Writing Time: Ray Bradbury & Writing for Dimes

Computers. They make our lives easier, except when they don't, and recent computer problems have made me spend some time working on my penmanship and reflecting on the nature of time: I only have so much of it to devote to this endeavor, and doing this thing the old-fashioned way is aggravatingly slow.

Apologies to my readers, but my writing time has been somewhat curtailed of late.  When given a choice between writing stories or writing blog posts, I choose the stories every time. And it's been a choice I've had to make with special delicacy lately due to the untimely demise of my laptop.

It's hard to upload a page of a legal pad to my blog.  It's not impossible, mind you, but the two technologies are not compatible without a special adapter and that special adapter is me.

But I do not alone beweep my outcast state because I am re-learning a valuable lesson about the value of my writing time.

On the day Ray Bradbury died, I was sitting at a computer loaned to me by a college library. This is important because Mr. Bradbury, you see, didn't own a typewriter when he started out. He rented one in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library for $.10 per half hour.  Fahrenheit 451 famously cost him $9.80 to write.

A bargain by any measure.

But think about that.  If you've never used a typewriter to write anything of length, I invite you to go do so and come back to marvel with me at the economy of this claim. One of the great works of American Letters took less than 49 hours to complete. That's a groundbreaking novel (originally published as a serial in Playboy) written in 6 and a half standard work days. All because its author was counting his dimes.

How many dimes did you spend on your last story?

I understand that there's infinite variety in writing styles and there's no such thing as a correct answer to "How long does it take to write a good book?"  As with any art, it takes as long as it takes.

But if your computer charged you a fee for every half hour you spent, how much faster would you write?  If you're like me, you would write so much faster it would make your head spin. Because one of the problems with writing on a computer is all the many other things you can do with a computer.  If you were paying for the time on the computer, how much less time would you spend looking at cute pictures of kittens and poking your friends on Facebook?

How much farther would $9.80 get you on a typewriter versus an internet-enabled laptop?

There's no right answer to this. The internet is blessing and curse. A digital circus that is hard to ignore, but also a bottomless cup of stories from which to drink. I think it boils down to whether you want to write stories or put on digital clown makeup and take the center ring.

As Robert Lynn Aspirin said in the forward to one of his books: "There are fast writers and there are slow writers, I'm a half-fast writer."  I, for one, have been on an unintentional journey between the the land of fast and the land of half-fast.

At risk of plundering the pun, I don't want to be a half-fast writer. I don't want to be a half-assed writer either.

In the past couple of months while this blog has been limping along in the shadow of my inattention, I have spent less time writing and written more than I would have otherwise. I have filled several notebooks with story ideas and notes and snippets of text. I've re-edited a book I'd long ago thought worthy of abandoning into something sleeker and more worthy of a reader's time.

The simple fact is that writing is a business, so even though I don't have an hourly wage as a writer, I am very much paying for every minute spent at the keyboard. If you're going to be your own employee, be a productive one.  I would never treat my hourly employer this way; why treat myself like that?

Ray Bradbury was infamously curmudgeonly about the internet. He hated it like my cat hates baths. I dis agree with him on that point. I think it's an inexhaustible well of words and enthusiasm.  An entire virtual world built entirely out of ideas. But he has a point nonetheless; and though my computer ills are now past, I think I'll remember how good it felt to just sit and put words on a page.

In the end, it's your dime.

Thanks for all your stories, Ray. You left us with a lifetime supply of new worlds to explore. You legitimized the business of writing dreams.  And you have left us with some incredibly big shoes to fill. Rest in Peace. We'll take it from here.

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Note: Adjusted for inflation, $9.80 in 1950 translates to  $93.48 in today's money. Still cheap at twice the price. http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%249.80+%281950+dollars%29&x=0&y=0

Rue the Day: Hunger Games and the power of race in our collective imaginings

It's been a couple of days since I read about it on Gawker Media. There are (or were) some vocal fans who were intensely disappointed to discover that a tragic young character from the books was being played by a black actress. Not because she was white in the books -- she wasn't -- but because they had pictured her in their heads with white skin.

