The Writing Itself Must Be 99% Of Your Validation and Happiness: The Secret To Remaining a Contented Independent Author
You have written and self-published a novel you are proud of and think is good. Great! No matter which way you slice it, that is a major accomplishment. You should feel validated and happy . . . but you probably don't.
And that's where the problems begin.
You are seeking your validation and happiness in the wrong place. The validation and happiness must be almost entirely focused in the creation of your work and the opportunity of being able to put it out into the world.
What happens after that is anyone's guess.
You might be an amazing platform builder / marketer / social media star who launches an incredible campaign and end up selling a gazillion copies in a few months. Then again, you might end up selling a gazillion copies and then be ridiculed online for years afterward. Or your amazing media campaign might fall flat and go nowhere.
You might not do any marketing and get noticed by a publisher. That same publisher could make you the hottest writer in the world or they could screw you over with a cut-throat book contract.
You might do minimum marketing and build up respectable sales. You might to maximum marketing and have no sales at all.
Your work could end up wallowing in obscurity your whole life and be discovered only after you die. You work could bring you fame and riches in your life and then drift into obscurity after you die. Or your work could be obscure forever.
The possibilities are endless. In the realm of self-publishing, anything could happen. Anything. It's chaotic and unpredictable and it is precisely for this reason that you should not peg notions of validation or happiness on the success or failure of your book in the marketplace.
Validation and happiness must be almost entirely confined to the writing itself. Look there to find your happiness. That you have the chance to put your work out onto the market is a merely an added bonus. After that, be ambitious, strive for whatever notion of success you desire, but for God's sake don't let rankings or sales or media attention be the measures for your happiness.
I guarantee you will be setting yourself up for a disappointment, even if you surpass your wildest expectations in terms of success.
Hungarian Painters Who Were the Inspiration For Reinhardt Drixler: #1 József Koszta
One of the main characters in my novel The City of Earthly Desire is Reinhardt Drixler, a painter-turned-pastry chef and café owner whose early ambitions to become a recognized painter in are crushed by the communist regime in Hungary for political reasons. Reinhardt hails from a small village near the city of Pécs and becomes interested in art when he is still a young boy after he accidentally discovers two suitcases with paints, brushes, and other art supplies in the attic of his mother's home.
As I began to plan the novel, I envisioned Reinhardt as a common man from a humble background who shows great talent. He remains in the realist style and likens painting to a spiritual act. As these blurry first ideas drifted through my mind, I began to cast about for real life nineteenth and twentieth-century artists upon whom I might be able to model my Reinhardt character. In the end, Reinhardt became a composite of many painters, both in terms of style and, in some cases, life events and personality.
The first of these is József Koszta, a realist painter who dabbled with expressionism:
Born on 27 March 1861, Koszta trained at various schools of art, including the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, which he attended in 1891 on a scholarship,[1] and the Master School of Gyula Benczúr. He studied under Károly Lotz and Bertalan Szekely. He became a member of the Szolnok Art Colony and worked largely in solitude on a farm he shared with landscape artist István Nagy for many years.
Koszta's artistic vision began to emerge in the 1920s. Working in the realism school, he focused heavily on images depicting peasant life, utilizing strong tonal colors and emphasizing the interplay of light and shadow. Particularly as his work progressed, he explored the pop of bright color against dark background. His prolific body of work includes portraits, genre paintings, still life and landscapes.
Prior to his death on 29 July 1949, he donated his images to the museum in Szentes, which renamed itself in his honor the Koszta József Múzeum.[2] source Wikipedia
Some paintings by Koszta that came close to matching the kind of painting Reinhardt Drixler creates in my novel.
Lights Before the Storm
The Corn Snappers
Village End
Kindle Giveaway of the Novel Soon
The City Earthly Desire will be free on Amazon toward the end of January / beginning of February. I will share concrete dates the moment I have them.
Jordan Peterson: Reality and the Sacred. One of the Best Lectures I Have Ever Heard
There is a university professor in Toronto, Canada who has garnered my complete respect. His name is Jordan Peterson and he is currently mired in controversy over his refusal to use non-binary or gender neutral pronouns. A defender of free speech, Peterson has been ringing alarm bells over Canada's C-16 bill for quite some time and this has, rather predictably, made him the target of relentless attack.
I immediately respected Peterson's courage to say no to the latest left-liberal attempt to regulate away all semblance of free speech and open discourse, but my respect for the man only deepened once I began to explore his works and understand the foundations of his views, throughts, and beliefs. He is of a rare breed. A professor who not only believes in axiomatic truth, but is willing to defend it despite the consequences. Unlike most of his colleagues teaching at universities, Peterson is no ideologically-possessed puppet willing to spout the left-liberal/social justice mantra in order further or maintain his career. What makes him special, in my opinion, is his uncanny understanding of what truth is and why it must be defended, regardless of the cost. He is no intellectual lightweight. Because of this, his enemies have not had an easy time taking him down.
