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Monthly Archives: July 2009
Monthly Archives: July 2009
I think writers are more familiar than anyone with the strange and unpredictable nature of inspiration. Suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, a brilliant idea strikes. You might be awake or dreaming. You have to write it down NOW or you risk losing it.
I’ve always known the best stories arose out of primordial mental chaos. Now, science has proved it.
Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability – “avalanches” of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.
It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems.
…and write stories.
How are books selling in Great Depression II? Just great! As long as you take into account that “flat is the new up”!
Total U.S. book publishers’ net revenues reached $40.32 billion in 2008, up 1.0% over 2007, while 2008 unit sales reached nearly 3.1 billion, down 1.5% over 2007, according to Book Industry TRENDS 2009, the Book Industry Study Group’s comprehensive annual research study.
Ventriloquist is in coma — but his dummy’s still talking!
Bin Laden’s Vegas Video! High stakes, hookers and hummus
Girl Frozen in Ice in 1939 Alive!
Britney stole my body! Shocking phots of the “real” pop star inside
3 Die in rampage of Killer Sheep
Bat boy foils Nuclear Bomb plot
Phone Psychic’s head explodes
Robot Priests — Pope’s Secret Plan to stop sex scandals
I keep mom’s ashes in the vacuum cleaner
Amelia Earhart’s Plane Lands — with skeleton at the controls
Osama launches doomsday bomb into orbit
World’s smartest ape goes to college
Wife Sells Hubby’s Body Parts on Internet
Al Queda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes
3000 Year Old Mummy Pregnant — Janitor admits, “I’m thte father”
Iraqi Sub Prowling Lake Michigan
Three New Commandments Found
Saddam Challenges Bush to a Duel
Jap Sub still fighting WWII
Bat boy leads cops on 3 state chase
3000-year-old Mummy has baby boy!
Duck Hunters shot Angel!
Saddam Feeds Christians to Lions!
North Korean Plan to Invade America
Bat boy fights in Iraq!
Viking frozen in block of ice
Merman caught in South Pacific
Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons found in Cuba!
3000 year old priestess revived in Libya
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — Killer Dinosaurs!
Some thoughts on writers and internet addiction:
I am coming to suspect that the internet will be to my generation of journalists, and to any younger ones, what alcohol was to our predecessors’: a destroyer first of thought and then of productivity, destructive both of the capacity to reflect, and to react, blurring everything into a haze of talk and endlessly repeated variations on the same experience. Just like alcohol, and even cigarettes once were, it seems an inevitable part of the job, one of the things that distinguishes it from all others. Stories are chased and found on the net just as they once were in bars.
This won’t kill journalism, or thought, of course. There were always many journalists who functioned drunk, and some who could not function any other way.
…But the internet has no edges, any more than it has depth. The sudden movement of someone else’s thought across a screen is something you can follow far beyond the room in which your thoughts could be confined. There’s no tether to jerk you back and by the time your thoughts return, the room has changed: whatever lay in front of the next sentence has disappeared. And so I sit now in a room with a window and no telephone, waiting for the next sentence, patient and pious as a dried-out drunk.
Consider this my explanation for why my blogging has been light of late.