A rant against myself

In my mind
Originally uploaded by SideLong.

Well, I have to admit that sometimes I can be a bit of an asshole. But at least I try to admit it and learn from my mistakes if I can--though there's no guarantees in that department either.

As I've noted in the comments section of the previous post, I was a tad hasty in my judgement of one or more of my fellow writers over at Blogcritics,and now I feel like a traitorous bitch. I guess I'll just blame it on the meds--that's always good for an excuse..lol...but seriously.

In my last post I linked to a Blogcritics article about blogging versus writing. I'd been reading a few posts and comments over at BC lately that had a cumulative effect of making me feel exasperated with what I felt were some pretentious attitudes held by some writers--especially those who had written novels and were either contemplating getting them published or had self-published and were hoping to gain visibility for them.

I have a bit of PTSD against aspiring novelists left over from my days as a member of a few Yahoo writer's groups. I think I managed to make an idiot of myself over at these groups on several occasions as well, but my pet peeve had always been those who wrote books but then did not bother to look into--and face the harsh realities of--the very very arduous, if not well-nigh impossible process of getting them either picked up by a traditional agent or publisher, or else self-marketing the shit out of them if they self-published.

Publishing is not an easy thing to get into, but fiction is probably the most difficult of all. The "problem" I had was that there were some folks who apparently wrote a novel in a vacuum, never ventured to "lower" themselves to trying to get a short piece published to test the waters (including--gasp--non fiction), never researched the process of submitting to agents and publishers, and then railed and ranted about the fact that the publishing industry is unfairly stacked against them. Well, yes it is, but that's life in a very competitive field.

In any case, to make a long story short, I'm now e-mailing back and forth with the author of the article I linked to in the previous post. I now understand why he had chosen to not respond to a lot of comments on his pieces, or even check his comments--and that he was not being stuck up by not doing so. Although he gets a lot of praise from commenters and BC editors alike, and many of his posts wind up on the Editor's Picks list, some of the comments he gets are horrifically nasty.

This is a guy who has the guts and determination to post a piece every single day on Blogcritics. I definitely can't do that, and my hat goes off to him. In any case, he's a talented and very nice guy, and I'm glad I'm getting to know him and his work better. In case anyone is interested, here's a link which leads to all his BC posts. Also, since I've refrained from "announcing" my new BC posts here lately, this is a link to the BC posts I've done so far. Some are original, and some are derived from old Shithouse pieces. Craven blogslut pimpout, over and out.

Another source of anxiety for me has to do with an old blogpal, Walker. He posted a brilliant piece the other day about his love/hate relationship with cigs, and has announced his intention to quit for good at the end of the month. He's invited me to take on this challenge as well, since we first "met" when he responded to one of my posts here about how bad my cig habit is.

Walker is roughly my age, and from what he says he has a number of health problems that are weighing on him. Not only am I worried about him, but I can relate absolutely, because I have come to the point where I am seriously afraid I may drop dead at any time-- especially if I keep up the bad habits I've developed to the max in the past year or so.

Since I started blogging and since my boyfriend BG (and thus I) quit AA (I'm not an alchoholic, but I've got an addictive personality and my own issues), I've stopped eating right, stopped exercising completely, and probably doubled my consumption of cigs. As a result, I feel physically sick whenever I walk half a block. I'm out of breath and have to stop for a minute or two. My 80-something year old aunts can get around better than I can nowadays. As if that isn't enough, both my parents smoked, didn't eat right, and died of heart disease early in life, leaving me an orphan before the age of 15. You think I'd be smarter, now wouldn't you?

My relationship with BG has suffered due to the blogging mania as well. Though I enjoy it no end, I've said here again and again that it's become an unbalanced force in my life.

Adding to my frustration is the fact that if my ex-boyfriend L and I had finished up the packing, discarding, and prep work in order to sell our coop, I could be buying the Bronx place I had my eye on for so long right now. I've been checking the real estate ads, and there are several listings for two-bedrooms in the complex I intend to move to, but since our place is still not ready to show, let alone sell, I'm sitting helplessly by while these choice deals will likely get grabbed up by others. I can only hope that there will be something good available to me when we finally do finish up this process, but it's seriously bumming me out.

So I guess I've got some work to do on myself--inside and out. But they do say that the unexamined life is not worth living, so I guess I'll just take it from there.