I've talked to friends all over the world about it, talked to my wife, and read the detailed analysis of many commentators and have yet to find anyone else who rises above the "How are we still here after all these years?"

The simple answer is that if you draw together a huge and diverse cross section of humanity, you're going to get some racists. Twitter, of course, is about encouraging the broadcasting of surface thoughts and soundbytes. That's the simple answer. But some questions defy the simple answer.

Many of the posts from Twitter were racism in the starkest terms. I have nothing to say to those people. If you hate someone because their skin color or think yours makes you superior, I have nothing to say to you; that the amount of melanin in our skin somehow denotes our value is anathema to me.

However, many of the tweets (most deleted since Gawker threw a spotlight on them) included hashtags like "#ihatemyself" and a lot of the posters seemed genuinely taken aback by their own racist brains.

It is to those people that I choose to address myself.

Because they were surprised by their own feelings and confused by them. The internet is not a place where calm and rational examinations of feelings and nuance are encouraged, but this is my space to stand and speak and I choose to dig for the nuance. Not to make excuses, but to hope that those who are surprised by their own feelings are those who are open for change.

I am going to dig into this as deeply as I can go in a blog post and I am going to end it without having answered any questions.  That's the nature of the thing: There are no easy answers, there are only more questions.

Color is woven so deeply into our culture that most of us are unaware of it.

There is an implicit association between "good" and "fair" in the English language and the culture it influenced. But what many don't realize that when the Grimm brothers called Snow White 'the fairest in the land' it is her pale skin that is being referenced just as in her name. She's the whitest white girl in the land. This was because in Medieval Europe, fair skin meant you did no work in the sun.

Shakespeare makes use of this dual notion of 'fair' in several of his plays and sonnets. In Sonnet 18: "Every fair from fair sometimes declines" when he is warning the recipient of his verse about how too-short the summer of our lives and by Sonnet 130, when he's in the throes of love to his mysterious "Dark lady" he describes her thus in pointed contrast to the lies told by other sonneteers...

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head...

Her breasts are dun, which is a shade of brown and he doesn't care who knows it, nor will he conceal it with false flattery. Because calling them 'fair' or 'alabaster' or any one of a hundred other metaphors for pale skin would be considered flattering and in Elizabethan England, white still equals beauty and our poet defies that convention.

Fairy tales, and sonnets, and history, oh my! But what does it and have to do with the Hunger Games? Because it's all about the power of words. About the power of our assumptions. And it's about the implicit associations between a word like fair or innocent and the mental image of Snow White, a child of pale skin and blue eyes.

This reminded me of a story told by Studs Terkel in the introduction of his book Race:

"My wife was driving down the street in a black neighborhood. The people at the corners were all gesticulating at her. She was very frightened, turned up the windows, and drove determinedly. She discovered after several blocks, she was going the wrong way on a one-way street and they were trying to help her. Her assumption was they blacks and out to get her. Mind you, she's a very enlightened person. You'd never associate her with racism, yet her first reaction was that they were dangerous."

In the 1940's, Mamie and Kenneth Clark conducted a series of experiments with African American children where they were asked to choose between two dolls: identical except that one was white and one black. When asked to choose the pretty doll, the 'good' doll, they overwhelmingly chose the fair-haired and white skinned doll.

The experiments demonstrated something called 'implicit association', which is what Studs was talking about in the anecdote about his wife. It's the deeply-ingrained reactions that our society programs into us without our necessarily being aware of them: that dark skinned folks are scary, or at the very least, less trustworthy. It's in our movies and our fairy tales and our cartoons. The Clark Doll Experiments demonstrated this in stark terms, that the fair-haired cultural stereotype was so deeply ingrained that even those who recognized themselves in the toys presented to them chose the white baby as better, prettier, and more desirable. The study compared kids from segregated schools and desegregated schools and the differences were marked. By some accounts the Clark's testimony was instrumental in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown -v- Board of Education decision that made desegregation the law of the land.

