Tag: professionals

Dentist’s Office

This will be a short post because there will be only a short wait for the dentist.

Many people dread the dentist. I used to.

It was to invite inevitable pain into one of the most vulnerable areas of your body.

Where a dentist works is only inches away from your brain. A mere slip of the drill and your face might be scarred. Like any renovation, dentists can find more problems beneath the one they saw on the x-ray.

That can mean more drilling = more pain = more inclination to stay away from the dentist all together.

It used to be said that dentists had the highest suicide rates among all professionals. I guess they didn’t much like inflicting pain any more than their patients liked putting up with it.

Modern dentistry has become sensitive to the potential fear and pain that is inherent to many procedures in their trade. There is laughing gas (nitrous oxide), and numbing creams to dull the needle’s invasion and, in a worst case scenario, general anesthetic for procedures that require a hospital stay.

Dentist offices now feel more like spas. Beautiful pictures on the ceiling. Often a TV set. Bright and cheery pillows and wall decorations designed to make you feel welcome and at ease. My dentist has floor length windows that look out on a nature preserve.

Makes the stories my parents told seem just slightly less than barbaric. Anesthetic wasn’t very good in the early days and was only used sporadically. It isn’t any wonder the fear and anxiety of byzantine dentistry practiced before the 1950s was passed down to the kids.

My mother tells of the night she needed an emergency extraction. In lieu of anesthetic, the dentist – ably assisted by my Dad – cracked open a bottle of high class booze.

It was that kind of small town where everyone knew everyone and was close and in each other’s business. Besides Dad was a lawyer. He and the dentist were both professionals I’m sure they rationalized.

The booze bottle was opened, Dad and the dentist poured themselves a stiff drink, but none for Mom when she asked. She was undergoing surgery, after all. Mom failed to see the logic and as the night and procedure wore on, the level of booze in the bottle steadily diminished.

At the end of it all, my mother’s mouth was packed with gauze, the offending tooth on the dental tray and both Dad and the dentist drunk as lords high-fiving each other over the successful procedure.

I have become so inured to the dentist’s drill, I usually refuse freezing. In my view, a couple of minutes of intense drilling wins out over a numb and skewed face and the hours it takes to come back to normal. Even the injection site hurts.

So dentistry today isn’t what dentistry once was. The importance of dental health to our overall health is much better understood. Dentistry has moved to center stage and away from the dark corners of back room barber shops.

Thank goodness. I have utterly no trepidation these days about most dental visits. The only discomfort I experience these days is the loss of time and not talking or breathing right for as long as they need me to.

That seems like a pretty sweet trade-off and impressive progress from the bad old days.

Kinda makes me want to smile.

Margot’s Argot

In an earlier post, I talked about my pleasant interaction with a book coach following the Perfect Your Process Writing Summit. Presently, I’m neck-deep in researching my subject matter, dates, places, events, and so on, and learning what I need to do to eventually get myself over the book publishing finish line. That seems like plenty to tackle for now.

But I’m not gonna lie. Having a knowledgeable someone to hold my hand and kick my ass in the doldrums could be helpful. Even better, it feels great to think that there would be someone else I could blame for my procrastination. Or failure.

The first challenge in finding such a person is imagining who that special someone might be. In that regard, bringing a book coach into your life feels a lot like falling in love and setting up house. Without all the sexual tension and dirty dishes. So how does an aspiring author go about acquiring and hiring such a person? Make no mistake. Acquisition is precisely the word. There is a marketplace out there with no end of well-meaning book coaches hawking their wares. And just like any corner of the capitalistic marketplace, the offerings are widely diverse.

Some book coaches have developed their own “processes.” They lure you in with their assertions to the secret world of publishing. Soon you are learning the special language of the publisher and the publishee. Just follow them, step-by-step, they exhort, and you shall be a published author in no time flat. When I came across one particularly comprehensive sales pitch, I checked out their website. I have never been so confused in my life.

That link led to this welcome page and then you sign up for the community here and, while you are at it, submit some of your writing so that others can critique it and that page will lead you back to a page where you can critique the work of others and if you get your draft submitted within this timeframe, you may get some of your money back and … whew. I am exhausted and I haven’t even talked to anyone personally yet. Maybe I’m not supposed to.

I have always had mixed feelings about argot. That special language professionals use to deem you an “insider” or an “outsider.” Think lawyers, doctors, and engineers. Professional training is in large part, language training. Argot – according to Merriam-Webster: “The language used by a particular type or group of people: an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group.” Well, that definition seems straightforward enough. I read further in the American Heritage Dictionary. “A secret language or conventional slang peculiar to thieves, tramps, and vagabonds devised for purposes of disguise and concealment.” Now that resonates a little too close to home. I am a recovering lawyer after all.

This is not to suggest that book coaches do anything improper or untoward in offering their offerings. But it does have that uncomfortable feeling of “one size fits all.” The promise that anyone can write a book but only if you follow their inherently, foolproof methodology seems a bold statement to me. You can’t argue with success, of course.

If I can be persuaded that countless numbers of illiterate aspiring authors were trained up to become New York Times #1 bestselling authors by following a certain prescription, I would eagerly jump on board. But neither words nor authors adhere that closely to prescriptions in my experience. There is the X factor that makes Stephen King who he is or more accurately the writer he became. He developed his voice over years and years as most successful authors do.

And no one who devours a steady diet of Stephen King’s books necessarily wants to read F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not even The Great Gatsby in Grade 11 English class. After graduation, even less. There is a fairly marked stylistic divide between those two particular genres. As is to be expected in the alchemy of developing a voice.

A book coach may be a good idea up the road but seems premature for me. A conventional first draft book manuscript runs around 50,000 – 70,000 words. I will be more comfortable hiring a book coach when I am at least halfway to that word count, which I presently am not. What happened to the days when intrepid authors sat in their grottoes and submitted query letter after query letter in vain to numerous disinterested publishers and toiled in oblivion for years before their great talent was recognized and, finally, fame, stardom, and wealth inevitably followed? Ya. I don’t really think that ever was a thing except for the favored few. Particularly for those with a trust fund or a wealthy spouse.

For me, for now, I will continue to toil in obscurity in my grotto. Seriously. Given the stage I am presently at in writing this book, getting my word count close to something that eventually impresses me that I am a real author is more urgent. Getting there would at least convince me I am becoming one. PS This is my thirtieth consecutive blog post. That accomplishment is helping me feel like a real writer. In any case, it’s a start.