An interview with Traci Lawrence

Traci Lawrence is the author of the e-book Accept No Trash Talk, which I read recently. I've been in touch with Traci and asked if I could send her some questions about the book. She's sent me the answers and here's the result. [My questions and comments are in italics.]

This is your first book, I believe. Has it taken a long time for you to get this book off the ground?

In a word: yes. About a year and a half passed from the time when I got the idea for the book until it was first published. I have spent the past five weeks editing it for the publication of the second edition. Editing is an important, seemingly never-ending process.

I can agree with that! I see you’ve had some very positive reviews from readers. Have you had similar reactions from people on a more personal level as well?

In the beginning, my beta readers (people who an author asks to read an early, pre-publication manuscript) gave me more constructive criticism than positive feedback. However, since that first awkward stage, I have been given mainly positive responses. Relatives, friends, and colleagues who have read the book usually say that it’s inspiring. At the very least, they tell me that they appreciate the stories of prominent figures overcoming the odds.

I believe you’re preparing a revised version of the book. Is this based on feedback from other people, or is it because you’ve rethought some of the things you’ve written?

The main motivation for my edit was the advice of a publishing industry professional. She felt that the message of my book was important, but I needed to tighten up the formatting and content. Also, she felt that I needed to shorten the book,

On my own, I had decided that I wanted to update the examples that I used. I added, deleted, and edited stories. I wanted to bring a more positive, updated outlook to my work. I took some of the focus off of me and shifted it more to the stories of other people.

One of the great advantages of e-publishing, especially when we self-publish, is that we can correct things, or improve them, even after the book has gone out to customers. Will your updated version be the last word on this book?

It’s hard to say. I understand that some authors publish many editions of a certain book, and I am a perfectionist. Aside from that, there will always be new stories to tell of how individuals interact.

Did you find the self-publishing process difficult, overwhelming, straightforward...? Were there people who could help you with the task?

I made the choice to publish only on Amazon for now. Publishing in electronic format is not difficult. I followed the links for publishing to the Kindle starting from the Amazon home page. My book was available for download by the next day. There are no fees involved for this process. It is straightforward.

Amazon Kindle publishing experts are available by e-mail only. They did help me with a few simple formatting questions at no cost to myself. However, it was inconvenient to only be able to contact them by e-mail. I really would have appreciated more help in a timely manner.

[For those wanting to self-publish with Kindle, I'd recommend the free e-book, Building Your Book for Kindle which I've used for all three of my books. It takes you through the process without missing any vital information!]

Do you have any other books in mind? If so, will they be on the same sort of topic, or on other areas of concern?

I am currently doing research for a book that is a sort of continuation of my first book. It will feature specific examples of prominent figures and everyday people overcoming ridiculous odds.  Some examples of the famous people it will feature are King George VI of England (who conquered a debilitating stutter) and the French Impressionists (who conquered a lack of acceptance by the mainstream art community).

How easy do you think it is for sensitive people to confront bullies or controlling people?  Is it better to avoid confrontation, to ‘tune-out any sort of inappropriate negativity’ as you say at one point?

Confrontation is difficult for many people, especially sensitive ones. Some delicate individuals may shy away from conflict altogether. In some cases, we must ask ourselves if the clash is really worth it. If our rights, or needs, will be trampled unless we address a particular issue, perhaps we should choose to face the situation—if feasible. However (in my humble opinion) if confronting a situation will be unproductive, it’s best to avoid an altercation. I have never been a big fan of wasting my own time.

I don’t know if it’s feasible to say that confrontation is always right, or always wrong. Individuals should use their own judgment. That’s the safest answer. When I mentioned tuning out negativity, I was referring to tuning out people who, generally, demean us. I wasn’t mentioning people who might be a real threat to us in any way. There will always be naysayers out there, and we can’t afford to give weight constantly to what they say and do.

You say at one point that you’ve ‘heard it said that every person...has a particular section of the body which is more prone to disease.’ I wasn’t sure that I agreed with this. Is there any actual research done along these lines that you know of?

I’m no expert on this subject, and I’m not aware of any scientific research on the subject. However, I have seen references to this issue in non-medical literature (such as New Age literature). To me, it’s an interesting field to observe. There does seem to be a pattern: ulcers may occur in people with a certain personality type. Other gastrointestinal issues may happen in people who are more sensitive. These conclusions are based on my non-scientific observations, and research, only. Of course, I can’t say that my observations are true for everyone.

One of the things the book made me do was look at my own behaviour. I don’t like confrontation much, but I’m also capable of being a controlling type of person in some areas at times. Do you think that many people have tendencies to swing between one or the other?

