This is my new motto: “If you don’t like it, change it!” I thought this up while I was doing the sixth revision of one of my novels. It occurred to me that learning to change the words or paragraphs in a novel is an art. When I first started revising this novel it was hard to change anything. It wasn’t until the third or fourth revision that I became utterly comfortable with deleting large blocks of text. Fortunately, this helped the novel to shrink from 51,000 words to about 46,000. It is a middle grade novel, so shrinkage is good!

The motto, “If you don’t like it, change it!” applies to other areas of life as well. If I don’t like my hair, I can change it… by cutting, coloring, or whatever pleases me. If I don’t like my living room, I can move the furniture, sell the furniture, or paint the walls. If I don’t like my weight, it really is totally up to me to change. It makes no sense to sit around complaining about things I don’t like. The feeling of not liking something should be an indication that there’s action to be taken. And since I’m the not-liker, I’m the one who must take the action!

This extends to societal problems. If I don’t like the status quo, it really is up to me to find ways to change the order of things. This may be tricky because there are other people with differing opinions, and laws that are unbending. But if one dedicated person doesn’t raise the banner of hope, who will ever see a benefit?

It seems like 90% of the people don’t care to make changes. They seem to be happy with society so long as they have money to buy the things they want and maintain their lifestyles. And then there’s the others… the patriots, the activists, the vocal ones. I guess I’m one of those, in my own way. I recognize that I can’t change everything on my own, but I can focus on one or two issues and try to make a great difference there to benefit others who see the world the way I do.