|
| |
Let's Face It
By Michael Harling
The life of the modern writer is complex. Starving alone in a garret wasn't
always pleasant, but it was easy. These days,
starving alone in a garret is no longer allowed, unless it
has broadband. It makes one long for the days of
manual typewriters and rejection slips brought by the mailman. But that's merely
wistful nostalgia; Pandora has opened her box, and the Internet isn't going to
go away.
This is not altogether a bad thing; even I enjoy the advantages of e-mail and
the inherent benefits of receiving rejections in a matter of minutes instead of
months, and manuscript manipulation in a word processor has retyping a 347 page
manuscript because you needed to make a revision in chapter two, beat
hands-down.
But alas, the Internet is not a static thing; yesterday's trendy website had
better be today's hip blog and tomorrow's happening social network or you're
gong to come off like some old curmudgeon who, well, talks wistfully about the
days of manual typewriters.
Realizing the importance of changing with the times, I long ago put up a
website. That, however, appears to be the limit of my web-savvy. When my
contemporaries began the scramble to cast away their websites in favor of blogs,
I joined the melee. I made a post or two, then retreated to the safety of my
website. There didn't seem to be any advantage in it;
if the goal was to advertise my writing and post self-promotional essays, my
website did a better job than a blog.
I appeared to be alone in this opinion, however.
In an attempt to avoid falling further behind the virtual pack, I recently
opened a MySpace account. I wanted it to be useful,
I really did, but the only good thing I can say about it
is, if you need to get over the idea that you are young and hip and have
friends, opening a MySpace account is the way to do it.
Everywhere I looked I saw people younger than my children, with active social
networks in the triple digits, having an apparently grand time interfacing with
one another while I tried in vain to make some sense out of the place and
watched my inbox flood over with "friend invitations" from scantily clad young
ladies named Candi or Tanya offering untold titillation if I called their 1-900
number.
Naturally, I bolted. But, undaunted, or perhaps slow to learn, I opened a
FaceBook account.
FaceBook seemed less of a virtual meat-market and appeared populated by a
broader representation of age groupings. Why, I can't say. While I feel
significantly less harassed in FaceBook, I still can't make
it do anything remotely useful, such as promote my writings.
Without actually meaning to, I have acquired a dozen or so "friends," yet my
feelings of virtual social inadequacy continue unabated due to the fact that
more than half of them are total strangers. So I posted a link to my website and
check back occasionally to see if I can puzzle out one of the many bells or
whistles that are supposed to make my online experience more enjoyable. This is
the electronic equivalent of attending a cocktail party and standing in the
corner holding a sign that says, "Come talk to me." And it's
just as effective.
So it looks as if I'm stuck in this particular rest
stop on the information highway and will continue to be the only person on the
globe who continues to post a web journal to a web page instead of BlogIt and
who counts as friends only those people he can make eye contact with. You can
visit me at FaceBook if you like, as long as you're prepared for "Ozzie and
Harriet" and not expecting "Friends" (the older episodes, when they were
younger, hipper and hadn't started shagging each other).
Don't bother looking for me on MySpace, however. I only venture there about once
a month to evict the porn-queen wanabees from my inbox.
Michael Harling is a freelance writer from Albany,
NY now living in Sussex, England. His articles have appeared in Absolute Write,
Writer's Digest, ByLine Magazine, The National Lampoon and The Journal of
Forensic Identification. He is also the author of "Postcards From Across the
Pond," a humorous account of his experiences living in England. Ironically, when
he is not writing, Michael continues to work in the computer profession, even
though, at some point, he has obviously lost the plot. Visit his website at
www.Lindenwald.com.
| |
Sponsored links
Ring binders
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer!
How to find a
book publisher
|
