The Naked Truth About Naked Selfies

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Last week, Kim Kardashian took naked selfies and posted them on Twitter. I don’t follow the Kardashians, but some of the talk shows picked up the news. I saw the edited version of the selfie and heard there was backlash from it, some of it from celebrities, like Bette Midler and Chloe Moretz. But there was also some defending her choice, mentioning “empowerment” and “using her body the way she wants,” which I’ll get to in a minute.

After some of the celebrities’ comments, Kim responded by mentioning her $40 million dollar paycheck and her popularity, as if that excused her behavior. I was trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a naked selfie tweeted to millions of followers. The idea of empowerment stuck with me long after I turned off the talk show.

Kim’s audience is made up of 18-24 year-olds, young men who find her attractive and women interested in fashion and the Kardashian brand. She has over 41,000,000 followers on Twitter. This is her life. This is what she does. (If looking good was my job, I might spend time checking myself out in my bathroom mirror, too. I just wouldn’t put it out there for everyone to see.)

These selfies are porn. Really. I’m surprised no one’s calling it what it is. Aside from the porn issue, millions of female followers who received an eyeful of Kim’s assets are self-comparing in their bathrooms. They’re learning, “This is what I have to look like. This is how I get attention. It’s okay.” And we wonder why teens are sexting. Dosomething.org says “24% of high-school age teens (ages 14 to 17) and 33% of college-age students (ages 18 to 24) have been involved in a form of nude sexting.” While boys are more likely to send sexually explicit messages, girls are more likely to send nude or semi-nude images.

These pictures aren’t about empowerment. Empowerment means to give power or authority. There’s nothing authoritative about standing in front of your bathroom mirror and showing everyone what God gave you. Anyone with a camera can do it. Instead use empowerment to share the memo “I’m more than just my sexuality. I’m a person of value and it doesn’t matter what I look like.” It’s hard to get the message across when you’re naked.

A talk show host praised Kim for “using her body the way she wants.” Good for her. But just because you want to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it. Kim claimed she wanted to be known as someone other than a person famous for her sex tape. She should start acting like it.

I don’t have a problem with Kim Kardashian. I have a problem with any person, celebrity or not, who uses pornographic nudity to “share,” empower, or otherwise seek attention. Girls are being sexualized at younger and younger ages. Kim could do girls a great service by using her platform differently: show girls how to be powerful with their clothes on.

And They Lived Happily Ever After: A Manifesto

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Romeo and Juliet. Allegiant. Marley & Me. The Fault in Our Stars. Quick, what do they all have in common? Yep, you guessed it. A main character dies. (For those of you who haven’t yet read these books, but planned to, my apologies.)

The works listed above aren’t recent releases, but I can recall several recent books and movies with the same problem. I’ve become leery of paying good money to read about someone’s death. In love stories, this dying trend seems ironic to me. Forgive my romantic leanings, but a love story should have one vital requirement: a happy ending. Remember the familiar ending to many romantic tales, “…and they lived happily ever after?” I’d like to know who replaced it with, “…and he died, leaving her alone and heart-broken.”

Even if the story doesn’t “require” a happy ending, many time it’s what the reader wants. I don’t understand why someone would choose a book with a depressing ending. With a drama or a thriller, grittier elements like poverty, drugs, terrorism and death can be expected. But with a love story? Where’s the joy in watching a couple fall in love, only to realize the two people so suited for each other will never be together? And I’m not so sure the adage about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all really works. Ask someone who has lost.

My reason for reading a book is simple—escape. I want to laugh, to smile, and to walk away uplifted. Give me a good ending, one where justice is served, someone’s perspective is altered for the better, and the characters find their soulmate. There’s plenty of sadness and bad news infiltrating reality without creating more of it on the page.

I’ve had this aversion to sad endings for as long as I can remember. After hearing someone raving about Casablanca, I chose to see the old classic on television. Afterwards, I couldn’t believe I had spent valuable time just to hear Humphrey Bogart mutter, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and disappear into the fog. And against my better judgment, I watched Titanic, only to cry for a good thirty minutes afterward. Even now, I refuse to watch movies or read books with sad endings. Friends and family members shake their heads when they discover I read the last paragraph in a novel just to make sure I know what I’m getting. I knew my habit was incurable when I found myself checking the ending of my daughter’s board books. In my defense, when those ten ladybugs started to disappear one by one, I wanted to make sure they weren’t being eaten. Who knows how my daughter might have been traumatized?

But I refuse to be disenchanted by Bogie, Hollywood, or any NY Times bestseller. If I want sad endings, I’ll just watch the news.