Brown ended segregation in the United States. It meant that my upbringing in rural Missouri was not all white faces and white culture. But it did not mean racism was at an end any more than the inauguration of President Obama meant that we were exiting a racial phase of our culture.

Flash forward to today, in our supposedly post-racial America and The Hunger Games...

Susanne Collins makes it clear in several places that Rue has "dark brown skin and eyes" but the innocence of the character drove these readers back to their societal default: fair skin and light eyes. So that confronted by the visual contrast between their expectations and the reality of a lovely young actress with African skin, the dissonance drove them to sound off on Twitter.

While this is sickening for many of us who hope daily that we will get past this horrible phase of our history, it is all too apparent that we are not. And while it would be easy to decry the mile-wide-inch-deep nature of Twitter, I cannot. Because I think that getting this stuff out in the open will -- I hope -- turn out to be a positive thing in the long term.

If culture is the lie we tell ourselves about ourselves, then let this show how thin the 'post-racial' lie really is.  Which is sad, but I can't help but hope it's healthy for our society as a whole to see itself clearly in the mirror.

The Huck Finn kerfuffle last year should have warned us this was still lurking out there, but race still has the power to sneak up on us. And I think nothing surprises us more than the fact that we're surprised by it. This is the ongoing power of literature and movies to bring out that which would otherwise be hidden. Our preconceptions and our prejudices laid bare...

If nothing else, it's a wake-up call to those who think we are in a post-racial phase just because we elected a black man president.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant then this is a good thing. Let us be aware of ourselves, warts and all. Let us do something about it in the light of day rather than shoving uncomfortable subjects under the rug where we can pretend they don't exist.

In Paradise Lost, Milton noted that: "Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light." We have a habit of burying our sins and thinking our culture more civilized than is warranted and times like this are necessary to remind us that though there is a rocky road behind us, there is yet more ahead.

Dr. Villainous Deeds: An Online Approach to Character Creation

Hidden somewhere in every narrative is the author that created it.  As Oscar Wilde observed "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

Which should probably alarm me, because one of characters that people best know me for is a mad scientist and self-professed evil genius.

Some people have an inner child, I have an inner mad scientist.

For those of you who have read Howard Carter Saves the World, you know Dr Villainous Deeds as Howard's mad science teacher (in every sense). But he's much older than that. Before he became comedy relief for that novel, he was 'tried on' for size in several ways to make sure I could embody that sort of silly/evil character in a believable fashion.

Before I could commit to writing a novel about him, I needed to get inside his scary, freaky, head and see how he ticked.

Under normal circumstances, I 'try on' new characters in a series of short stories or vignettes.  Each time the character appears in these short pieces, there are subtle changes as I learn how they move through their worlds and interact with the people they meet.  I find my way into their skin and fill it out until they become as real as ink on a page can be.  Only then do I commit them to a longer, more complex storyline.

I did this with Howard Carter and his friends, I did this with Ashleigh MacLeod, and I did it with a host of other characters that never grew into actual novels because what the short stories taught me was that I didn't want to live with them through 90,000 words.

Doctor Deeds called for an entirely new approach.

Shyness Unmasked :: Finding My Inner Extrovert

This morning, a writer and storyteller I greatly admire not only correctly identified me by my work, but also told me that he loved the story. My tongue cleaved to the top of my mouth, my palms got clammy and it took me several minutes to figure out how to respond.

If this interaction didn't take place via Twitter, I'd have been in real trouble.

Like everyone on the internet, my various bios conceal as much as they reveal. When someone asks about me, I'm prone to default to being funny rather than honest. I have no excuse for that, it's just the way I am. If you asked me the same question at a restaurant, I'd probably do the same thing.

Well, at least I'm consistent.

My sense of humor comes from a place of extreme discomfort. I am notoriously awkward in social situations, excitable, shy, prone to blushing, and generally nervous around new people. Strangely, I've been told by many that I'm a compelling public speaker. I'm not sure how that works, but when I hear it, I smile, sort of jerk my head in a nervous half-nod and carry on carrying on.

