The Life of a Keyboard Warrior

            I don't remember where I saw the term 'Keyboard Warrior', but I liked it.  That's what it feels like so much of the time - like I'm fighting: with technology, some snafu in the plotline or with just arguing with myself.  I'd adjusted to the solitude and isolation.  I put my shoulder to the proverbial wheel, and pushed forward. 

            Then Santa brought me a wonderful Christmas present - a publishing contract.  And not for just one book, but a series of five!  After years of rejection letters and emails, I had done it.  I had shown promise to an editor.  So now all I had to do, I thought in my innocence, was work with an editor to tweak the first book, and wait until it was released.

            Silly me! 

            I wrestled with technology and won the reformatting battle.  The CAIS (Cover Art Information Sheet - it took me about a day and a half to figure that out) and I skirmished for a week or so.  However, I beat it.  I filled out the author's information questionnaire and even managed to get one or two pretty good pictures.  Of course, I took over a hundred - so there was bound to be one or two . . .

            Then I joined the authors' group, when I turned tail and bid a hasty retreat.  There were so many of them.  I've been living in a virtual vacuum for years, and now I felt like I was in Grand Central Station at rush hour.  The first week I worried my brain would implode!

            True story - a pilot spotted a lone Japanese soldier while flying over a remote Indonesian island - in 1974.  The soldier was taken in custody on December 18^th, 1974. He came out without a fight when a specially trained group of Indonesian soldiers surrounded his hut and sang the Japanese anthem. 

            The trouble was he was he'd been raised in Taiwan when it was a Japanese dependency, so he identified with Japan.  After several weeks of debate over where he belonged, he was returned to Taiwan, where he died lonely and confused, five years later. 

            I know just how he must have felt being sent to a country no longer under Japan rule, to a wife who'd remarried twenty years before and a son he didn't know he had.  I've been plunged into a new world of technology, instant gratification and 'social networking', and I'm barely treading water.

            Thankful goodness, my editor threw me a life preserver in the form of another author.  Slowly, kicking and screaming, he's dragging me into the deep end of the pool.  The thing is I trust him not to let me drown.

            And for that, I thank them both, but especially Bill. 

A New Hope

            Last night I did something I'd never done before -- I watched a video on Facebook.  And I got quite an eyeful!

            In case you haven't seen it, it's a guy - early to mid forties; an ordinary guy, in jeans and a cowboy hat.  He's calm and well-spoken, and is sitting on a chair in the middle of a large yard holding a paper.  He then says that this is his response to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah's tirade of her parents and how they treat her.  Apparently, she'd already been grounded for three months for a similar incident.   So this time she'd post this 'secretly' (or whatever the term is - I think it's clear I am not a Face book aficionado), under the foolish belief that she was slicker than her father - the IT specialist.      

            He reads her letter and responds to her accusations and then pulls out a forty-five automatic and empties the clip into the laptop, lying on the ground near him.  He ends by telling her that she'll have another laptop when she buys herself one. 

            Now, I admit it - I was pleasantly shocked.  Finally, a parent taking some control back.   At last, an adult drew his imaginary line in the sand.  After this video ended, there were video comments made by viewers.  However, here's what got me - the four or five I watched were all teenagers; and every one of them was behind the dad's actions.   They applauded his showing this ungrateful child the facts of life.

            Perhaps there is hope for the up-and-coming generation after all.