Crime Victims Deserve Respect Too

In our society, if an armed soldier goes off to war and receives a horrible injury because the "other side" is trying to capture, attack or kill him or her, that soldier is then hailed as a hero, and rightfully so.  On the flip side, if an unarmed citizen walks down the street and is captured, attacked, or killed, that citizen is considered an unfortunate crime victim and is all too often ingnored and even shunned by society.  The victim now makes others feel uncomfortable. The "incident" is discussed only in whispers for fear of upsetting the victim or it is not discussed at all in the belief that if you don't talk about the bad thing, the bad thing won't happen to you.

The crime victim gets no medals, no disability pension and no parades but does get the life long burden of shame. Shame in the sense that they survived and shame in the sense that somehow they brought the violence upon themselves.

The situation typically goes from something bad happened to me, to I am bad because something bad happened to me.

PTSD is an expected and understandable disabilty for war veterans.  For crime victims, PTSD is oten considered a weakness.  They are told to "get over it".

Soldiers, for the most part, volunteer and are trained and armed. They are to be commended for the service they provide to their country.  Civilians, for the most part, are unarmed, untrained and never agreed to fighting an attacker to the death. 

But sometimes they must.

The Book is Finally Up on Kindle

Wow.  It has taken two years and thousands (and thousands) of hours to complete but the book is up on Amazon.  It is also up on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony Reader, Apple iBookstore and the Diesel ebook store. 

Now I've got to run it a flagpole and see if I can get anyone to salute it.  Hopefully people will want to read this story and the story of Colene's survival - against ALL odds - and the stuggles that she encounters every day, relating back to that fateful night in 1981.

Apparently Formatting is NOT Instantaneous

I finially finished everything, everything on the book . . . EXCEPT the formatting . . . and I thought it would take one day to format but apparently formatters take the weekend off.  I did not know that.  I'm in the 24/7 world and I thought everybody else was too. 

So just like every other day . . . I wait.  Bums me out. 

On the bright side, I finished enrolling myself for my 2 necessary ISBN numbers.  That took awhile.  Everything does.  People look at me and think I'm goofing off on the computer all the time.  Like I'm playing solitaire or something.  No, I am not.  It's work, work work.  And what do I have to show for it?

I'm not sure.

Well, at least I am closer to fine.  Just regular fine, not Joe Fine.

We will see what tomorrow brings.