on being nice
There’s that little ghost going ’round the Internets that not being nice on your blog can seriously impede your progress in publishing industry. See Wendy Loggia via Janet Reid for the latest bumps.
And that little ghost is scaring pants off me. Figuratively.
It’s mainly because I’ve led a semi-public life since I was 15, so you’d think that in 14 13 (I forgot my age AGAIN) years I would have learned something, like, you know, being nice and not ticking people off, such things. On Internet and in real life.
The thing is, I haven’t. That’s it. I am not able to be a nice person for a long time even if I try, I have trouble even being polite (that’s actually not too bad, because me being polite and mean is a horrible, horrible thing). I’ve come to a conclusion that I am not a nice person and unless something big and scary changes me, I won’t ever be. I am not that sure I am even a good person. I try to do “the right thing”, but “the right thing” isn’t always “good”. (But that’s another story entirely.)
I act nice with people I don’t know at all. I also am nice with a select few who need to be treated nicely. (Not many of these people around.) However, when I think that something’s gone wrong, or something’s done wrong, or somebody’s being a hypocrite, I will say it, and I will not try to soften it with nice cuddly lies. Soften it with truth, yes, but what I take for “soft truth” can feel pretty hard for people. That’s the way I am, and I have reasons to be like this (for one, it makes me able to see the wrongness in myself), and unless life presents me with a very good reason to change that, I won’t invest the resources in changing.
So I’m thinking, yes, I could probably find a method to appear to be a Very Nice Person. After all, I’ve done a good job at not being an Overly Mean Person all the time. However, if (supposedly) an agent or a publisher or other lesser god of publishing industry comes over this blog and makes a decision based on me being nice-and-cuddly posts, then there is a fairly big chance that they’ll get a big unpleasant surprise when my evil part shows itself. And when it does, it’ll be far worse than if they’d known me for a fairly nasty person from the very beginning.
Which is why I think all this “try to be nice” thing is overrated.
It’s not like, as I overheard in “How I Met Your Mother”, “every marriage should be a perfect end to a perfect love story”. A marriage is a point somewhere in the beginning/middle of a love story, and seeing it as the end, well, that’s a creepy and destructive idea. Likewise, signing a contract with an agent or a publisher is not the end of all that publishing thing. There is a lot to do after the signing, and it is *after* the signing that the personality matters, and the way people do and see things matter. If somebody can’t take the way I normally blog about things, how on earth are they going to take the way I work with editor and publicity people?
So, well, assuming I ever get that far, I’m better off being true to myself, not being nice.
And if I never get to signing and editors, and publicity people, why bother with niceness at all? 
