I guess the best description of me in high school could be pulled from the INFJ personality profile:

“INFJs have a rich, vivid inner life, which they may be reluctant to share with those around them. […] [T]hey are guarded in expressing their own feelings, especially to new people, and so tend to establish close relationships slowly. INFJs tend to be easily hurt, though they may not reveal this except to their closest companions.”

I’ve always been very reserved — sometimes perceived as standoffish or uncaring — due to extreme emotional vulnerability. The people who most often recognized me behind my reserve (before I ever said a word to them) tended to be other introverts. The best (though not the only) example would be my friend Dee. She approached me softly and unexpectedly in gym freshman year and I felt an instinctive understanding with her. I saw some of my own shyness in her, but she’d reached out in her own quiet way and made it easy for me to feel safe. I believe she knew how to get past my reserve simply because she knew what it was like to be afraid of opening up.

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Crazy, stupid, offensive people sell a lot more newspaper headlines than sensible, rational people do.

Thus, the crazies often get 98% of the publicity for any particular group.  Think about Muslims and what they have to deal with when the terrorist sects are all some people know about their religion.  Or consider how Christians only get publicized by nutjob hate groups anymore.

The crazies are not usually the community leaders of a group.  They just stand out of the crowd more.  There are other crazies who listen to them, sure, but every time a crazy says something stupid, the sane part of their community has to live it down.

Thus, those of us who don’t want to murder anyone really don’t appreciate when the crazies crawl out of their holes to make headlines.

They aren’t our spokesmen.

They’re nutjobs.

Just so you know.

I should have mentioned this to my brother.

I went to church with him last week (it’s an hour drive and I have trouble getting up early, so I rarely go) and got to listen to a pleasant elderly man tell me how I should write about his life because he’s been so many places and done so much stuff.

I smiled and nodded, but it was pretty painful.  And awkward.  Ohmygoodness, the awkward.

People think, and it’s really not their fault because they aren’t writers and don’t get it, but they think that just because you can write that you can write anything.  That just because you’re interested in writing, you don’t discriminate in what you write.

This is a false assumption.

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I just finished A Stranger to Command and am in the middle of Crown Duel, and these books make me feel like an incompetent hack with a computer full of childish scribbles.

It’s not that they’re so similar to my work, it’s just that they make me feel so strongly, and I love them so much, I can’t help but think I’m not good enough when I read them.

I am in the midst of a bit of writer’s block.  I can’t start anything new without hating every word.  I’ve been working off and on toward completing a third book in the super hero series, but I’m also still shopping around for an agent for Frostbite (now titled Cold Snap) and trying to flesh out that world in general — I’ve created five new characters to use as background noise in another story, one that actually predates Frostbite/Cold Snap in the general chronology of the series.

I figure if I can’t get F/CS up and running, I can just work on the prequel until it’s ready to shop.  It’s a little darker, and a lot of the agents I’ve looked at seem to want dark and edgy.

I’m about as edgy as bunny slippers, but I’ll see what I can whip up.

Over Christmas, after an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” that touched on popularity and its pitfalls, my dad said with eloquent disgust: “I was a nobody in high school until they learned I could tackle and shoot a basketball.”

I thought for a moment, choosing my words, and replied, “I didn’t know if I was popular or unpopular or a non-entity in high school, and I didn’t really care.”

Dad nodded twice, firmly.  “That’s good.  That’s good.  Too many people do care and spend all of high school trying to be popular.”

I nodded back silently.  Nothing else needed to be said.