Smile! Aren’t you happy now?
You know I was reading this article and I got to the part where they pulled out a quote that said, “When somebody tells you to smile, it’s kind of hard not to.”
Well … no, not necessarily. Sometimes when someone says a thing like that, all you want to do is slap them silly.
But that’s not really what this post is about.
This is about being content in the face of adversity.
Now … the good news is that, no matter how crappy you feel right now, you can be happier.
I realize this just sounds like a platitude, but honestly there are techniques you can use to help yourself feel better.
Take it from one who felt at one time like I simply couldn’t go on. Like I’d fallen into the deepest well and would never be able to crawl out.
In a word, I felt “alone”.
But, little did I know, that I actually wasn’t alone. That, in fact, I had so many friends, but I’d simply taken them for granted. I got so wrapped up in my own troubles that I couldn’t see how lucky I was, in so many ways.
So … whatever else I may post here, I can tell you this for sure.
I promise not to patronize you with dumb platitudes.
I promise that, if you want, that you can recover and maintain a level of peace of mind that I’ve found.
However, I can also assure you that it will be hard.
Frankly, it isn’t easy to endure the rough passages in one’s life. Nonetheless, if you feel like you can’t bear another minute of whatever ails you, I urge you to please stick with me here.
I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing. It’s a story of a bizarre kind of quick success (relatively speaking), only to be followed by a quick bottoming out, financially and otherwise. Thanks to my being oblivious to the bait-and-switch tactics, ahem, I mean chess-like maneuvers of a certain tech company that started out as a bookstore.
It’s helped to remember that I don’t have to do any of this alone. I’ve also stopped giving a damn about a whole lot of things that don’t really matter.
Stick with me. More to come!
PS: How authors are earning $50k+ on Kickstarter. I seem to recall someone or other sneering at the notion of crowdfunding for authors. Well, whatever, right? 🙂
PPS: Hard Choices in Mobile Filmmaking. If you want to make a movie with your smartphone, what’s stopping you? 🙂
PPPS: 17-Year-Old YouTuber Set To Direct Hollywood Feature Film.
Welcome to the internet, folks! 🙂 The new stage where we’re all multi-hyphenates/creators now.
PPPPS: The Orphan and the Tortoise | A Fairy Tale.
PLUS: Palace Project, Draft2Digital Strike Deal to Offer Indie E-books to Libraries.
And here’s an excerpt:
Beginning next week, the first of an anticipated 500,000 e-book titles from Draft2Digital and Smashwords (which announced their merger last year) will be made available for library lending in Palace Marketplace, the Palace Project’s digital content platform. For now, titles will only be available for sale on a perpetual access, one copy/one user model, though other purchase and lending models could be made available to indie authors in the future.
Draft2Digital authors (including existing Smashwords authors) will be paid 60% of their e-book list price. As for pricing, DPLA and Draft2Digital officials say prices will be very “library friendly,” with some 50,000 of the e-books available to libraries priced at free.
Furthermore, in an effort to help librarians determine which of the many indie titles might fit with their collections, the Digital Public Library’s “ Curation Corps,” a standing group of “librarians, information professionals and library graduate students who develop collections for the DPLA’s e-book projects” will create curated “recommended” lists of Draft2Digital books within Palace Marketplace.
So, are we to understand that real people will be curating these books? What a concept, huh?
This is what librarians do. They’re like gatekeepers, ahem, I mean they’re information specialists. That’s their job. 🙂
Originally published at http://randomandsundrythings.wordpress.com on February 10, 2023.
