Shift! Trailer

Get Off The Fence.

There is no place for emotions in a civilized society.  Even keeled, good tempered and the ability to outwardly project minimal fluctuations in emotions is a trait that at least makes it look like you have it together.  Civilized?  Maybe, maybe not.

Have you ever just seen someone totally lose control of their emotional disposition?  Wether it is anger, or depression, or sobbing, or whatever, the lack of emotional grip makes the person look out of control.  Mostly because they are.  The line between conviction in something and emotional control is blurred, but it's there.  Can one be passionate about something and have complete control over their emotional state?  I think so.  This week, I've decided to write about the dynamic relationship among emotions, how they influence public opinion, and what it means to be civilized.

Vanilla.  People have used this expression to describe a state of being of just sort of going with the flow. There is no conviction on either side of the fence.  There is no strong opinion about anything, really, at all.  The terminology is a metaphor.  Chocolate being an extreme on one side, and strawberry being the opposite extreme.  Those that choose vanilla, really don't lean one way or the other.  Vanilla is that center option, it is the "I can't get off the fence and choose a stronger option," option.  What might people think of me if I go strongly in the chocolate direction?  It will certainly alienate the strawberry people. And the converse is also true.  If I go in the strawberry direction, it will most certainly offend the chocolate people.  So this person is vanilla, ever so careful not to offend, ever so careful to try to identify with all groups, everywhere.  

So, then, I wonder, if being vanilla means not having your own opinions, or if it simply means you choose not to express those opinions since much of society can't seem to get a grip on their emotional state.  If I expressed a strong opinion one way, the unstable nature of society's emotional state could have consequences I simply don't want to deal with.  In fact, it could incite consequences that I feel that I'm above dealing with.  This whole freedom of speech stuff, while protection of it legally seems great, peer pressure is another matter all together.  The question then becomes how fast my government can save me from an angry mob of the general public?  Not fast enough.  Vanilla it is!  

Tolerance of opinion differences is a civilized idea, and can only occur with education.  That may be wrong.  Maybe it can only occur with intelligence.  And since intelligence can not be taught, we are evolutionary steps away from tolerance.  No amount of teaching can make a person tolerant of opinion differences.  It can only happen with a logical mind.  Emotions cripple the ability of the average person to achieve this.  And we are all emotional beings.  But we are also on the precipice.  Some people are intelligent enough to handle chocolate or strawberry.  Some people can look at things from different angles, get their pride out of the way and say, "When you explain it like that, I can see your position."  Some people can do it, but most cannot get outside of themselves to have this ability.

Our emotional depth is what makes us humans.  A robot can see things logically, but conviction, anger, sadness and art, all come from the heart and not from the brain.  When we lose our ability to stay vanilla despite how we feel, when we don't care about public reactions because there won't BE a public reaction, when logic rules and emotion doesn't exist, will there be anything worthy of conviction?  Without opponents to arguments, there is no argument.  Stay vanilla, but be against something.  Or stand for a strongly held belief.  Fight the fight if it is something you believe in, but listen to alternative opinions.  Be emotional, but be rational.  Be loud, then be quiet.  Be heard, but listen.  We enter debates too often with a closed mind, a mind that will not be swayed.  

We are changing, though.  A world without controversy--world peace--has always been an abstract idea.  And a highly-touted goal of Miss America contestants and politicians for lifetimes.  Evolution is the answer, and it is coming.  Make no mistake, we are emotional beings and we need that.  But we also need that one switch, that switch that we can turn on to allow us to consider alternative opinions.  We can never know all angles, and we need to realize that it might be possible that someone can explain an angle we haven't thought of.  So be chocolate, be strawberry, and be vanilla.  But don't select your position based on your emotional state.  It's possible to be neopolitan...

Check out my satirical fiction:

"Delightfully offensive!"  Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...

Buy "Shift!" on amazon

Prioritize Your Reliability

 Reliability is an important attribute to have, from every vantage point.  Of course employers want a reliable employee, but also from a personal standpoint, friends want reliable friends.  That's why, in this week's blog, I'm going to unravel the root reasons that people want other people to have that quality.

1.  Trust.  If you never do what you say you're going to do, you lose people's trust.  When no one trusts you, they know they can't count on you.  I almost called this point 'predictability.'  But if you never do what you say you'll do, well, then you do become predictable insofar as people will be able to predict what you're not going to do.  But ultimately, it boils down to how much trust you can garner from people.  People will only trust you when you have a proven track record of doing what you say you'll do.  In many cases, we humans often allow ourselves to trust people before they have given us a reason to trust them.  This is most likely due to the misplaced belief that other people have the same moral code that we ourselves hold.  Call me an optimist, but I honestly do still believe that people want to do the right thing in most situations, but ultimately it will come down to their ability to prioritize in a way that matches your priorities.  Let's be realistic here, though, everyone' priorities are skewed to lean toward what's important to them, individually.  When they make your priorities their priorities, they will build your trust.

2.  Good intentions.  "I planned on coming to work when I was scheduled, but I had a flat tire."  Unfortunately, the world doesn't function on good intentions.  Not when it comes to reliability.  Obviously, the example is a situation that couldn't be predicted.  But consider this:  you leave in enough time for work that any unexpected detour would still get you there on time.  Often, as a manager of staff, I have had people call out because their car wouldn't start, or their ride didn't show up, or some other excuse that rode soley on the back of a lack of transportation.  A reliable person would find a way.  Call a taxi.  Take the bus.  Ride a bike.  Their priority was not a match with mine.  My priority was to have employees that can help my customers.  Their priorities were not in line with mine.  They didn't find a way to make it work.  Unreliable.