My favorite aunt was a source of particular terror for me as a child. I was so painfully shy that I ran away and hid from her. I locked myself in a bathroom or two and she once pursued me over and around furniture, determined to give her great nephew a hug. This perfectly turned-out woman, always proper and dignified and accustomed to moving in the circles of power and propriety, determined to get me over my fear of her.

Because she was just that awesome.

If you meet me, you might not realize I'm the adult that used to be that kid. I've been developing ways to conceal these kneejerk responses for over thirty years. When I was single it was ten times worse. It's a wonder and a miracle that my wife and I ever met, much less married.

Even conversations with people I've known for years are often filled with odd stretches of complete silence while I try to come up with something say.

I've always suspected that I'm not alone in this. Not to paint with too broad of a brush, writers are by definition, people who are inclined to spend a lot of time alone with their thoughts. Let's face it: when your imaginary friends are so good you want to share their antics with other people, it leads to a lot of living inside of your own head.

My imaginary friends are so at home they built a lovely little village named Westmoore and made themselves at home. If there's room for a whole village in there, surely the rest of you will fit?

One of the ways I get past my anxiety is by wearing a mask. And not a metaphorical one either, a real one. The one in the snapshot to the right.

I realize that sounds a little weird, but bear with me for a moment.

Consider for a moment a man who is terrified of walking up and standing in front of a room full of people and talking. Then consider what it would take to make that happen. What kind of shield would it take for that person to walk up in front of a crowd and not only command their attention, but hold it?

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I met my Dumbo's feather.

Unfortunately, you can't just wander around in a mask without paying a higher social price than you are already paying for merely being shy. It is possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction and what I really needed was a controlled environment for the experiment where this sort of behavior isn't that strange.

I needed a place that would allow a largely inexperienced, completely unknown and shy actor on their stage.  There really is only one place where that sort of thing is possible. Luckily I'm an historical reenactor and was therefore already on the cast of my local renaissance faire.

Meet Calabash. (I'm the one that isn't made out of bronze.)

I've mentioned before that I'm a clown. Calabash began as a strange experiment and it became something more than that. He became the outlet valve for a part of my personality that I didn't know existed.

With that mask on, I could walk up to complete strangers and not only engage them in conversations, but I could stand on a stage, shouting at the top of my lungs and attracting the sort of attention that without the mask would have me scrambling for cover. I became a lead character. I got paid to show up places. I was on the cover of the program.

A terrified flying elephant holding onto a feather for all he's worth.

And like that feather, the mask was a trick. And just as with Dumbo, it worked.

About eight years after I first put on the mask, I attended my first writer's conference and I was one of the few people there actively meeting the eyes of those around me. Who was starting conversations with strangers, walking up to tables at the dinners and introducing myself, leading conversations, holding up my hand in classrooms...

Outside the agents and editors room instead of staring intently at my shoes, I pictured myself putting on the Calabash mask before I went in.  I was still shaking when I walked out, but my voice was as steady as my handshake and my eye contact was good.

As dumb as it sounds, I couldn't have done it without Calabash the clown.

Writers are mainly introverts, people who would rather sit and chat with their imaginary friends than stand in front of a room full of people who are looking for them to be as interesting in person as they are on the page.

Given my druthers, I would still hide in my corner and write my stories without ever doing anything else. Instead, I'm presenting ideas to the boards of local charities and nonprofits. I'm heading up comittees designated with the task of broadcasting the missions of those organizations to a larger audience. I've walked up to editors and agents and journalists and felt less like I was ice skating on thin ice over the dark waters of panic.  I've found myself on a stage both literally and figuratively, and I've found my a way to make myself at home there.

Because if I want to introduce all of you to those imaginary friends of mine, it's what I have to do. And to be successful at this, you do too.

i

The Total Perspective Vortex

This morning, my mother called to remind me that today was Make a Difference Day.

I'd never heard of that, so I got online and looked it up.

As cynical as my initial knee-jerk reaction to the National Day of Insert-Cause-of-Your-Choice-Here might be, there's something to be said for having a reminder pop up now and then not to get so self-involved that I forget that there are other people in the world and that the things I do have an impact upon them.

