to demotivate me, should I not allow it?  But I think I'm getting off point here.

     No one can be constantly productive.  That's where I was going.  I see so many people yearning for that big break, that one knock of opportunity.  They are dying to get out of dead end jobs and poor relationships.  They want so desperately to live the life they imagine it should be.  We all have had that attitude at some point I suppose.  But the real problem I see is that many people that feel that way, sit there, immobile, hoping that the change will come without any sort of action on their part.  They want that change so badly, but they don't take steps to create that change.  In a perfect world, everyone would be handed their own personal key to happiness without ever having to work for it.  It's what we all want, right?  Well, sorry, it's most likely not going to happen until you take some action.

     I would love to win the lottery. Oh man!  Would I self-gluttonize!  I sit in my recliner with my tablet in hand checking the numbers week after week to no avail.  Success doesn't seem to come.  But I'm sitting there, just waiting to win it!  Oh, by the way, I never bought a ticket.  That's essentially what we are doing: hoping to win a lottery we never bought a ticket for.  You must take some sort of action for something to occur.  It will not come if you stay actionless.  That's the point.  You must create your opportunities.  But, how then, does one obtain the inspiration?

     This, I believe is where almost everyone fails.  No one seems to be doing anything.  Like zombies they simply trudge on, hope driving them but oblivious of the requirement to take action.  Hope, but no action.  If you choose to do something, you are already at the top of the class.  You exponentially have a better chance at achieving your dream, whatever it may be.  To me, that is inspiration enough.

     Inspiration cannot come from an external source.  You must be inwardly moved.  A simple quote can be a catalyst for that inner inspiration, but ultimately, it is your willingness to take action.  THAT is what inspiration is.  If we can learn to create that desire to take action within ourselves, maybe the dream can become a reality.  Until then, like most of society, we dumbly accept our lot in life and take no action to achieve our dreams.  Since we--and by 'we' I mean most of the rest of society--since we are squared firmly inside the mediocre bucket, any movement toward the dream will distinguish you away from that mediocrity.  That is an encouraging thought.  More encouraging than that, though, is realizing that the dream can be within reach, if only you make the move to extend your arm and reach out your hand.  Then at least for you, the dream will be closer to your outstretched fingers than the guy standing next to you, with both arms planted firmly at his sides.


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