A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.

But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.

But should they be?

Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?

And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?

But if you’re writing fiction, and your goal as a writer is to find a real audience for your work, sorry, but I think you have to be very cautious about joining a writing group.

Here’s why.

1. Blind leading the blind. If you want to learn how to become a success in anything, you need to find mentors,  models, and teachers who are already successful at that thing. A writing group — unless it’s well-stocked with published authors — can’t offer you anything but the opinions of people who are capable of educated guesses, at best. At worst, they may well be naive or even ignorant. You have to ask yourself: what sort of person do you want advising you on your work?

2. Your precious time. Participating in a writing group takes time. The meetings alone take time. Critiquing other peoples’ work takes time. And what could you be doing, if you weren’t spending all that time on your writing group? Um, writing, perhaps?

3. And your precious focus. One of the most important things you have to do, as a writer, is to pinpoint what you want to accomplish with your WIP. Any time anyone peers over your shoulder, points at a sentence/character/theme and says “well, what about this, though?” and you are obligated (because you’re polite!) to respond, then guess what. You’ve just been distracted. And when you’re distracted, you’re not honing in on what you’re trying do do, as a writer.

4. Committee syndrome. Related to #3, but important enough to merit it’s own line on the list. Committees create only one thing: consensus. Committees cannot create novels, or any other kind of art for that matter. The minute you start offering your writing up to some committee, you build a nice consensus on what’s “good” and what “works” etc. etc., but you are also consigning your WIP to mediocrity or worse.

5. False security. Say you manage to wow your writing group members with your latest example of scintillating prose. So what? To paraphrase Dean Wesley Smith, the only readers who matter are the ones who are going to pay you for your work. And here’s the thing: being praised for something we’ve written is a peak experience — it’s satisfying, it sates us as a culmination of sorts. The danger is that after that peak, we tend to let up. This is often subconscious, of course. “Oh,” says our sneaky little mind. “I’ve done it. I’m finished. I can rest for a bit now.” Well guess what — you’re not finished. Wowing your reading group means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. And every second you spend your time polishing that little trophy on your shelf is another second you’ve wasted when you should be pressing forward toward your real goals as a writer.

6. False insecurity. Okay, let’s look at the opposite scenarios. Say your writing group hates your latest example of scintillating prose. Does that mean you stink? Well first of all, maybe not. See #1 above. But even if the group is correct, and your stuff could use some work, what do you gain by knowing? Nothing, except if you count it as a “gain” when you let people suck you dry of all that pesky self-confidence. Look, it takes tremendous courage to become a writer. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re spending your bravery reserves on the wrong things.

7. Creating and judging are mutually exclusive pursuits–and the creating bit is the one that is most important to writers. It’s “the zone.” I’m a golfer. And I can tell you that if I’m in a self-critical frame of mind, I cannot hit a pure golf shot. Well guess what, the same goes with writing. Yes, there’s a place for looking at your work critically. The risk is that participating in a writing group will cause you to add too much of that self-critical mode to the mix that makes up your writing life — in a sense, to your identity as a writer. Put another way, as a writer you have to learn to get in the zone, and that means controlling the self-critical periods of your writing cycles very, very carefully — because too much self-critical destroys creativity.

So does that mean writing groups over absolutely no benefits? Well, no. They may be a networking resource. They may be your outlook for socializing. You may, if you’re lucky, win a couple of future readers through writing group contacts.

But if you want to invest in yourself as a writer by getting feedback on your work? Look for workshops where you can learn from published, successful writers.

My 2 cents.

Definitely Cerambycidae, based on the body shape, showiness, length of the antennae, etc., but this particular one’s not in my copy of Petersen’s field guide to NA insects, and I can’t find a pic of it on the ‘net, either . . .

:-)

Thanks to all who have stopped by this blog — and best holiday wishes to you . . .

(Ecard courtesy someecards. Check it out if you haven’t ever visited!)

As you know if you’ve been anywhere near a mainstream media outlet this week, the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation that children as young as two be screened for cholesterol and, even more heinous, children as young as eight should be put on cholesterol-lowering drugs.

We need to wake up. Cholesterol is NOT the problem.

Trying to lower cholesterol via prescription drugs, OTOH, is a HUGE problem.