Alas, there's no ribbon for that.

In Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams introduced a device called "The Total Perspective Vortex". In his story, it was invented by a scientist whose wife badgered him about having a sense of perspective. So he took a piece of cake, extrapolated the entirety of creation from it (like you do) and on a microscopic point resting atop a microscopic point, he placed a sign that said "You Are Here". And seeing one's insignificance in relation to the whole of "one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation" was enough to destroy your mind.

And comedy hijinks ensue.

All beings, Adams reasoned, constantly divide themselves into smaller groups in an effort to fight the enormity of it all.

I've recently read a few blog posts by cancer survivors railing against the practice of wearing pink ribbons or the curious practice of Facebook status memes meant to raise awareness.

And to be honest, the Facebook thing annoys me too.

The number of people in my life who have either beaten or succumbed to cancer isn't something I care to dwell upon very often. It's just too... big. When it jumps out at me, it overshadows everything else and I can't think of anything else. I'm just a microscopic point on a microscopic point holding a sign: "I am here."

Those damn Facebook posts do that too me every time. And I remain like that until I've managed to write my way out of it, push it back with a phalanx of giant robots until it is sequestered once more in my mental basement, where it will lurk under the stairs until the next time it reaches out to grab my ankle.

But that's not the fault of the person I saw wearing a pink ribbon or even the person who cut and pasted a status meme onto their Facebook wall.

Adams reasoned that our minds cannot cope with how small we are in terms of the bigger picture. That if we were forced to confront the impunity with which the world moves regardless of our individual whims, we couldn't handle it.

He's both right and wrong. Right in that we do indeed constantly retreat from the enormity of the world without and wrong insomuch as we can take it. In small doses.

And maybe that's the value of these commemorative days. It's certainly why I have a special place in my heart for this one.

Make a Difference Day. Nothing telling you what to do or how to do it or who to do it for. Just make a difference. A positive one.

Lately, I've been working with an organization called "FindAnHour.org" which is a mentoring drive in the Tacoma area. The site acts as a clearing house for agencies and volunteer organizations ranging from the write@253 writing center where I volunteer to Big Brothers/Big Sisters.

The marketing campaign I designed for them hinges on the graphic to the right, which handily explains our name. Look at how you spend your time: sitting in traffic, surfing the web, watching TV, and find an hour you can reallocate to changing the life of one child.

Even if you don't live in the south Puget Sound area, I encourage you to reach out to one of these organizations and ask "How can I help?"

Wearing a pin probably won't help cure cancer, nor will expending electrons on a Facebook post. But deciding you'll Tivo your favorite show so you can spend an hour helping a kid with his homework? That effect is immediate and measurable.

Even if I am a microscopic dot atop a microscopic dot, within my reach are hundreds of other microscopic dots and the shadow I cast touches an unknowable number of other microscopic dots.

Which is why I'm wearing a blue rubber band on my left wrist as I type this. And why I don't hide the friends who remind me about the things I'd rather forget. Because my grandfather and my father were taken from us prematurely by cancer.

And while these things do cause the beast under the stairs to stir and grumble, they also keep me from pretending it's not there. Because when i do that, I forget to reach out to the person next to me. To break out of my protective isolation and touch another person.

Because this microscopic dot is here to make a difference. I hope you are too.

The MJ Manifesto - Some Thoughts

Maureen Johnson, popular YA author has planted her flag and declared a line she will not cross.  MJ (as she is called by her fans) is almost a cult figure in the YA community and one of the 'must follows' on Twitter.  Her blog and her books are wildly popular and her name is one to conjure with in some circles.

Yesterday, she put her foot down on the hot-button topic of SELLING YOURSELF TO EVERYONE YOU MEET and CREATING YOUR BRAND and SELLING YOUR GODDAMN BRAND TO ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN.  And other things that I'm required* by the Chicago Manual of Style to spelled in all caps.  Writers hear it all the time.  Every book, every blog, every magazine tells us that we are brands and if we're not, we're fools.  The writer has to be the key that winds a social media and self-marketing machine or YOU ARE DOOMED! DOOOOOMED!!.