ADHD: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

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I have a daughter with Attention Deficit Disorder (also known as ADHD). But she’s not a high-energy kid. She’s shy, quiet, content in her own space, and has difficulty making friends. Many people think ADHD looks like someone without an off switch. Sometimes it does, but not always.

I knew there was something different about my child early on. At different times depending on her behavior, I thought she had a hearing problem, or a vision problem, or autism, then just decided she was different. So what? We were okay with different. When her grades started slipping, we started to investigate. A’s one minute, F’s the next. There was no middle ground with her. It was frustrating because she was smart, but struggling.

Even her primary physician, who I like and respect, took one look at her and said, “ADHD? Really?” My daughter wasn’t climbing the walls, or doing giant leaps off the exam table. I ended up getting a second opinion, with a doctor who specialized in ADHD.

As we gathered information about this disability, we discovered there’s more than just one kind. There’s the typical high-energy, loud, always moving ADHD with hyperactivity (which is what the “H” stands for). There’s also ADHD inattentive, which gives you kids that are dreamy, unfocused, unorganized, and content in their own heads and spaces. This second type is less familiar, and it affects girls more often than boys. There is also a less common third type, which is combination ADHD. It includes symptoms of both ADHD hyperactive and ADHD inattentive.

If you have child who seems unfocused, lazy, or distracted, they could have ADHD. Every year, I took my daughter to the pediatrician and asked, “Do you think she has ADHD?” Finally, when her grades started to slide, we made an appointment with a specialist. The sooner your child is diagnosed, the better the outcome.

Trust your gut. If something seems off, schedule an appointment with your pediatrician. As of my daughter’s last progress report, she’s getting straight A’s. Although it isn’t easy parenting an ADHD child, when was parenting any child easy?

How Contests Changed My Writing

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Do you participate in contests? I never did. I’d receive the Publishers Clearinghouse packet in the mail, and I would do a free throw right into File 13. After all, why bother? Thousands of entries, but hardly thousands of chances. You’d have a better chance of being struck by lightning.

Until I started writing. That was a contest based on skill. Sure, it’s a subjective thing. What one person hates, another loves. But work at the craft, polish the writing, and it becomes great. I entered a few writing contests many moons ago when I was working on my inspirational romances. I never won, but the feedback I received helped me improve.

Fast forward to over a decade later: at a conference by author Hope Clark, she said, “If you don’t enter, you won’t win. So enter as many contests as you can.” It was good advice. I began entering more of my projects—poetry, short stories, the first five pages of novels. Some of the contests were free (yay!), while others had a small fee. After a couple years of losses, I received an honorable mention for a novel in 2012. Then in 2015, I won an Editor’s Choice Award for a short story. But even when I lost, I won. The unparalleled feedback I received was invaluable, especially with ACFW’s First Impressions contest.

Now the ACFW Keystone Chapter is holding the Great Beginnings Contest. They’re not looking for much, just the first five pages of a novel and the synopsis. And the cherry on top of this sundae is the nominal entry fee ($10-15). So polish those pages and send them an entry (or two!) After all, if you don’t enter, you won’t win.

Three Tips to Writing Good Bad Guys

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The author, Bethany Jennings (@simmeringmind.com), recently sent out a list of thirty-one WIP Joy Themes. It got me thinking. I had to add my own joy theme: why I love writing about villains.

Writing about villains gives us a chance to be bad. The author gets carte blanche to say bad things, do bad things, think bad things on the page. And each and every choice is legitimate and can be excused because he’s bad, right?

Um, no.

Here are a few tips to writing good bad guys.
1. He or she won’t be bad all the time. If they are, they come across as two-dimensional, cardboard cutout bad guys. Make them interesting by making their choices interesting. For example, he’s a serial killer, but has a penchant for rescuing stray dogs. This leads to my second point.

2. Give him a chance for redemption. To make your bad guy more thought provoking, give him the chance to make a good choice. Think Darth Vader’s saving of Luke in The Return of the Jedi or Severus Snape’s deathbed tears given to Harry in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (I apologize to those of you who haven’t seen either of these movies. If you haven’t, go watch them. Now.) Both Darth Vader and Severus Snape became infinitely more fascinating when they made choices that seemed out of character.

3. Make sure there’s motivation for his behavior, either good or bad. To follow up my theme in #1, he’s a serial killer because his mother beat him all through his childhood. When he kills, he releases the anger and powerlessness he carried all through his teens. In addition, every person he kills resembles his mother. Nothing is worse than excusing his choices by claiming, “He’s a bad guy!” Yes, he is, but there should be a reason for his bad actions.

So check your work in progress. Give your baddie a goal, a story arc, and an excellent backstory. Flesh him out; make him three-dimensional. Don’t allow your villain to be fade-into-the-page boring. After all, there’s no excuse for bad writing.