I’ve blogged before about cholesterol. We’ve managed to collectively demonize the stuff: a textbook example of the phenomenon of “mistaken consensus.”

Here’s the reality of the situation. We NEED cholesterol. Our brains need it, our bodies need it. It’s an essential component of dozens of critical cellular structures, such as the myelin sheaths that surround our nerve cells (can’t lay down new neural pathways in the brain without myelin, folks); it’s a component of the bile salts we use to digest fats; it’s a building block of our sex hormones (yes, that’s estrogen, testosterone, & friends).

So why is cholesterol the bad guy? Because it’s also a well-known component of arterial plaque.

But we’ve made a crucial error. We’ve assumed that since plaque is made of cholesterol, lowering cholesterol levels will help prevent heart disease.

Well, I say “we.” People have been questioning the role of cholesterol for years, now. This is from 1987:

In considering 1,400 patients whose blocked arteries were replaced with veins taken from other parts of their bodies, Dr. [Michael E.] DeBakey found again that cholesterol levels did not predict which of these bypass patients would redevelop blockage and require further surgery. He said patients with ”low” cholesterol levels, below 200 micrograms per milliliter of blood, did not fare better as a group than patients with high levels, about 240.

That’s over 20 years ago!

Since then, the thinking has evolved considerably; research now points more toward inflammation than cholesterol levels as the critical risk factor for heart disease. Google “inflammation heart disease” and you find plenty of stuff to mull, much of it along the lines of this bit from Andrew Weil’s website:

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a substance found in blood that is a marker for inflammation in the body. High levels of this protein are associated with an increased risk of heart disease and low levels with a low risk. The notion that inflammation plays a central role in heart disease is relatively new, although we’ve long known that CRP levels go up to signal any type of inflammation . . .

[T]he link between elevated CRP levels and heart disease has been demonstrated repeatedly, and there is some evidence that CRP may be a more important indicator of heart disease risk than high LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. In an eight-year study involving 27,939 women led by Paul Ridker, MD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, more than half of the women who eventually developed heart disease had high CRP levels even though their LDL levels were not considered high. Dr. Ridker has estimated that the same may be true for 25 percent of the U.S. population. The study results were published in the November 14, 2002, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. More recently, a Cleveland Clinic study found ultrasound evidence that clogged coronary arteries had not gotten worse among 502 patients who were most successful at lowering their CRP levels. The study was published in the Jan. 6, 2005, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

It gets crazier. Courtesy of this piece published by the Weston Price Foundation: cholesterol seems to protect against infection. Since infection causes inflammation (low grade bacterial infection might be the true heart disease culprit), high cholesterol levels might actually PROTECT against heart disease.

Yes, there is a subset of the population for which high levels of so-called “bad” cholesterol is correlated with increased risk of heart disease. But it’s only a small subset. And it doesn’t include kids!

So why would ANYONE even CONSIDER drugging kids to lower their cholesterol levels?

I’m no conspiracy theorist. But I do think the American Academy of Pediatrics has betrayed its role as an advocate for our children. It’s shown itself to be too cozy to the “drugs are the answer” model of health care–and that’s not a positive thing.

Put on your thinking caps, guys, for crying out loud.

We need to feed our kids better. Childhood obesity IS an issue.

But drugging our kids to artificially lower levels of an essential molecule is NOT going to solve the problem.

What is will do, count on it, is put them at risk for a world of hurt. Starting with the known side effects of these drugs. And ending with who-knows-what other horrors. Messed up brain development? Hormonal imbalances during crucial stages of puberty? We just don’t know.

It makes me sick to my stomach . . .

I’ll try to get back into my head & blog some more over the next couple of days. We’re supposed to get a ton of rain tomorrow, that should settle me down. And any day now I’ll start to sleep better again. I’ve been waking up early every morning, too wound up to keep myself settled. I’m not complaining, it’s fun in a jittery kind of way :-)

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Is that an issue with the quality of the mic?

It’s a Radio Shack headset/microphone. I can’t remember what it cost. Under $30.

If I invest in a higher quality mic, would that solve the problem?

I’m using the sound recorder utility that comes with Windows 2000. Are there better sound capture applications that would let me filter the static?

Anybody reading this able to help? Thanks!