But it's all BS because what the so-called social media experts who push this version of social media "branding" don't get is that social media exists to circumvent that kind of thing, to make it easier to ignore it.  Because social media is a two-way street.  It's not about shouting slogans and titles at your friends, it's about making friends and building community.

And what kind of friend would I be if I didn't buy your book?  Get it?

"The more the internet expands, the more people—okay, authors, who are a KIND of people—are being encouraged* to go online and PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE! To aid in this endeavor, these poor writers are being shipped off to conferences where they roll out people like me under the guise of being experts on something. And in general, the quality of advice is pretty craptastic. “Get a Facebook page!” “Get lots of people to LIKE you!” “SHOUT THE TITLE OF YOUR BOOK AT PEOPLE UNTIL THEY START CRYING AND BUY IT.”
Maureen Johnson
"Manifesto"

MJ is one of the 'must follows' on Twitter.  It's a crime that she doesn't have a million followers.  She's one of the few writers I've followed online that I haven't knocked back a beer or two with or at least shaken hands with.  Frankly, I'm not her target audience, but it's difficult not to like her.  And she does social media as naturally as breathing.  She is genuine, funny, accessible and creative and quirky as all get out.

And she knows what she's talking about.  The more she demurs the appellation of "Social Media Expert" the more I'm inclined to take her advice because the so-called "experts" have failed to grok social media and are falling behind as the collaborative Web 2.0 model takes hold.**

Should you promote yourself and your work?  Of course you should.  But as she points out, there's a long walk between the advice of the SHOUT UNTIL THEY BELIEVE YOU model of social marketing and the true heart of social media.  There's a difference between making a connection and selling Band Instruments to the kids and then skipping town before they realize they've been had.

I've written a manifesto or two in my time or at least written several things that could be mistaken for one.  This is the first time I think I've really recommended one on this blog.  A few months ago, I outlined three authors I thought were the real pioneers in this game.  Two of them are already walking the path she's laying out here, creating genuine community, engaging in the conversation.  (Anthony Zuiker is the only one who didn't and his innovative project fizzled.  There's a lesson there in bringing people along rather than imposing your vision, but I digress.)

You can shout your message and repeat it until we're sick of it.  Some people will buy it and some people will even like it.  But that's not social media, it's old-school marketing.  MadMen, style.  Missing the point that when you are genuine and engaging and actually have something to say you're actually using the medium to be social.

Which is kind of the point, isn't it?

-Scott


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*Not really, but marketers do it all the time anyway.
** This footnote is just here as an homage to MJ, who loves footnotes.

The rebirth of soliloquy

or: It's William Shakespeare's World & I'm Just Living In It...

Once upon a time in a high school English class far away, the subject of Hamlet and his propensity for talking to himself was on the table.  The teacher, the right honorable Anonymous Archetype, gavelled the session into order and  the first to speak was a much younger, beardless version of the bloke in the hat you see to the right.

Scottie: "I hate this play, it doesn't make any sense."
Mrs. AA: "What don't you like about it?"
Scottie: "You keep asking me to read Polonius and he gets stabbed."
Mrs. AA: "You do such a nice doddering old goat voice, Scottie.  What else?"
Scottie: "And last semester I was Cassius."
Mrs. AA: "And a decent backstabbing fiend as well.  Is there anything you object to other than my casting choices?
Scottie: "Well, for one thing, people never turn to an invisible audience and just start jabbering."
Mrs. AA: "You just wait for the invention of Twitter and YouTube."
Scottie: "What?"
Mrs. AA: "Nevermind."

I always wondered by she had a blue police box in the cupboard.

Anyway, I forgot all about this little exchange until a few days ago when someone asked me a question online and I turned to this anonymous audience and started talking.  Well, I was typing, actually, but I most assuredly was not talking to myself and I owe that unnamed English teacher an apology.

It began with an essay by Michael Chabon (as such thing often do) called "Trickster In a Suit of Lights" which I opined should be read by, well, everyone who reads.  This prompted a young reader to ask me what else he should be reading and my response grew and grew bit by bit until it became a 1,300 word soliloquy on the nature of reading and writing and the constraints of genre (which amounts to a sort of deconstruction of the Chabon essay).