3.  Do what you say you're going to do.  If you don't plan on doing it, don't promise it.  Politicians could take a lesson in this.  How frustrating is it when someone promises they'll do something and then they don't do it?  Pretty annoying.  Often, they fully plan on doing whatever it was they said they'd do.  Again--good intentions.  But their priority level of the task is not in line with yours and they forget, or something comes up, and point one is blown.  Trust is out the window.

4.  Be the person you would want someone else to be.  Blah blah blah....treat others as you would want to be treated...yada yada yada....gimme a break!  How much more cliche can it be, really?  It's true though.  Wouldn't you want someone else's priorities to match your own?  Would you want the things that are important to you to be important to everyone else?  Of course you would!  I often think about how everyone has their own agenda, their own self important mental view of the way things need to be.  It's a selfish view.  It has to be.  But at least in most of what we do, we are driving towards that self important agenda.  Can we, some of the time, not all, focus on what's important to others?  If we can do that, we will find that most people will pay it back by matching their priorities just a little closer to ours.  And that is where the magic happens.

5.  You have to pay it forward before it will get paid back.  A good deed, a nice gesture, the simple act of consistent reliability will get a return on investment.  People will trust you.  Good intentions will materialize into good actions.  People will do what they say they will do, and treat you as you would want them to treat you.  When you are a reliable person, people will reciprocate that back to you.

It's interesting to me that a good employee can be viewed that way based simply on reliability.  A good friend can be a good friend based simply on reliability.  A good parent, the same.  All positive interactions build on the foundation of reliability, because reliability is the root of trust.  People want to trust other people.  We want to trust others so desperately that we trust without proof that we should trust.  Why not be that breath of fresh air?  Make people confident that they can trust you because you are reliable.  Simple reliability will give you meaningful friendships.  It will get you promoted at work.  In a day and age where everyone is so focused on trying to selfishly gain the advantage, it is easy to let the selfish nature of others propel you by being reliable.  In other words, when people can count on you, in a world where that quality is rare, they will want you on their team.

Check out my satirical fiction:

"Delightfully offensive!"  Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...

Buy "Shift!" on amazon

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.

   
     Check out my satirical fiction:

"Delightfully offensive!"  Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...

Buy "Shift!" on amazon

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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The Hope Of Perpetuation

     Everything, everywhere, builds on a foundation.  I've always considered this to be true, but I've never articulated it in writing, verbally or otherwise.  I'm think, at one time or another, everyone has at least thought about it.  Look around you, and think about everything you have, everything you've learned, and everything you are, currently, as a person.  Everything occurs in a series of steps that builds on the foundation you have laid down.

     I once thought of the world as a mess, as a hodgepodge of incomplete works, things people began but never finished.  Everywhere I looked, I saw unfinished projects: roads in the middle of construction, flip phones, tube TVs, gardens, elementary school children, the NFL draft.  All of these things, indeed everything else in this world too, were not finished and would never be finished.  They were simply building to a crescendo that would never occur.  They were all projects that would continue to be reinvented, redefined and improved upon.  But my view of the world, as I get older, is beginning to change.

     I dare suspect(as if I know the minds and hearts of others) that I am metamorphisizing backwards in this.  I would think that most people initially view the world through the prism of hopeful optimism and evolve away from that into a negative cynicism.  As I live on, I think I'm moving away from the idea of an incomplete world and into the idea that there is no technological ceiling.  There will never be an end to the incomplete projects of the world, but now I feel a comfort in that, not a brooding sense of failure.  It is like a classical masteiece ending on a suspended seventh, and I'm waiting, screaming for that resolution chord to finish the concert but it never comes and we, the audience, sit in our red velvet seats, stuck in suspense for all eternity.  But after being stuck on that chord for so long, maybe, just maybe, I begin to recognize the hope in it.  It is the idea that we are never finished--not as a negative, but instead as a positive.  Things will always improve.  And with that idea, comes hope.  It is the focal point that changed, I guess.  I am no longer focussing on the incomplete, but instead focussing on the future possibilities, and imagining the evolution.

     The same is true with everything in this world.  End points are an illusion, like the concept of time.  Ends are a means constructed by the human mind to force some sort of order on the world in which we live.  The idea helps us feel fulfilled.  Admittedly, it's hard not to be seduced by it.  For example, I mow my lawn.  I am finished.  Broaden the time frame and I am not finished.  If you broaden it enough, I will end up cutting it next week too.  Broadened to infinity, I will never fully complete the task.  Again, and simply for the fact that it bears repeating, everything is this way.  

     We define what constitutes the end of something.  We make an imaginary stopping point, a point where we say, it will be done when....fill in the blank.  But it's never done.  We percieve something to be completed when we arrive at this imaginary end point.  Everything stretches to infinity, and our minds cannot grasp it.  Because of this inability to fully grasp the concept of infinity, we must create absolutes.  

     

     Instead of negatively viewing a project as never finished, I submit the challenge to view it positively.  It is a chance to improve on it, a chance for continuation, a hopeful progression of perpetuation.  There are no real end points, no fulfilling victories.  The fulfillment comes in improving, in always having that last chance to do it better.  It is what has given us what we have today.  Everything builds on a foundation and goes on ad infinitum...

http://www.amazon.com/Shift-Bill-C-Castengera/dp/150088703X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410747499&sr=1-1&keywords=castengera