It's no secret among creative communities that envy is the biggest obstacle in any of our workflows; in other words, our toughest problems are human. I can design anything I want to, for any type of budget, using any kind of tool, in any language you want, but how does that help you if you're uneducated, illiterate, learning-impaired, or brain disordered? It doesn't, does it?
Hence, the literary world has almost always been comprised of top-tier intellectuals, because it isn't fun (or fair) to make us describe the same text, layout, or picture to you again, when our job is to make art that soars above the heads of those who come after us, sometimes by a millennium or two. We address special needs in the books designed for the people who tend to them, but books for the blind is a rare genre, indeed. When was the last time you met a Braille-reading typesetter?
Audio books fare far better with the vision-impaired market anyway, because who has time to learn Braille, especially if you began life sighted? You see images in your head, and that's what creative content is really about: your imagination. No one else can do that for you. You have to supply that. I suppose that's why artists and designers are treated with such extreme prejudice and suspicion in any type of company: it must be threatening to talk with someone who knows (comparatively) all the answers, but that's the point. Our higher education is your knowledge base to tap into. Being angry at superior intelligence defeats the whole point behind hiring creative genius.
And so, it was no surprise to me that I worked with a quiet old Jewish man at the end of his career who still carried a huge chip on his shoulder from that big promotion he was denied many years ago by the major leagues. Why? He told us many times (when he wanted to scare or intimidate us into silence) that he didn't need anymore money. Okay....but we do. How does your point of view on the subject matter? It was totally irrelevant. Either keep the company going or don't. His employees would simply go to work elsewhere. It was a baffling bad strategy that highlighted his lack of abilities the big companies must have noted as quickly as I did the first harrowing week in his employ.
Of course, the old man's very first employees were rejects who never really worked for the big league companies, as a skeleton crew comprised of typical industry cast-offs, and a bigger bunch of pompously pretentious art fag "wanna-be's" I've never met. One of his "lifers" (Hi, "Scooter"!) was a glorified salesman/paralegal who worked boring contracts for us, and the other some lazy idiot fired almost immediately by a bigger brand-name publisher, not that I thought higher of larger publishing companies, anyway. I was better than the nut-cases working for abusive bosses who practically tossed people out the window by ignoring their pathologies for mere profit, because compulsive crazies do the grunt labor better left to machines than humans with fully-functioning brains.
His oldest "hires" were those two nut cases strange enough to work out of his home with him, as his nut-job family wandered in-and-out all day long. What kind of legitimate person does that? No one with a reputation to protect or their good name, like, say, me. By the time I came on-board his company, he realized that he needed real talent to work with B&N; not the crazy hangers-on from his daughter's bullshit screenwriting class for tacky no-talents at the local "Learning Annex" location. The two biggest douchebags who gave me the most condescending attitude right away were the exact same two dicks who were so desperate for validation, that they worked for almost no salary in some crazy old Jewish guy's apartment.
I'm not talking about building computers in your parents garage, or publishing original works through the public library's Internet access, either. Those two douches couldn't pen a novel if their lives depended on it, but they could be immoral enough to profit from the works of others. It made them constantly irate, especially when heavy-hitters like me and my production manager created a profit-producing workflow without their input. Ever hear the sound of teeth grinding? That's it. They did the mental version of gnashing teeth every single day.
Most of the staff avoided them. They were windbags who preferred sucking each other off, in meetings rife with odd head-games over the making of any real art, which suited us just fine. They were nobodies, and they acted like they knew that already. They were "easy come, easy go". And they did: first, one was fired for physically assaulting the old man in a meeting, then the next for a lack of available funds, because they siphoned cash to various family members before their "seniority" that was bragged about. Without constantly sucking the talent from their betters, they became snarling vicious losers in our absence, bringing the company down brick-by-brick from the crazy old man's final incompetence, and that was this: his inability to see through his overly emotion connections to the friends and family who were the sickness that tore his businesses apart.
The very first month that I did a favor for their production manger of a dead classics series (feeding off the souls of writers they would never be) told me everything about them that I needed to know, besides their widely telegraphed disdain that existed around every office corner I turned. That big douchebag for their classics series threw down an easy layout his incompetent designer couldn't do on the ground of his office floor, to walk over it on the way back to his desk, thus leaving a big dirty footprint on the piece of paper that I would easily see, because he thought it would get to me somehow, except for this very prurient fact that the demented always seem to miss: that old layout can turn to dust, because the books I made are still for sale throughout the country, not to mention on the shelves of the book-buying American public printed with my name on them, and not his.
How's that for a "make it pretty" housewife decorator of a designer, Mark? Those were his actual words to me, as an already-famous art director and book designer that they didn't know because of their industry irrelevance, after flipping some minor layout from his dead imprint disdainfully across my desk for me to correct, because his designer was too stupid to keep up with a single female rock star like me. Besides, right after they "hit it" big with their classics series, B&N simply pillaged their idea in-house, creating an award-winning Classics series of their very own, thus cutting out the middle men forever. Thanks, Jo. Nice one!
One night I dreamed I was walking
Along the beach with the Lord
Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.
In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints
Other times there was one set of footprints
This bothered me because I noticed that
During the low periods of my life when I was
Suffering from anguish, sorrow , or defeat
I could see only one set of footprints.
So I said to the Lord. "You promised me
Lord, that if I followed You,
You would walk with me always.
But I noticed that during the most trying periods
of my life there have only been
One set of prints in the sand.
"Why, when I have needed You most,
You have not been there for me?"
The Lord replied.
"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints
Is when I carried you."