Yes, everyone talks to themselves whether they admit it or not.  Most of those ramblings happen inside our heads, our "internal dialogue" and for some of us (myself included) it occasionally emerges and steps blinking into the sun.  At which point, my wife usually turns to me and says "I'm, sorry, did you just say something about robots and goblins?"  Because when I externalize my internal processes, they tend to emerge mid-stream and malformed.  I think that most real life soliloquies have had that quality for most of history.

I'm put in mind of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead where they wander through the events of Hamlet and periodically encounter the mad prince of Denmark mumbling nonsensically to himself.

Enter the Twitterverse and it's ready supply of audience members to listen to our externalized ramblings and re-enter the soliloquy into our daily experiences.  Each day millions and millions of people turn to their screens and on blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, they launch into soliloquy those things that might have in past days remained internalized.

So I apologize to all the English teachers.  For the soliloquy thing, not the complaining about being cast as Polonius thing.

"Nothing ventured, no brain drained..."

This is priceless.  From the New York Review of Books, this is Margaret Atwood weighing in on "social media" that web-driven whirlwind of electron chatter... what a great lady.  Great post, very witty and fun.

"The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?"

Read More from the Source
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/482335188/atwood-in-the-twittersphere

Cause and Effect

Do you think that reading something not because it drew you in on its merits, but because you're acting in defiance of authorities intrinsically changes your relationship to the material?

The fact that someone else told me not to read something does not guarantee that I will read it. For one thing, there are a lot of lists of Really Bad Stuff and I don't have that kind of time. But in all honesty if I know that it is on a list it gets more scrutiny in terms of whether or not I will read it than it might otherwise. There are certainly books I've read and books on my to-be-read shelf that wouldn't otherwise draw my attention for one reason or another.

I think any reasonable person would see that seeking to ban something you hate is self-defeating. You're giving free publicity to those you oppose. Right? Or does the effort to ban or constrict access to a book or song so intrinsically change my experience of it that it's worth the effort?

If I read a book that's on some Really Bad List somewhere, the list all but guarantees that I will contemplate it on a level deeper than I would otherwise. Sometimes I find something I deeply loathe. (The key being that I found it, it wasn't kept from me because I might find it.)  And it troubles me slightly that the fact that it's on a List somewhere changes the way I feel about it, may alter on some level deeper than I'm aware of how I respond to it.

I suspect that I'm not alone in this. But is that good or bad? Does finding it on some We Hate This And You Shouldn't Read It list make it seem better than it is? Does it inhibit our critical faculties in some fashion because we, the rebellious readers, deeply WANT it to be good just because some annoying jerk told us they didn't think it was and they 'know better' than we do? So is banning a book a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-defeating one? Or do the two cancel each other out?

I honestly think that the furor that surrounded A Catcher in the Rye was at least partially responsible for the cache that it's carried for the past fifty-odd years. Does the story of Holden Caulfield's 1950's Upper Westside, white, middle class ennui remain compelling without the history to the books fight to remain in print backing it up? Even after his idle and strangely asexual chitchat with prostitutes about "phonies" has lost its ability to shock us? I think it does, but I cannot be sure where the act of innate defiance that reading such a book entails begins and ends. So I asked my assembled friends on Facebook -- some of the brightest people I know from all parts of the country, all walks of life and every political leaning -- and now I ask you.

Is the prophecy self-fullfilling or is it self-defeating? What is the cumulative impact of challenging (verb form) books? Not to mention the cumulative effect on you, on society and on the writers of the books?

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Social Networking at Harper Collins

Provided by Todd over at Iced Tea & Sarcasm (thanks!) Harper Collins Wants To Be Your Friend The New York Observer Traditional publishers are awakening to the non-traditional ways that books are getting noticed and the viral nature of internet 'word-of-mouth' traffic that can make or break a book (or an author). Great interview, through provoking on the new face of the 'traditional' publishing houses.