Recently I sent a message to my blogger friends asking if they would like to participate in a blog tour to help promote my new novel, Mercury Falls. I suggested that participants could do a review of the book, or an interview with me, or whatever they wanted to do. I got plenty of responses (see the ongoing list of participants at my blog), but only one person asked me to do a guest post: Sheen.
When I asked her what she wanted me to post about, she said, and I quote:
Anything that comes from deep within your heart would be awesome! I wouldn't wanna limit your 'expression' in any way! :)
This is what my blog in-pensive-mood.blogspot.com is all about. It bears the deepest of my thoughts and emotions, or those of others, that stir mine somewhere deep.
And I thought: “Sheen doesn’t know me very well, does she? Because if she did, she’d know that I don’t HAVE anything deep within my heart. Except blood, of course, and even that stuff is in and out pretty quickly.”
And after all, this blog tour isn’t about what is or isn’t deep inside my heart; it’s about selling lots of copies of my book, Mercury Falls, so that I can quit my job and live the life of leisure that so many of us crave but only a few of us, such as me, truly deserve.
But then I thought, “What if Sheen sees something in me that I don’t even see in myself? And I looked deep into my heart and realized that, more than selling lots and lots of books, what I really cared about was bringing an end to all the pointless strife and discord in the world. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” I thought, “if everyone in the world could just get along like the giant siblinghood of humankind that we truly are?”
But then I realized that even this noble sentiment was a cop-out. Because beneath my desire for universal getting-along-ness lies a more personal need: the need for reconciliation in my own life, with those people who are closest to me. What I really longed for, underneath everything else, was love and understanding from those around me.
And then I looked under THAT, and realized that underlying it all was a desire to sell lots and lots of books.
