Words of wisdom...

I don't have any. LOL! No, seriously, in joining chats this past weekend (m/m chats) I find I am very inept at voicing my opinions. The Aries temper in me pushes my 'pride' or 'ego' button and I fall into the trap without looking. I have a narrow vision, it seems, on the realities of life. Not that anyone blasted me for saying things, just that...what they said on certain topics, as compared to what my opinions were, made me feel like I was a fish out of water. It was a heavy lesson, but being that I'm a new kid on the block and wet behind the ears, the greenie, the rook, it was more a wake-up call.

Yes, I want my name out there. I want to make myself known, but there are ways to do that and speaking up just because you think your opinion holds even a drop of water is not the way to do it. No one treated me unkindly, let me get that out there up front, I had three responses to my comments and all were nice and diplomatic. No, what I'm trying to say here, and again, being woefully inept at it, is that I'm feeling and realizing my own inferiority. I would never make a good public speaker. I'm learning how to expand my knowledge, my vision, so-to-speak, but I'm still a kid in this area. A teenager in my mind. I need to grow up. Also, I don't know the etiquette. I had a woman contact me privately about what 'not' to say in those posts. She gave me valid reasons for my opinion being out of turn, but it still hit me hard that I had done something wrong out of ignorance. I learned from it and that's the good thing, still no one likes to be pulled aside and told they did something wrong, especially when you thought you were trying to help another author. I won't go into details, but it's an author/writing/publisher thing, something I'd never heard of before because I've not known anyone who experienced the situation, so I had no idea this thing happens.

It's not easy to realize that the world of authoring is not like the world of fandoms. In the world of fandoms you can leave if you don't feel welcome. In the world of authoring, you have the choice of giving up or pushing forward and learning. This is all a very dramatic reaction, I'm sure, but it was still a heavy wake-up call. For me, it's better to keep my mouth shut, and simply listen and learn. Never will I give up, but my strategy to get my name out there has just taken a very bad review by yours truly and it's time to block/delete/revise.
So...with that in mind, I need to learn how to speak my mind by getting other opinions on a subject first. So, I'll be asking a lot of questions in the future, simply to understand how others in this writing world of m/m love stories think, what they expect. I'll sift through that information, form an educated opinion, and go from there. Huh. Easy to say. Hard part is to actually do it. I have a tendency to forget lessons learned.
Write On!