Again, I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area. I only know what I’ve researched, and observed. Some researchers of personality types, such as Tim LaHaye, feel that every person is an unique amalgam of characteristics. It’s a fact that few mentally stable people are controlling, or submissive, 100% of the time. It’s probably true that most people swing between the two depending on the situation. For instance, I may feel comfortable taking the lead on a small group project at work while I may be submissive to my supervisor.

People are complicated. Most of us can’t be put into boxes that read “Continual manipulator”, or “Shy and awkward”.

Thanks, Traci. Good to have some background to your book. I know it will encourage a great many people, whichever version of it they read...

Review of Accept No Trash Talk, by Traci Lawrence

I read Traci’s book over the last week, and as usual with an e-book, highlighted a number of things that struck me, or that I ‘argued’ with. This is one great advantage of e-books, that you keep track of the notes you make so easily. It’s the equivalent of scribbling on the printed page or putting in exclamation or question marks.

Traci’s book looks at the difficulties people face who have limitations, or who are more sensitive than others, or who struggle to make themselves heard against those with stronger personalities. The limitations may be physical or mental disabilities, or health problems. The one struggling may be part of a minority, someone who's been brought up in an abusive family, or someone currently living in an abusive situation. Traci’s book applies to any of these and more.

It also looks a great deal at bullies and controlling people.

One of the lines that really struck home to me was: Controlling people do not like to be controlled. Controlling people do not like to have their agendas obstructed. I’ve found this true in my own life too. I know several controlling people: they usually have positions of authority and can abuse that authority, often without realising it. I’ve even been guilty of being a bit of a control freak at times myself, so in a sense I know it from both sides. Controllers don’t like to be confronted about their behaviour, however. Mainly, I think, it’s because they don’t see it at the time, and perhaps don’t even believe they’re doing it.

I’ve found that some of them eventually come to understand they’re controllers, but the behaviour is so habitual that controlling usually happens before they can deal with it. They have to eat humble pie afterwards. Still, better to eat humble pie than never to acknowledge it.

Traci makes a point about bullying: I think that the overarching reason for the bullying...can be condensed down to the fact that many of these people [are] self-righteous. Self-righteousness can be loosely defined as the attitude of a person who feels that he is superior to people who don’t think, look, act, talk, or believe as he does. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector immediately comes to mind! [Luke 18:9-14]

The self-righteous often don’t see their own behaviour. I had experience of corporate bullying in the last three years of my working life. I wasn’t directly in the line of fire, but my immediate boss was. The self-righteous bully eventually closed down our office because he felt he was right about his views. And unfortunately, as is often the case with such bullies, there were also cronies and yes-men surrounding him who endorsed his self-righteousness. Standing up to such people is an enormous, energy-draining task, as my boss found.

This is a personal book, and Traci discusses her own successes and failures honestly. She also gives credit to those who've helped her, and in one passage talks about her husband who saw her potential, affirmed her, encouraged her and validated her. ‘Since he believes in me,’ she writes, ‘I believe in myself.’

In spite of the difficulties of Traci’s life she has managed to build up a positive attitude. I like this paragraph from her book: When one door closes, a new door to a better life usually opens. Sometimes, we just have to be patient. At first, newly-opened doors may not always look like fresh opportunities. Opportunities may not always manifest themselves immediately. In fact, opportunities may first present themselves as unexpected, undesired challenges. The good news is that those challenges are what prepare us for new levels in life.

There’s a lot more packed in that paragraph than I realised when I first noted it.

This is a book that will encourage those who struggle, whatever their situation. It will also make you stop and think: am I guilty of this kind of behaviour?

I might not have discovered this book if I hadn’t discovered Traci on Google+. Increasingly I’m finding that site is full of people who are willing to make strangers into friends, and help and support each other.  

You can buy Accept No Trash Talk here. 

Three films

Three movies in as many nights. After not having watched movies either on TV or DVD for a few weeks, it's been quite relaxing (after finishing my second book and getting it published online) just to lie on the couch and watch something instead of working.

First there was a strange Jet Li movie on TV - Unleashed; then Silver Linings Playbook with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence; and finally, tonight, the almost fifty-year-old A Town Like Alice, a film based on only the middle section of Nevil Shute's famous novel.

This last of the three shows its age mostly in the now-stiff-looking performance by Virginia McKenna, so British that nothing disturbs her upper lip. Peter Finch is excellent, as he always was, and has already gone past that very English style of acting that a few other members of the cast indulge in. Even given that it's virtually a road movie, A Town Like Alice, is still very watchable, and there are some excellent scenes, and a strong supporting cast. Fortunately the film focuses almost entirely on the war section of the story; the bookends about improving the lot of a group of Malayan villages, and setting up work for unemployed people in a remote Aussie town, are barely hinted at.

