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.