Subdued Intrinsic

Personal Note: I wasn't a coffee drinker, not even a 'social' one, until a little over a year ago. No, seriously, I didn't start drinking coffee--thought the stuff nasty--until I started writing and my average bedtime skyrocketed from around eleven P.M. to two A.M. Problem was, I still had multiple human beings to take care of the next day and therefore needed something give me some semblance of consciousness. Hence, coffee. And now I am a stereotypical coffee-chugging writer. I think they may take blood samples to make sure you've got enough of the bean in your system, or they revoke your author card.

Also, I kind of think a line from Panic at the Disco's "London Beckoned Songs About Money From Machines" is a fantastic piece of writerly advice.

"If you talk, you better walk, you better back your s*it up . . . "

A few minutes ago I looked up the title The Butterfly Tattoo because I follow a lot of agents and editors on Twitter and several of them have discussed Deidre Knight's eBook, Butterfly Tattoo and then I saw there's a movie coming out by the (nearly) same title and I wanted to see if they were the same (they aren't; the movie is based on Philip Pullman's The Butterfly Tattoo).

WHICH is just a really twisty-turny way of getting to my point. You don't really need to know all the above, but I just spent fifteen minutes arguing with small sons and writing the html for the links, so it's staying there.

I noticed somewhere on one of the Amazon pages that Pullman won a Whitebread Award for his work (I'd guess the Dark Materials series). And then I shook my head a little. If it weren't for some decidedly British pals in some of my writer/critique circles I'd have no idea the Whitebread was a big deal, something one really gets to talk smack about, and frankly, I have like ><> might be. The Newberry? The Caldecott? I recall seeing gold-metallic badges for those on book covers. Is there a Nobel for literature? I think there is, but is fiction even qualified? I don't highlight my ignorance to downplay these awards; I'm sure they're as important and as much of an honor as they sound and I'd be proud to ever be in the running for one, but it hit me. I don't really care if I ever win an 'award' for my writing. I'm not saying I want to accomplish the bare minimum. I want to do the absolute best by my readers, give them top quality work, but I'm not writing for awards. Apparently I'm not even aware of the awards.

It kind of trips me out because I am NOT (oh, so, so not) a modest human being. When God put me together He skimped on the modesty big time. I've learned to fake it since becoming an adult, but inside I'm totally doing a touchdown dance whenever I've rocked something. So it goes against my norm that I'm semi-oblivious of big time recognition . . . which tells me two things:

1. I'm really passionate about my work, because I'm willing to do it even without anyone praising me or handing out Brownie Points.
   
2. And two, given the first bullet, I must be doing it for the right reasons.

And in case you wondered, the title of this post refers to the heinous brain-throb I had earlier and how coffee--yes, coffee--fixed it for me. Whatever little dude first picked up that bean (despite it looking suspiciously like rabbit droppings) and threw some hot water over it, THANK YOU.