Jordan Peterson is, in my mind, a great man. I urge you to visit his website and You Tube channel. His lectures, interviews, articles, and books are all required viewing/reading to help us all better understand just what it is we are facing and what will likely happen if we do not rise up and challenge that which is confronting Western civilization. He is already a prominent figure in the spiritual battle currently being waged; I have a feeling he will become even more important in the coming years.
I wish I had discovered him sooner and I urge you to discover him now. His ideas are truly life-changing or, at the very least, incredibly life-affirming.
Dr. Peterson's links:
​https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos/videos
​http://jordanbpeterson.com/
Modern Transcendence is Purely Horizontal
I got to thinking about transcendence today and how any yearning for transcendence in today's world is purely horizontal in nature. Gone is the vertical structure of lifting earth up to heaven. It has been replaced by a desperate and fevevish striving to bring heaven down to earth or, more correctly, to create heaven on earth (since belief in an actual heaven is, well let's face it, so passé and yesterday). The motivation for transcendence still exists, but its direction has shifted entirely, to the point that vertical transcendence barely exists at all and if it is ever mentioned it is immediately frowned upon or ridiculed.
Naturally, the observation that contemporary transcendence is horizontal is nothing new. It has been made a handful of writers, philosophers, and thinkers over the past few centuries. Nevertheless, what strikes me about our contemporary notions of horizontal transcendence is how doggedly we persist with it and how oblivious we are to the results.
Happiness According to Tolstoy
"I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness."
― Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
I originally came across this quote about fifteen years ago after I had more or less formulated similar notions of what constituted happiness in this life. It is comforting to know that I am in good company.
Thoughts About the Power of Visualization
On New Year's Day I like to go for a walk and reflect upon the 365 days that have passed and think about what I would like to do in the coming year. It was a perfect day for that kind of walk. A dense, milky fog cloaked the landscape creating a peaceful, almost otherworldly atmosphere in the familiar fields and meadows where I normally take my walks. The diffused whiteness encrusted the trees and grass in crystal snow and limited visibility to about 50 meters. Since I had no vistas upon which to gaze, I had no choice but look within as I made my way through the whiteness. I concluded that 2016 had been a positive and pivotal year for me and that I could attribute much of what I had learned, accomplished, and experienced to the habit of visualization.
Of course, there is nothing groundbreaking about this – the power of visualization is as old as mankind; countless works ranging from the philosophically profound to the trivially mundane have been written about the subject. At its most basic level, visualization is instinctual. It is an activity we all do, though at different levels of consciousness with varying levels of mastery and intensity. It is utterly fused to the strength and persistence of one's imagination and, as such, steps outside the limits of rational and logical thought and challenges preconceived notions of reality by venturing into other realms such as faith and hope. This has been understood for centuries by people from different cultures and various walks of life, yet despite its ubiquity and apparent obviousness, the power and necessity of visualizing is often neglected or underutilized in our everyday lives. The conclusion I reached as I walked through the foggy field this morning was this – I can attribute most of what I accomplished, learned, and experienced this past year to my prior visualization of these events and circumstances. Put another way, whatever I achieved in the past year was more or less dependent on my ability to picture these achievements beforehand. The more consistently and intensely I imagined something, the more likely it was to manifest in reality.
Naturally, not every single thing I put my mind to bore fruit in the real world, but the things I focused on most keenly did strangely come to be. Among them are the purchase and remodeling of an old house in the Hungarian countryside (a culmination of much visualization over the course of many years), which has produced a mortgage-free existence (a lifelong goal finally achieved), as well as a secure and rewarding employment situation that allows me the pleasure of engaging in freelance work I enjoy. It is also comforting to know I will never again have to return to the teaching career I abandoned when I moved away from the United Kingdom a year-and-a-half ago. Together with this, I have finally managed to craft a daily routine that allows ample time for spiritual contemplation, physical recreation, and a plethora of intellectual pursuits. Put simply, my reality today was a mere pipe dream less than two years ago, yet here I am.
However, as I considered these things I quickly understood that all of this was merely the groundwork for more significant accomplishments, which led me to the awareness of the things I had not expended any great effort visualizing, chief among them my further literary ambitions and my desire to engage with the world in a more meaningful and impactful way. After I emerged from the fields and made my way home, I decided to begin visualizing these things for the coming year.
We shall see how successful my visualizing will be in the months to come.