D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

failure

Ramblings on What It All Means

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A cat picture to lure readers in, not my cat

I fell into deep despair about the followers of this blog this week. I strive to communicate—with my books, with my social media postings and with this blog. But this week I hit a funk. The worst of my better nature told me my blog clearly fails to pique people’s interest at all. Nor does my web site. It’s very disappointing to have worked so hard to create interest-piquing content and then come to the realization that you’ve failed utterly at that task.

We writers are an awkward lot. Many of us, as I’ve discovered on Twitter in the #WritingCommunity, are introverts who’d rather stay at home and write than get out and actually commune with people. We prefer sticking our noses in books to reveling at parties. We’d rather burn our eyes out staring at a computer screen calling up action and plot and characters than wander around a shopping mall. Thus, putting ourselves out, even on the interweb, can be tiresome and even frightening to many of us wordsmith types. Promotion? Are you kidding? And what is a blog but self-promotion?

Let’s get this clear. I write my books for myself. If I manage to draw someone into my world, I’m thrilled, but my books are my refuge, my peace place (despite the death and mayhem I often visit on my characters). But my blog represents my effort to represent me to the world. If I have few subscribers, that world is small indeed.

And what’s the trick? What’s the trick to kicking the meter up a bit and gaining followers? Self-promotion. But I thought that’s what the blog was supposed to do—promote me and my work. If I have to promote it in order to then promote that other stuff, what is the f#%$ing point?

So there you are, this writer whining about her failures and, in truth, hoping my defeat will blackmail new readers into following me. Am I a horrible person? I’ve always thought so. Hence, the self-promotion thing being such a bust. But I’ve now written the post I swore I wasn’t going to write this week. I guess that’s success, right?

The Bitch

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My mother was a bitch. As simple as that. She had no love in her at all. She didn’t understand the concept. It wasn’t a part of her tool kit. What she felt for my father was lust, not love. It ruined their marriage. They never divorced, but for my father it was loveless.

 I quickly learned as a child not to do anything to make her unhappy.  She downplayed my intelligence, my abilities, encouraged me not to look too far afield for satisfaction, to accept less than I wanted.  She taught me basically that I was worthless and had no business striving for anything worth anything. So I failed. I failed at life and I failed at hope. I failed at ambition and I failed at discipline. She took tasks from me that she thought were beyond my abilities to complete which left me believing I couldn’t complete anything.

I gave up somewhere in the ninth grade year of my life. I’d managed to remain hopeful until then, but at some point that year, with everything going for me, I turned away and surrendered to the meaningless, the pointless, the mundane.

Don’t tell me a certain generation of parents were like this. Don’t excuse her sad excuse for parenting as okay. It left me at 68 years old a failure at everything including the thing I would love for anything in the world to see succeed. I don’t promote the books I’ve written, the books I’ve slaved over to make shiny because telling people I’ve got something I made that they’d really want to enjoy is abhorrent to the child in me whose mother said I “just missed the boat on being a genius.” Leaving a child feeling boatless and not smart at all.

I’m glad she’s dead, and I will never apologize for that.