You’d think problems would just stand in front of you, and once they moved on, or you figured out how to get past them, that would be it.

But nooooo, sometimes problems are like this.

They just keep circling. You say WTF? But you can’t move forward until you get out of the darned car and deal with them!

I took a candid pic of myself, no makeup, for my Twitter pic–>see sidebar. Am I starting the February challenge with Tammy? Not sure. I’m a lousy photographer.  If I do, my camera is my iPhone. UPDATED: Nah, I’m not going to do a daily challenge.  Just too much to do. “What are you wearing,” they ask. I’m wearing polka-dotted pajama bottoms in that fluffy, cheap, super soft fabric and a ratty orange T-shift.  Not edifying, but I do love my life.

 

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Amazon Publishing

Here’s a great article laying it out.

The publishers are quivering. The authors are chortling, because the publishers have only been good to celebrities and a very few bestselling authors, so many authorial hands are rubbing together in glee at the anticipation of a Big 6 demise, and chortling that those snotty, rejecting agents might die off, too.  Amazon is wanting the big names, but I’d love to see them decide to make their publishing profits made off the midlist and spread their generous advances that way.  Readers read a lot.  Literary star power is overrated in my opinion.

Where can African Americans feel as if we truly belong to the culture and group?

Hint, it ain’t Africa.  It always baffled me when folks talk about returning to Africa as their homeland or motherland when they are untold generations removed.  We’ve been here longer than many European immigrants.

What if you took a white American generic mutt, whose family has been here for many generations, plopped them down somewhere in Europe, and told them to feel at home?  Europe is a collection of nations, languages and diverse peoples.  Most Americans, especially in the Midwest where I live, are of German origin, but they are not Germans any longer and would have to acclimate to Germany as they would any foreign country.

Africa is even more diverse than Europe.  A black American who doesn’t have close native relatives there they know about, and most of us don’t, need to keep in mind we won’t belong there either just because we’re black.

This guy figured that out, rather uncomfortably, when he realized that he had more in common with the diverse group of expatriates than the African natives.

It’s because of the black feeling of exclusion that we’re more comfortable than other minority groups being segregated. In those tiny, created groups, at least we belong.  This can be extrapolated to books too.

An aside: China is a collection of diverse national groups too, except they have all been collected together under one flag. There is no language such as Chinese, although many speak Mandarin.  In Hong Kong, Cantonese is spoken.  There are many other languages, the same as in Europe or Africa.  Also, any Asian can’t show up in Japan and expect to be considered Japanese either.

You can’t really belong to a continent just by virtue of some external racial characteristics.  It’s simply too big.

 

 

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