Promotional anxiety

I just ordered a bunch of postcards for Rain at Midsummer to bring to the Fetish Flea in Providence. (Phaze will have a booth there. Stop on by!)
And weird as it sounds, my heart was racing as I clicked BUY. I am fairly cheap at the best of times, but I have a real problem spending money on promotion. I think it's in part pure guilt that I'm spending money on promoting work that, fulfilling as it is, hasn't brought in half the mortgage yet. Illogical, I know. I used to work in advertising and marketing, so I know you have to spend some money to make money. But damn it's hard to do.

I think part of it is a legacy of my family. It's a complex subject that I'll explore in more detail some other time. But the Revered and Gifted Ancestor, the one my beloved grandmother taught me to look up to, the architect of notable genius and drive, believed "Fools' names as well as faces are often seen in public places." He believed talent was a gift from God and nothing to be proud of, and that while it was all right to be proud of your work, he himself never put his name on it. He also often passed up payment for jobs he did for the Catholic Church (which was most of them). And the family cemetery plot had no individually marked graves.

I have reason to believe he was mildly bug-nuts, in the way that only very brilliant people can be bug-nuts. And he died in the late 1800s, at least a decade before the grandmother who taught me of him was born. But his legacy endures a little bit, in a descendant who's blessed with gifts that are verbal rather than spatial and visual and who follows a completely different religious path, yet who still hears "Fools' name..." whenever she tries to get herself some publicity.