I feel naked.

I just released my first collection of short stories. It's my love-baby, and even though I think it might just be worth the nine-ninety-five (two-ninety-nine on kindle) that I'm asking people to pay for it, I nonetheless worry for its future.

It's me, see, and I've just tossed it out onto the internet winds.

Maybe I shouldn't have taken a naked photograph of myself and used it as a model for the picture on the cover. Maybe I shouldn't have just admitted that I'm naked on the cover of my own book. Maybe that's why I feel naked.

I did it on purpose, though. I did it because the artful life is a monkey-dance best lived openly, with your, um, everything exposed to the wind. Art is about communication and connection, about telling artful lies that expose the truths we all know and experience but sometimes have trouble connecting with and expressing. Because we're scared. Scared that if we show people what we're really like, they'll reject us.

I don't want to be rejected.
I don't want to be laughed at.
I don't want to be dismissed, ignored, or forgotten.

This, then, is the perfect opportunity for me to grow a little faith. To rest in the unknown, and believe that I will be okay and loved, regardless.

Some readers are not going to be able to look past the swearing I had to use to tell some of my stories honestly. Some readers are going to be offended by the way some of my stories explore problems in the North American Protestant Christian Church.

Most readers aren't going to be my readers at all -- it is, after all, just a self-published collection of short stories.

I yam what I yam, though, and what I am is good. Whole. Cleansed. Beautiful. So I will straighten my shoulders, suck in my gut, and walk confidently and faithfully forward into the naked unknown.