| BookeaterOdessa |
Awkward “Can I read your novel?” requests
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Official Participant
Joined: Oct 27, 2009
Posts: 48
Posted on:
Dec 9, 2009 – 21 20 |
-A friend that has an unstable character based off of her.
-My father - A friend of the family
I have no idea why these people are suddenly so interested in my writing. My father reading my writing weirds me out so much for some reason. Maybe because my MC’s father is conspicuous by his absence? Maybe because there’s a whole chapter about female undergarments, things my old school father would never take me shopping for, not even as a child? Also, since I’m writing some pretty messed up Lit.Fic., I don’t want everyone to think I’m mentally unstable.
Similar worries/conflicts? ———- “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” Oscar Wilde http://thebookeaterblog.blogspot.com |
I’ve never let any one read my *smut* novels, EVER. I come from a super religious family/community and so all my friends, family, relatives are all super Christian and go into spasms if you even mention the word *sex* and not a one of any of them ever told any of their kids anything about *that dirty thing* (they can’t say the word sex for some reason). Than you got me, who writes graphic sex scenes. o_O
When I was 14 years old, my bishop got a hold of one of my earlier (and much milder) smut manuscripts, and called the state mental institute (insane asylum) to have me committed. Apparently his hysterics over the phone had them thinking I was some sort of deranged criminal and the next Sunday I arrived at church to be greeted by *men in white coats*.
I had no idea what the hell was going on, who these guys were, or why they were talking about having me locked up. An hour later though, they left the church shaking their heads and commenting that they were seriously questioning the bishops sanity. The doctor that was with them, after talking to both me and the bishop, came to the conclusion that I was just a normal kid and that our bishop needed some serious help to deal with his paranoia. (Years later, I found out I was not the only person the bishop had done something like this with, and that 2 years after that incident the church took away his title of bishop, due to question of his sanity. Uhm, I guess he ended up being sent to a psychiatrist to find out what was making him act like that, because later, we found out that he had extreme paranoid schizophrenia.) Talk about over reacting! OMG!
Of course, that was a long time ago (I’m not exactly young any more.) And back than all it took was a snap of the fingers and a phone call to the local insane asylum to lock a person up. Today. Well, today you’d be hard pressed to find a town that even had a local asylum now! LOL!
Than years later, in 2008, my mom got a hold of my NaNovel and sent a copy of it to the current bishop. Now I’m going through a de ja vue all over again. This bishop is threatening to have me excommunicated because I actually had my 2008 NaNovel published. *sheesh* I haven’t heard anything about it since the book got published though, so it seems that those above him in the church are not so keen on my excommunication as the bishop is. Okay, when I was a teenager it was one thing, but come on people, I’m older than half the current church leaders are now! And it’s been 13 years since I last went to that church. I didn’t even know who the bishop was when he called me! LOL! I think we got another paranoid bishop on our hands here. 
I find the whole thing hilarious, the fact that these people are so very extremely old school that they make the Amish look futuristic. OMG! And it’s not like our church teaches them to act like that either, because it doesn’t. It’s just something that a lot of locals for whatever reason picked up on an obsess over. (This fear of sex and anything to do with sex and books that mention sex.) Can any one say religious nuts? How do people get like this?
In recent years, (well, I stopped going to that church 13 years ago, if you can call that recent years), I’ve started spending less time with them and more time with people not connected with our church, and I found out something – most of the non-member locals think of the church I grew up in as being a freaky cult. And, I got to say I’m starting to agree with that theory.
But yeah, once bitten twice shy, and since that incident in my teens, I’ve never let any one read my “smut” stories since.
Now, my regular stuff – the ones with no sex in them – I let people read those with no problem. I wonder, if my bishop had not had that freak out fit back when I was a teenager, if I would still avoid letting people read the smutty stuff or not? I mean, I was only 14, and it was my first time writing anything like that, and well, you got to admit, my bishop did go WAY overboard in his over reacting. (To this day, I never did figure out how he got a hold of my manuscript. That remains a mystery.) So, yeah, I guess it really did effect me pretty bad, because it was that incident that caused me to develop my later phobias of doctors and eventually resulted in my becoming Agoraphobic as an adult. A problem which I am now trying to overcome.
So, yeah, people who are strict are going to think you mentally unstable for writing something that does not fit in with their personal moral codes. However, know that even if you do run up against a super fanatic (like my former bishop) the mental health practitioners are going to think the one who complained about your book is nuts, not you. And you want to know why? Because as an author, you know that what you are writing is fiction, not real. But the person freaking out, is freaking out, because they are not able to separate the real whole from the fictional one. Doctors know that the one freaking out over the book, and not the one who wrote the book, is mentally unstable. So, you’ve nothing to worry about, because if any one does complain, they’ll be the ones that get locked up as crazy – not you. I’m sorry to say, I know this from personal experience.
But, no, you are not alone. Freaky family members and friends and relatives and friends of theirs are every where and yep, every once in a while you’ll find one that blows their top and does a major freakazoid over what you wrote. Just remember that being a control freak is a form of communism and communism is illegal in the USA. They have no legal right to stop you from writing whatever you what.
Remember: freedom of speech and freedom of press, and no one has the right to take that away from you. NO ONE – not even your parents, not even if you are a minor. You can write whatever you want and no one can legally stop you and no one can use a work of fiction against you as proof of mental instability either.
If they start getting on your case about it – “just let them rave on that men may know them mad.” (Yul Brynner) Any one who freaks out enough to freak out in front of others is only going to prove themselves less sane than you. LOL!
Think of it like this:
- YOU: But its just a book. THEM: But YOU wrote it! YOU: So? THEM: So YOU wrote that, that. . .THAT! YOU: Yeah. So? THIRD PERSON: What’s his problem? YOU: I wrote a book. He doesn’t like it. THIRD PERSON: So? YOU: He says I’m crazy and should be locked up for writing it. THIRD PERSON: He’s reacting like THAT and he thinks YOUR crazy? It’s just a dumb book. Man, that dude is nuts! YOU: Yeah, I know. Freaky isn’t it? Like, he thinks it’s real or something.
See? You the author is going to be the one sounding sane. And the relative freaking out over your book is going to come off sounding like a raving lunatic.
Ignore them. Laugh at them. Write another book and give them yet another thing to freak out about. Publish both books. Make a ton of money. Become famous. Than when they show up at your book signing you can say: “See? I told you I wasn’t crazy.”
Incubus: Fear the Night!
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