I’m giving it another few minutes until the day has officially ended here in the Eastern Standard Time Zone and I will go review all the reviews and first thing in the morning I will announce the winner of the competition. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure, I present to you this:

As A Footnote finally begins it’s being passed around, as raves and and as snickers flood the whispers in the air, I hold to my routine and write as the energy moves me towards finishing up this second collection and begin in my mind scribbling down notes for the third collection and forth, fifth and so on. I remember once when writing was this thing. A thing that was so magical I was afraid to open the door to strangers, hell most of the time I was afraid to open the door to the most familiar of faces, and yet now I feel as if I cannot open the door enough to let eyes behold the message scribbled upon the paper. Prose like poetry that tries to be a message felt to be needed by all.

Too often I set on fire entire folders of writings because I cannot feel myself within the pages. Am I alone here? I never wrote for the following I could one day grow, or for the volume of sales of a collection I may get lucky enough to get pushed out far enough to be read or for the ratings and reviews, the rants and raves, the joys and the bitches of what one insignificant individual like myself has managed to pour out of his soul and capture upon the page. Too often are we misled by the power of the chair when we sit to critique the work captured by another’s soul. Too brutal we can become when we forget we too once were but those timid children. And somewhere in the fear of that rejection we as a generation come from generation after generation of timid children afraid to speak their voice.

I seek to stand alone, to be unlike any other and I feel that rejection from a society which has become so pop culture that if it isn’t the name brand or close to being that brand, it cannot be a good product. I smile most from my rejections as opposed to my acceptances. I have heard repeatedly my vocabulary is tiny, or I’m not educated enough and/or my punctuation/grammar and/or lack thereof will be the things that hold me back… coincidently, I have ten years of college education as an English Literature major, a journalism major, a marketing major, and so on. I come from nothing, a little lean-to shack along a river bank where the rats were bigger and sometimes friendlier than the cats we kept. I write for the majority who do not come from the pockets of their fathers or their father’s fathers. The ones who struggle to make the ends meet at the end of the week and pray for the month to come to an end. The ones who die on the same street they were born on, never getting the chance to see or experience the world. I spend my time undocumented reading to friends who cannot read but long to know the experience of life beyond the tiny cell their world feels it has been reduced to.

I do not write for fame or glory, or praise. And I do not write to become one of the many great pieces that I have read. I do not live to be remembered. But I try to be from the heart. And to those who dig, grab a shovel, the shit in this world has gotten deep, and it’s gonna take some time and some numbers to turn the game around.

Thank you though to those who do support the indie writers. Thank you for finding the voices that I have had to listen to from a far inspire me to become the person that I am today. I wasn’t made to be one of the pop culture of the world. I like being that thorn in the world’s ass too much to be any less. I love those who fear not the rejection of those eager to pound the gavel, change is needed. Be not afraid to become it.