Let's start today with a heart-punch. A Hulk-sized fist of one that might smart a little to all of you who have stopped by here long enough to order yourself a copy of The Family Of Noise because it means a whole lot to me. Sometimes I question myself harshly with a bamboo cane over whether I'm doing the right thing by going it alone in the world (for now) but the greatest benefit of all, is that I get to do everything the way I want to - from book cover design right down to how things are packaged up for shipping.
This, I also questioned (though not so much) until this morning when I got this email from Katie that ran something like this:
"The Family Of Noise has just landed on my welcome mat! As a person who only ever sends things in brown paper parcels (because I think Jiffy bags have taken the romance out of sending mail to your fellow men/women), I got very excited and then even more excited when I remembered that it would be your book.
While I'm congratulating you on your choice of parcel wrap and your handwriting (which is lovely FYI), I bloody love the front cover of the book. I know people harp on saying that you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but it's nice to have a nice cover.
The only books I've ever read cover to cover like I have with yours is the Northern Lights trilogy by Philip Pullman. Again, great covers - I was obsessed with them and the way they were written but then I didn't really pick anything up again until I read The Day The Sky Fell Down. Those stories are just so cleverly written, like they weren't just written for the hell of it but that they were written 'cause they were meant to be... which sounds totally odd but they felt that way to me."
And after I read that, I spent the rest of the day not really questioning my decisions at all. It makes me happy when I hear the things I do have made other people happy. The world should be run using those rules.
•••
Which leads me to this I guess. Earlier this week, I came across this photo on twitter. I reposted it with the caption "Another sad waste of another three lives":
There's a lot of things I could say about it. There's a lot of things I should say about it. There's a lot of things we should all say about it - but we don't. We collectively spend our time on twitter (and wherever else you like to hang out) trying to either promote ourselves, promote our friends or reading somebody else's digital daisy chain of similar promotion but not an awful lot of good comes from it in the real world.
Raising awareness of the awareness of raising awareness. Fantastic.
And you know what? Fuck it. When I read the feeds surrounding the posted picture, I felt like a man clutching a photograph of a God that fell out of the sky while the rest of the world was applying lipstick and browsing through the TV guide.
I'm not sure what I was expecting by posting it in the first place. I'm not the first and I certainly won't be the last to do such a thing, but it's shifted something in me. So aside from auto-posts from here to there, I'm going to take a little sabbatical from the inanity of twitter and get my head further into what I'm supposed to be doing. I can't do a lot about that lion but bears is a whole different story.