What an Idiot

You: “What an idiot!  Anyone with a keyboard thinks he can blog.”

See?  You already understand my motivation.

According to Publishers Weekly (no citation), about 768,000 e-Books were published in 2009.  Discounting for Google digitizing everything written down since Adam and Eve went fruit shopping, that’s probably one book for every thousand people in America; two, discounting for all those small children who’ve mastered the keyboard but not the alphabet.

It seems that everyone I meet, when I tell them I’m a writer, says, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about writing a book, too.”

They probably have.

Today, everyone has something to say.  Facebook and Twitter consume the efforts of people with short attention spans and tiny keyboards.  Blogs can accommodate those of us who don’t run out of steam after the first paragraph.  E-Books are the new leviathans, capable of swallowing the efforts of the more verbose, like me.

What all these new media have in common is a lack of filters.  People can and will say almost anything on the web, coherent or not.  This outpouring constitutes a cloud of dark matter which is guaranteed to absorb all the illumination, the brilliant insight, the creative genius that yearns for an audience.
Philosophers once asserted that a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters could never produce the Declaration of Independence.  Now we have proof, or we might if anyone was actually reading all that stuff.

I feel compelled to blog about writing: about people who couldn’t put a coherent thought together, but think they have.  About people who have nothing to say, but are determined to keep saying it anyway.   About people who have a great deal to say, who express themselves beautifully, but struggle to reach closure.  About people who have all the right stuff except an audience.

Obviously, since you’ve never heard of me, I’m not writing from the top of the New York Times bestseller list.  More like the bottom of the slush pile.

I am published in the 21^st century sense.  I have two books with Agora International: Red Crush and Safety Margin, both crime novels set in the car business.  You can find them on Amazon if you look hard enough.  I’ve written two more books in the series, but have not yet transformed them to e-Books in the deluded belief that words on paper are infinitely more valuable than electronic ephemera.  I’ve also seen my dissertation published.

This makes me sound accomplished, but according to my most recent royalty statements; I’ve sold a total of two copies – one of the dissertation and one of the novels.

I blog both as a matter of blatant self-promotion, and also because the messages from the bottom of the slush pile are different from the ones we hear from the chosen few who’ve made it out of the mud.  The messages: Maybe, even if you think you have a book in you, you shouldn’t waste your time writing it.  Maybe you have something worth saying, but you need to square your shoulders and get to work.  Maybe there are voices that deserve to be heard, but that are lost in the cacophony of the web.  Maybe…