A Grand Evolution

Marketing has persisted for several centuries. Back in the day town criers yelled out the latest news and developments. Then, in time, posters appeared, pressed against walls like bees on honey. These posters held all kinds of news: the latest attractions, wanted criminals, new plays in the closest theatre, and news on shocking or fascinating events. Later down the line newspapers rose and advertisers and marketers made their marks on the ink-filled pages and in the eyes and minds of many readers. For over a decade news papers were the main source of information and advertisements. Then came the radio. With this new invention people could hear fantastical stories and listen to current events while drinking a cup of coffee and sitting with the family at the dinner table. Suddenly, television made its appearance. People saw events live and saw movies market themselves through commercials. Today marketing has gone a whole new level.

With the invention of computers marketing has become a race of "Who has the best of the best?" Does the cover look good? Is the trailer heart wrenchingly incredible? Does the advertisement on the side of the webpage catch the user's eye? These are questions that were not asked one hundred years ago, but are pertinent to today's technological utopia. Marketing is everywhere, not just in television screens or billboards or radio. Now Facebook, Pandora, Twitter, Spotify and other websites have the latest trend available for users. With this new wave of advertisement books are also seeing themselves marketed just as often as movies are. Television commercials present new book releases of famous authors and Barnes and Nobles sends out e-mails to all its members lists full of new popular book names hitting the shelves. The covers themselves have become oriented towards the readers of interest. If it's for teenagers the book is flashy with a large title and colorful images on the front, if it's a self-help book the cover is maneuvered accordingly.

Marketing has evolved from simple word of mouth to a blown out version of criers in web version. There is nothing people don't know about and if they don't know about it one simple look at the various online sites will provide all the information needed. Technology is both a blessing and a curse, but businesses who know how to maneuver their way through the online community know just how much of a blessing it can be.

Pick Up your Pens and Tongues

 Almost two months ago an entrepreneur of the Business Department in TCU came to visit our class. Michael Sherrod introduced himself with enthusiasm and charisma and one of the first things he said was: "English majors are the most important people in a business." Of course, I'm paraphrasing, but his statement was well remembered because for years I've heard comments similar to "You will never find a job as an English Major." "Go into law instead." "English? I don't think you make much with that." I'm sure I'm not the only person who has heard these point of views and I most likely will not be the last. Yet, on a Thursday morning in a class full of English majors and minors I heard Michael deny what most people had told me during my short college career. English majors are highly sought for, he said, and not because it's a field with less applicants, but because English majors are innovative.

For a business to thrive it needs creativity and requires of its workers and CEO fathers and mothers to keep a lookout for new ideas and creative ways to market or build new products. Sherrod clung to this point when he spoke with us. Creativity blooms in an English major and minor's mind because the student reads constantly and writes constantly both fiction and non-fiction pieces for class. Sherrod believed (quite emphatically) that businesses needed more creative thinkers who could put forth new ideas and new answers to current financial or production problems. He went as far as saying: "You don't need to get a business major to get into business. I didn't get a business major and I helped bring up several companies." Again, paraphrasing, but the gist of the idea is there. English majors don't need to fear being out of a job because indirectly Sharrod stated that they are a commodity. There are fewer English majors and minors each year and businesses are scrambling to implement people who can read in depth and write without making multiple spelling mistakes. Being an English major suddenly didn't seem like a wishful dream to make it somewhere in the world.

There is much left for an English student to do and say. Every passing day is full of people offering new ideas for an application on IPhone or a new website for an upcoming movie. Creative minds are everywhere, but as Sherrod said, English majors and people focused on literary works have a different way of viewing the world. The jobs are out there and so are the businesses, all we English folk have to do is search.

Self-Publishing: The Easy Way Out?

It's no secret that in today's publishing world there are many aspiring authors rising from the crevices and cracks of fan-fiction, hobby writing, poetry jams and simple writers who just want to make their presence known through autobiographies or showing their knowledge on recent discoveries. Authors, back in the day, used to see a publishing company acceptance letter as the ultimate goal. 'We would like to take a closer look at your work.' 'Is there any way we could meet for coffee and make future plans on your publishing career?' These lines were sought by most authors during the early point of the 19th century to the 21st. Now, not even halfway into the 21st century, writers of all ages have discovered that publishers are not the only means of getting their work out to the real world.

With the rise of Amazon.com also came the rise of self-published authors. Amateur writers milled in by the thousands and began submitting writings considered non-publishable by companies who make it their business to decide what the public decides will be interesting and what won't. The gatekeepers of good writing were overlooked by Amazon and writers were given free reign to publish whatever they wished. Good or bad writing, it didn't and still doesn't matter. Authors found that no more constraints existed for their beloved stories. There was no need to erase chapters or 'edit' the work heavily until the body of the story completely changed. For the first time Authors found the power they have always wanted: to have a say in what their stories have and don't have.

