Facebook–A Squirrel Ran Through It

After looking at my Facebook page today I am overwhelmed. So many random thoughts are piled up in my forehead I don’t know where to begin.

First, Dean Frank Lappi has rereleased his epic fantasy-horror, Black Numbers, along with a sequel, Blood Numbers.  The Aleph Null Chronicles has to be the most unique fantasy series ever written.  This book is not for the faint of heart, or for those who shy away from explicit and at times, violent sex. Yet the sex is not for prurient purposes–Lappi’s magic is created by melding high mathmatics (the sort that explain the universe) and that most powerful of human drives, sex. I have been waiting for more than a year for this, and I guess you know what’s on Grandma’s Kindle today!

Then, there was a hilarious post by a fellow Olympia area author, Elizabeth A.. It was a link to a blog called “Death and Taxes”, and the post is called “18 Obsolete Words Which Should Never Have Gone Out of Style.” 

They are all just so awesome, it’s hard to pick my favorite! I do think “Snoutfair: A person with a handsome countenance — “The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten” by Jeffrey Kacirk” is a real winner.

Also there were the usual snarky, funny pictures that make the rounds.  So many posts by so many people, all intent on chatting…. If I’m Facebooking on my phone I’m in trouble. It takes me ten minutes to accurately text “On my way” so a readable post by me is out of the question. I do end up with some awesome auto-fill errors.

I love Facebook as much as I hate it.  It is a vast, time-sucking black-hole at the center of my universe, but some of the things I run across are just so hilarious.

Some things are really thought provoking. Today there was the blog post by Traci Tyne Hilton on being a writer and other people’s perceptions of you. It’s titled  “The Proof of the Writer is in the CV.”

“So the other day,when a friend called me a “new writer” my defensive nature kicked into high gear.

What did she mean by that? She just meant I hadn’t been writing long.

What did I hear when she said that? I heard: “You just picked up a pen for the first time, like, yesterday, and now look at you!” (She doesn’t talk like a Valley Girl, the voices in my head do.)”

I think a lot of authors can relate to that feeling of “Whoa– what do you think I’ve been doing for the last 30 years?” but, just as Traci does, we realize it’s perception and semantics, and try not to feel that pang of instant outrage that we suppress and cover with a smile. Frankly, how many people actually know we’ve been holed up in a dark room with only Strunk & White and a typewriter or keyboard for companionship for all these years? Who of my coworkers knew I could wallpaper an outhouse with my letters of rejection? Failure to land a publisher for a novel you penned in your own blood and tears is a deeply personal failure, and is not something you chat about over lunch with the girls in the data-entry pool.

To be honest, before I published my first book, probably only my husband, my kids and my sister knew I had this dark secret, so it shouldn’t bother me to be called a new writer. In the eyes of the world, I am a new writer, so I’ll embrace it, and roll with it.

I love all the off-the-wall, hilarious and thought provoking posts I find on my Facebook page. In fact, today I found enough to keep me from having to write for nearly 3 hours!  Woot! Now the morning is gone, I guess it’s time to sit on the back porch and read me some Dean Frank Lappi! Strange, how dark and scary he can make a summer’s day appear….