May I Read Your Palm?

Yes yes, where have I been, blah blah? I get it. I have been AWOL. Life is sometimes a bitch.
And then you die.

However, I didn't die so here I am, bringing you some new, exciting, scintillating, amusing, educational, inspirational content.
Or am I?
We'll see. How about we get started?
So, yesterday on Twitter, there was this post doing the rounds about how men describe women in literature. That led to another writer asking people to describe themselves as a character in their stories. The answers to that post made me write a mini post about it on Tumblr because wow.
I don't know if you guys know that the narratives that you tell yourselves about yourselves are projected outward for the world to see.
So if you tell me that for example: "She's thirty-five years old, is quite pretty with makeup and doesn't give a fuck' what I hear is, she's self-conscious about getting older and insecure about her looks. She also tries to protect herself from criticism by pretending she doesn't care.
You give a fuck honey.
People who have no fucks to give also have no time to tell you about the fucks they don't have to give. It's simply apparent by how unmoved they are by your attacks/trolling/opinions. See: Chrissy Teigen.
Besides the whole "IDGAF" thing is very 2012. Rihanna moved on and so should you.

Much worse than that, there were some women who COULD NOT describe themselves because of "societal mores". I don't know what that means. What I do know is that how you view YOURSELF should be a very personal thing coming from your own inner sense of self. Let other people think that you're TOO fat, or TOO dark or TOO skinny or TOO ugly. That's their business and their perspective. You should have yours. You should know who you are and what you like about yourself. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, drop everything you're doing and find out because this is the single most important thing you will ever do. If you don't know who you are, you basically don't know anything. You can't have an opinion if you don't know who you are, you can't get to know somebody because you rely on other people's perceptions to tell you what you should think. You've basically erased yourself.                                                                                                                                            I don't know how one grows up without any knowledge of who they are, so I don't know how you fix it. I suspect it comes down to paying attention to yourself, finding out what you like, and what you don't. Trusting your gut. And loving yourself. I think. I'm no expert on emotional intelligence. 

It saddens me that so many people don't know how to love themselves. Like if I had time I would probably sit here angsting about it for a bit. But I can't because I have a test page to write for a new client and a fanfic to begin for a Big Bang.                                                                                                        

   On the book front, it's been a pretty demoralizing March. Amazon continues to be the douche bag we all know and love, making it difficult for authors to price books, making it difficult for those books to be found, making it difficult to know if they even tell you about every sale. So my new thing is promoting my author page where there are other vendors that books can be bought from. It's also a place where you can compare prices and get my free books for free. You might have noticed, or maybe not, that my free books are not free on Amazon. That's their shit, not mine. Every other vendor has them priced for free. So that's one advantage. Another is that I'm gonna host a giveaway for my mailing list. Whoever buys a book from a vendor OTHER THAN Amazon can post me the link to their email and I will reward them with another book of their choosing. Isn't that A-MAZ-ING? Of course, it is and you're excited. I can tell.

  Other than that, I'd like to give you a bit of homework in the comments. Please describe yourself as you would your heroine in a novel. Give me 100 words. Nothing negative.

We're gonna have a good April. I can feel it.                                                                                            

Welp

Have you ever had a book launch give you mood swings until it feels like maybe you're undergoing menopause? No? Just me then?
Okay.
Today I woke up feeling like everything I ever wrote is trash. Have you ever felt like that? It all began when I checked my texts and saw this book club was discussing reading and reviewing In Search of Paradise. One of my literati members is a member of that group so they'd brought it up. And it seemed like people were up for it, and enthusiastic - kind of- about reviewing and even referring me to other reviewers...all very positive right? Well yes, it was, but somehow it just made me doubt every single word I wrote like, "Oh God, what are these strangers gonna think of me?"

This is not me.
You can ask my son and he'll tell you, "Mummy ain't scared of nothin'" - hopefully in grammatically correct English.
Ask anyone who has known me for like five minutes. I am truly one of those people who just doesn't give a fuck about other people's opinions. But here I am, second-guessing myself, wanting to find another profession, eating chocolate for breakfast...okay maybe I'd have done that last one anyway. The point is, I'm all discombobulated.
Over a book.
Maybe this is it; menopause is here.
Or I'm just a self-absorbed dickhead. One or the other.
It's freaking me out going from being Kanye to...I don't know, somebody who doubts themselves.

Maybe it's stepping out of my comfort zone? Probably. You think this is how Colin Kaepernick felt - and I am in no way comparing myself to him; he's my hero - when he decided to take a knee? Just hooo, okay here goes nothing. But expecting criticism and whatever from the masses and just letting it roll over him and still, do what he thought was right?
I mean this isn't that serious I guess but it's a problem. It's a problem in this society and many people would look at this couple and start quoting bible scripture at me. That's okay. What I fear most is that maybe I took this bit of culture and didn't' do a good job representing it. It's a responsibility and maybe I failed. Or that's how I feel today.

Well anyway, there's one cure for self-absorption and that's looking outside yourself and turning your attention to someone or something else. Another member of my literati squad wrote a blog post today about the origin of Jaluos. My beta reader, Ben, who is American told me that I need to include a glossary in my book for my non-Kenyan readers so they can understand all the very Kenyan references. Well, I didn't do a glossary but I did do footnotes. However, there are always blanks to fill and if you wanna know more about Ben's Jaluoness, read this article. Curiously it also talks about not letting our origins define us....serendipity perhaps?