Unleashed is a typically violent Jet Li movie, in which he plays Bob Hoskins' 'dog.' Hoskins has rescued him as a child (after shooting his mother) and brought him up to be absolutely subservient. When the collar he wears continually is loosened, however, he defeats anyone sent against him. Morgan Freeman, doing the typical Hollywood version of what it's like to be blind, and Kerry Conden, playing a piano student who appears to do very little practice, rescue Li by accident, and set him back on his human feet again. The film is full of extraordinarily choreographed fight scenes filmed and edited brilliantly, but it also has strong characterizations from the two leads: Li gets a chance to reveal a soft side, and Hoskins revels in being the ultimate bully and sadist (and manages to survive two major car crashes and various beatings). It was Louis Leterrier's first film as director, and he does an excellent job with his English and French cast and locations. Not for the fainthearted, however.

Silver Linings Playbook (I have no idea what the title refers to, unless it's something to do with the home betting shop Robert de Niro runs) is an in-your-face drama-cum-comedy. Cooper plays a man whose wife was found with another man in compromising circumstances, and who went off his rocker - he was already prone to mental health issues. After eight months in an institution, he's ready to come home - even if no one else is quite ready to have him back. Cooper gives a wonderfully subtle performance underneath all the bombast. Lawrence is equally mentally unhealthy, not helped by having lost her policeman husband in bizarre circumstances. She never says anything you expect, which is quite refreshing, and indeed a great deal of the movie has unexpected moments and situations. Lawrence is wonderful and grabs her role by the throat and tears it apart. (Totally wasted in The Hunger Games - this girl has the goods.)

De Niro plays the manic father again (not far away from his manic father performance in Meet the Fockers), and it's debatable as to which Pat, Senior or Junior, is the more cracked. The leads have top notch support from the rest of the cast, and although it takes a while for the thing to show where it's coming from, it gradually takes hold of you. Interestingly enough, the film departs from the book in many (improved?) ways.

The Shadow Line

There are several spoilers here.  Don't read if you're intending to watch the series.

We've watched a British series on DVD over the last week or so.  It's called The Shadow Line, and it was exceptionally gripping.  But also very nasty, and ultimately somewhat unsatisfying, as it killed off the one character who had integrity, and left the villains in charge. There was a point to this, which I'll come to in due course, but after having watched the villains do damage to all and sundry throughout the piece it was disappointing to see them getting away with it still further.

The piece has two stories running in parallel (over seven lengthy episodes), but both intersect at a number of points, and both have come about as a result of something that happened before the story began. The first episode opens with what seems a prolonged look at a dead body in a car.  Two police officers have 'discovered' the body, and the more talkative and more-knowing of the two (David Schofield) seems to have his own peculiar agenda. He plainly knows more than he's letting on, though he gives away a number of hints to the viewer.

We're then introduced to Detective Inspector Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his working partner, Detective Sergeant Lia Honey (Kierston Wareing). The latter is a smart-mouthed, very competent cop, who's not entirely pleased to be working with Gabriel, who, as a result of being shot in the head (the bullet is still lodged in his skull) has had a loss of memory as to what he was doing the night he was shot.

Gabriel's is the main story, and he's the character with integrity, and a passion for the truth. Curiously, as so often happens with characters in modern films who have integrity, he has had a mistress with whom he's had a child - his own wife has had several miscarriages, but is hoping for one last chance at pregnancy. In the film Gabriel - to his credit - anguishes over the fact that he's never revealed the presence of this other woman, and their son, to his wife. At least in that regard he's better than the leading character in Judge John Deed, another series we've been watching, where Deed, the judge who's shown as having enormous integrity on the justice side of things, consistently plays around with various women, including his former wife, his current lady friend, and several others.

The parallel character to Gabriel is soon introduced: Joseph Bede (Christopher Eccleston). He's a wholesale flower seller - on a big scale - and is using his business as a front for drug smuggling. Also on a big scale.  Supposedly he's built up the flower business primarily as a cover for a one-off big deal that will set him up for life, and will enable him to provide constant care for his wife, who has early onset Alzheimer's. But one of the problems with the drugs game, as we see time and again in this story, is that it's a cruel master: Bede finds himself increasingly trapped inside his plan. Several others, both big and small, also come to grief before the series has finished, most of them violently.

