Sooo Phisticated

Photo copyright Stuart Miles
via freedigitalphotos.net

In October 2009, I received my first one-star review. The rating didn’t bother me much, because the reviewer’s other one-star reads included two of my favorite books plus an Oprah club pick. But a particular line in the text of the review haunted me for nearly three years: “The writing was so unsophisticated.”

After I read that line, it hardly registered when other strangers described my book with words like “compelling”, “important”, “heart-wrenching”, and “superbly written”, because my brain kept going back to so unsophisticated. I had never in my life strived to be sophisticated–I’m not even sure what it means–but suddenly it became the measure by which I judged every passage I wrote. Continue reading “Sooo Phisticated”

Perspective Changes Everything

We are all individuals in this world with different ways of looking at the same events. No better period demonstrates this principle than our current events. Here in the United States, we have two political parties that are talking about the same issues in entirely different ways. Depending on how you look at things, you are either dissing half the country or telling it like it is.

Have you seen the recent NFL referee debacle? If you caught the end of the Seattle Seahawks vs. Green Bay Packers game last Monday night, you saw one of the most publicized displays of perspective in the history of sports. Changing perspective changes everything. In fact, you had two officials standing over the play signaling two different outcomes. Continue reading “Perspective Changes Everything”