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A Very Good Blog Post

My friend, Jeff Goguen started a blog a few days ago. I mentioned him in an earlier post. His passion is linguistics and he is not only a good technician with the language but gifted or cursed with the 'bug' as he refers to it; he is a writer and a very good one at that.

I invite you to click the link either in the title of this post of at the end of the post and check out his blog. I am in almost complete agreement with his comments about writing and being a writer.

I think that some people use the terms writer and author interchangeably. To be sure, in some cases a writer is an author. To be an author is to be a writer that has had something published. It doesn't mean that you are no longer a writer; it just means that you have as a writer completed something and it has been published. It is my understanding (from what someone in the industry told me) that you can claim to be an author for seven years after being published. That would mean that you must publish every seven years to continue calling yourself an author.

Jeff's assertion is accurate though, some authors are not writers just as some who write, even those that write very well and are not writers. Lately to be an author seems to be more about being famous or being an established writer with a following. Apparently there was a time when it wasn't that way.

I suppose that in these days almost anyone can self-publish almost anything. Perhaps that is the present vehicle of the exposure of new talent in writing. The avenue is the Internet and it can take many forms of which this type of weblog is but one. There are some purists that would acclaim this self-publication is a type of vanity publishing, demeaning not only the vehicle but the relative merit of the material presented. I would counter that ghost writing a book for a famous person and purporting that it is something that he or she authored is worsv that vanity publishing, it is an outright deception. There is nothing wrong with self promotion, folks. A writer either does a lot of that or never sells anything. Jeff states that a writer cannot help but write. Even the frustration of the process and the rejection of publishers cannot dissuade or prevent a writer from writing. For the sake of the most effective and immediate exchange of ideas, I could not imagine anything more useful than a weblog.

Despite the negative comments about self-publishing, it is somewhat ironic that the weblog has been used by many very recently to communicate news information that the mainstream media were rather hesitant (for whatever reason) to pick up. I would never be so quick as to condemn an emerging medium of exchange. After all, we are in the middle of a revolution within the Information Age.

My kids use the term 'old school' to refer to anything that obviously was the way things used to be done. It doesn't make it wrong or bad but just dated, perhaps. If it still works then it can exist along side the 'new school' innovations.

I interact with the general public on a regular, daily and continual if not continuous basis. That is one of the things I love about working in retail. I am also around technology and innovation that are at the cutting edge. I know about 'stuff' before the existence of the 'stuff' is widely known. I provide this information and knowledge as a resource to my customers and I hope they appreciate it and come back to buy even more 'stuff'.

What I hear everyday is that 'I am not a technical person' or 'I am not a computer person'. There are other variants as well: 'I'm not very computer literate, computer savvy or whatever'; 'I'm not a geek'; 'I know next to nothing about these computers' or my personal favorite 'I don't have a clue'. You really don't have to be a geek to be proficient in the use of a computer anymore. The technology has developed rapidly to be sure but so has the technology of making the interface more user-friendly. I work with this 'stuff' everyday but it does not mean that I do not have to adapt to the changes as well. There was a time before I was good at this 'stuff'. When I was acquiring computer skills the user interfaces were much less friendly. However, if I can learn this stuff, then anyone can.

I think my point here is that technology is not going to go away. So it is counter intuitive to burry your head in the sand and try to ignore it or even worse refuse the even acknowledge that it might be of some use, interest or benefit in making your life different if not easier. One of the strengths of the human race is adaptation to change. It is why we survive even though we are not the strongest or fastest of the animals on Earth. At some point the 'old school' needs to visit the 'new school' before the 'old school' is supplanted and replaced. Better yet the 'old school' can be remodeled into a 'newer school' approach.

That is why I would advise those in the publishing industry to take heed of some of the innovations that the Internet can offer to the end user, the reader. The reason that the printed text style medium still exists is that it is still a little inconvenient to curl up in bed with a computer monitor in order to read a book. That does not mean that books will never be replaced. I personally hope that they never are. It is my experience that every time someone says something like 'that will never happen’ it eventually happens and usually much sooner than later. It would be prudent to prepare for the changing world especially if one's livelihood depended on prediction of consumer trends. If it comes to pass that hard copy books disappear altogether I would not want to be caught clueless in the competitive world of the Internet.

I suppose that advice could extend to almost all of the mediums of information and entertainment. Embrace and incorporate the new, or else be replaced.

I was an 'old school' writer. I had a typewriter; isn't that quaint? I used to write reams and reams literally of typewritten drivel. I thought at the time that some of it would be good enough to use so I kept everything that I wrote in boxes. I mentioned in an earlier posting that I purged those 20,000 pages at one point. It could have been more than that I don't know. What I kept I eventually digitized sometime after I bought my first PC. Why? Because it is a hell of a lot easier to compose, edit and revise on a computer. I adapted and I am glad that I did. I really do not think that I would have ever finished a book otherwise. The ancillary contributions of working with computers contributed to the actual plot as well. Being connected to the Internet brought me into contact with not only friends that have served to inspire my writing but also friends who had purchased and read my material.

Thanks Jeff, for getting me thinking along these lines. Check out his blog at

http://meditativeentropy.blogspot.com/

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posted by Unknown @ 1:37 PM