Spiritual Misfit

Last night I got into an interesting conversation with WWNF about what the fact that everyone and anyone can publish a book these days is going to do to the writing industry.

Then, as if on cue, I wake up to the story of author Jacqueline Howett’s very public melt down in my Inbox.

The story, in brief, is Howett wrote a book and published it independently. Big Al gave the book a mixed review on his blog. Howett freaked out, started swearing, accused Big Al of abuse, lashed out at other posters and demanded he take it down.

(And honey, while I definitely empathize, the review wasn’t actually that bad. Most writers – including myself – have had much worse reviews than that. And yeah, I freaked out badly the first time too and regretted it after.)

So now she’s famous (for the next few days anyway) as an OK-writer who can’t take criticism without throwing a fit.

Poor Howett. Like I said, I get it. The question for her will be where she goes from here.

So back to my conversation with WWNF…

Anyone can write a book, or create a CD, or upload a video, or create a blog… but not everyone’s going to want to stick with it once they’ve tried.

Not everyone is going to do what it takes to keep going, to try again, to tune out stupid comments, to deal with failures, to take criticism, to work with mentors, to stick it out, to scream in the rain, to drive their friends and family crazy, to keep going.

If you dream of being a writer, then here’s a Reality Check. Some 79% of books published sell less than 99 copies.  An estimates 83% sell less than 1,000 copies, and 98% sell less than 5,000 copies. Less than 0.04% ‘make it’ big. (See here among others.)

So, unless you dream of spending days, weeks, months, years writing a book which only sells a few hundred copies, chances are your book will ‘fail’.

The question is: What will you do if you get knocked down? And where will you go from there?

It’s been two years since my award winning novel If Only You Knew first hit shelfs. I’ve got a couple more in the works. But a few of you have said you wanted something to read Now!

So – here you go. Since October, I have been writing a brand new messy, quirky, funny, unpredictable romance online – as part of the Storypraxis daily writing challenge.

There are nine mini-chapters so far, which you can find here at Misfit Romance, an evolving novel. Enjoy!

Eye Weekly had an interesting article this weeked on “The war on god (and karma and acupuncture and wizards)”. It’s a bit long, but it takes a really interesting look at the Centre for Inquiry,  a Toronto based atheist group.

What was fascinating was how author Edward Keenan keep asking if they’re “just another church”.

He wrote: “The fact is, though members of CFI stridently reject comparisons to religious organizations, they’re starting to look an awful lot like a church group, complete with evangelism, a mild persecution complex and a gallery of dead prophets including Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell…”

And later: “…For the most part, it’s like any church or social club gathering anywhere: a group of people discussing common interests and bonding a bit awkwardly over homemade food and cheap drinks.”

It made me wonder… what does that say about our churches?

Recently on Behind the Story I said I’ve learned a lot by listening to atheists. And I wanted to explain more what I meant.

I used to feel like I Had to argue with atheists. That aggressively “defending the faith” was the only permissible course of action, because believing in God meant that it was my job to either shut down or shut up everyone who didn’t.

(As I’m writing this I’m fighting the temptation to go off on a long tangent about how obnoxious, ungodly and frankly unhelpful it is to always push your beliefs on others without ever taking the time to actually find out about what they believe and why. But we can argue about that one another day.)

So, I thought I’d take a few blogs and talk about some of the things I actually learned once I started listening.

#1: Giving your Life without Hedging your Bets

When I was a brash but insecure 20yr old, I interviewed Professor James R. Brown from the University of Toronto’s philosophy department. (Looking back, I can’t believe how gracious he was to me, considering how graceless I was to him).

Prof Brown said one thing which really surprised me. He told me that the belief that there is neither a higher power nor an afterlife had spurred young people to sacrificially give up their lives, time, money, and energy to proactively change the lives of others for good.

For him, theism lead to a laziness of spirit… after all, if God was going to sort it all out in the end why did it matter that children were dying of preventable diseases?

But if there was no greater purpose, if the only meaning your life had was the one you created in the few short years you were going to exist, then that lit a fire under some people to go flat out, make their days count, and live their lives with reckless, generous, sacrificial abandon.

My 20yr old brain had practically no capacity to even begin to get my mind around what he was saying. To me, belief in God automatically spurred you to change the world, while lack of spiritual belief, by default, led to nothing but bleak despair and gluttonous excess. I was wrong.

Now I’ve actually been privileged to meet a huge number of people, for whom faith in Jesus has given them a drive and passion to give their lives for others. People working in Africa, Asia, North America, Latin America, Europe, and on the streets of downtown Toronto, to rescue young people from sexual slavery, provide palliative care for the dying, create life-changing new technologies, feed the hungry, champion social justice, and even just be identified as people of faith in countries where Christianity equals prison and death. They are my Heroes.  Seriously!

BUT I’ve also seen far too many people who are too quick to use “God’s sovereign plan” as an excuse to do far too little in this world. Who use select verses from the Bible as license to hate who they want to hate, ignore who they want to ignore, spend how they want to spend, and live fat, lazy lives of excess while they wait to be “called” or “led” to get up off the couch, before they get to go to some eternal heavenly Disneyland.

Personally, I am humbled to realize how many people are out there actively trying to both change the world and save the lives of others, without having a spiritual safety net to fall back on, or the promise of an eternal reward for their troubles.

People who know that they only have one chance to live their lives – and so decide to make it count on behalf of others.