The series may be intended to highlight the impossibility of surviving the drugs game (more than one character talks about 'just surviving', and one of the nastiest (Rafe Spall, always on the verge of insanity) says realistically, in the last episode, how he's probably only got twenty years before he'll wind up the same way as all the others), and it's plain that those who have made the big time in drugs live under the tension of being overtaken by the next villain to come along, and plainly don't enjoy the fruits of their labours.

However, this is countermanded by the fact that the corrupt police in the series, of whom there are several, seem to manage to live above the law, and thrive. Their involvement in drugs began as something that was seen as a good, but was achieved by the wrong means. Then the 'rewards' have taken over their lives and they've gone back to the trough time and again. And the chief of these, a man called Gatehouse, (Stephen Rea, in a most chilling performance), manages to manipulate and pull strings and survive assaults, like the devil himself.  He's perhaps the most improbable character, when you reflect on it all, yet Rea gives him such life and personality that you come to believe he could exist. He's utterly treacherous, blatantly murderous, and convinced of his own ability to twist everything  and everyone to his ends, even those who appear to be honest.

The story is utterly convoluted, and has several shocking moments, as well as some we can see coming. Almost no one is who they seem, apart from Gabriel, and he worries a good deal (since he has this memory issue with a very important event) that he may not be the honest man he hopes he is. The curious thing is that even the evil ones tell him he is honest, and that gets up their nose. He's the only one to make Gatehouse think he might have mis-stepped at one point, and that's some achievement.

Hugo Blick wrote the script, and directed and produced the series. (Blick has also been an actor.)  This is a major achievement, because he has filled the series with vivid characters and cast some of the best in the business in the roles. Yes, there are some moments in the story when coincidences pile up a little too high, but the tension created and maintained throughout is extraordinary - I could feel my own nerves on edge during one particular episode - and he continually keeps us guessing as to who is really who.  Some apparently good characters aren't, and some of the evil ones appear to have their moments of sincerity.

Blick's direction can be mannered - but then the best film noir directors are always mannered. That's one of the things that makes these films what they are. A great deal of the time is spent in darkness, or night, or shadows, but even when we venture out into daylight, there's a sinister feel to what we're seeing. We know, for instance, that the journalist on his motorcycle won't make it home, and this is assisted a couple of scenes before by seeing him standing in front of a full-sized photo of T E Lawrence - with his motorbike. But then Blick takes advantage of what we guess by first giving us the journalist and his motorbike a near miss, and then having him vanish into a dip in the road, while a car heads towards him. Nothing happens on the screen for a moment, there's an ominous thump, then the car quietly reappears out of the dip and proceeds. The motorcycle doesn't reappear. Finally we're taken down into the dip to see the journalist incongruously sitting on the road, dying, his bike splattered across the road, and worse, that large farm vehicle he just missed a few minutes before sounds as though it's heading his way. It's a grisly scene, but all done without any bells and whistles, and in spite of our realisation that it's going to be happen, we're still shocked.

Several other scenes shock in different ways. Gatehouse makes his way into at least three houses at different times, and on each occasion we think he's going to murder someone. Nothing ever quite happens as we expect, so that when the actual murders happen, we don't have high-pitched strings playing on the soundtrack to prematurely warn us; the murders come almost out of the blue. When he comes to Peter Glickman's son's house (Glickman is his opposite number in the story, and is absent until about half way through the series) and threatens the man's wife, the whole thing takes on a craziness via a baby monitor that we misunderstand at first. The baby is unharmed, the woman is hysterical - but unharmed - and the only disaster is the dinner burning on the stove, an echo of the soup burning after the murder of the young pregnant mother earlier on.

Then there's the confrontation between Glickman and Gatehouse, in a Dublin clock shop. It has Hitchcock written all over it, right to the point of the explosion that demolishes the place, but not the two villains. (Hitchcock is everywhere through the series, in fact, and is frequently himself put in the shade by Blick's trickery.)  And the near disposal of Gatehouse in the hospital by Glickman's mistress - at least that who she appeared to be until she stabbed Glickman to death - much to our surprise.  This hospital scene is improbable; firstly because we know they say Gatehouse has the heart of a 20-year-old, but he is actually in his sixties and shouldn't have withstood being blown up and shot twice; and secondly how does he know he's about to be done in by the mistress and what method she's going to use?  Where is the policeman outside the door (yup, that's kind of explained later) and how come the nurse doesn't see or hear anything?  Once again Blick turns our expectations on their heads.  If for no other reason than his ability to undercut what we think will happen, Blick should be congratulated for a masterly series.

I didn't like some of the things that happened in it, but it was gripping viewing!