The question is...is this a good thing for the future of writing? Or will this eventually become detrimental to the business of writing stories?

I heard someone say once that a self-published author only seeks the easy way out. He (or she) decided submitting endless manuscripts to different publishers was too difficult and found an easier way to earn money through Amazon or other self-publishing methods like Xlibris. This way there would be no need to excess 'work' on the book that felt unnecessary. In other words the author who seeks self-publishing is nothing if not "Lazy."

Personally, I don't believe publishing companies are the only way to get one's book out there. Sometimes publishing companies won't show interest even if your work is well written or mildly interesting. Especially if the story doesn't coincide with the 'zeitgeist' of the times. This is where many first time authors get stuck. As a first time author myself, I wonder if my book is up to par with what publishers today consider the zeitgeist of current public interest. Sometimes an author has no choice but to self-publish. It doesn't make him or her any lazier than a published counterpart. I can attest for myself, at least, as an author who seeks to self-publish, I've worked heavily on my story for over a year. From someone who edited and erased, and shifted paragraphs and simply dropped chapters, I can safely say self-publishing doesn't feel like the easy way out to me nor does it mean it's a badly written novel. I put my heart and soul into my novel and fear changing the story completely, but I still submit it to beta-readers and wish for it to be the best of its kind.

Is self-publishing the easy way out? Will it mean the end to good writing? I don't think so. Literary works may not show themselves through this generation of writers, but does that make the writing bad? Perhaps not. It's a massive change and change is neither good or bad. Change just is.

Was it Supposed to be a Lifetime?

Here we are, 2013, and we are left wondering what's next with the world of publication and bookstores. For almost three months we have discussed the possible alternate futures in store for reading, books and readers. Personally, I had never pictured a Barnes and Noble going out of business. To me a book store was a permanent symbol for all readers out there. I thought that even twenty years from now Barnes and Noble would stand tall among the book industries and even root itself against Amazon's competitive business.

But is that reality still plausible? Or am I grasping for optimistic outcomes and false hopes?

Today, I can see that Barnes and Noble's time may be nearing an end, one that's not too far in the future. Many publishers and editors we have interviewed and spoken to all say the same thing: the book business is getting rougher. There are less people reading, which means less profit for book sellers. If that wasn't bad enough, Barnes and Noble failed to beat Amazon at the ebook game. The Nook sales never quite matched up to the Kindle and stayed one step behind every year a new update was released. What is Barnes and Noble left with? Scraps.

The estimated life expectancy of Barnes and Noble is now at a 7-8 year range. Borders already left us, what will happen when Barnes and Noble does? Will reading continue plummeting? Or will Amazon rise up to the occasion?

As a reader these questions scare me. I personally don't mind ebooks, but I like being able to enter a store and simply browse and feel the shelved books. It's not encouraging to think that this may all soon become a thing of the past.

The Business of being an Author

Megan and I interviewed Matthew Pitt, a published author who has already won a prize for his writing, on what it is like to be an author and his views on the upcoming technological world of books. We have an extensive transcript of his answers and found it to be very informative. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Author Questions

 

Katherine R: Who or what inspires you as an author?

Matthew Pitt: There’s two ways to look at that. Do you mean other writers that inspire me? Or…

KR: Have there been any writers that inspire you?

MP: Sure. Yeah. I’m constantly inspired by new writing. Or at least writing that is new to me.

KR: What kind of writing?

MP: It can be a combination. Sometimes it’s a writer who’s a friend of mine, so I might get to see the work in progress. So I get to see what they’re doing and watch them come up with drafts and be really talking with them as they’re going through the problems. And that can be inspiring. You can also look at work that is new to the world and you don’t know the writer, but you’re really blown away by something and you feel like it’s speaking to what you’re doing or it’s suggesting a question that maybe it doesn’t answer and you feel like you want to start asking that question in your own work. And then sometimes it’s writers that have been around or been gone from this world for a hundred years. I just read—I think I mentioned this in class—but I’ve read Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin for the first time. It wasn’t that I was putting it off purposefully, I just put it on the stack, and everyone I had respected and admired read it and said, “You have to read this, you have to read this.” And when I did it opened up the world to me in a new way that it hadn’t been before. And I think that’s what the best writing does. So even though that story is known by many, many people, it becomes personal. It becomes your experience because you have it in your house or in your room or in your desk for that one moment.

Megan Doyle: So I’d also like to ask what motivates you to write as an author?

MP: you know, the short answer is curiosity for the world and the world that you see in front of you and the world that exists in other people’s minds that can’t be fully known by you and yet you want to try. And so you look for voices that maybe express things that you don’t understand or you see a different way. And I think that that can be the big impetus for writing is the other: what’s beyond your own world and your own walls. And weirdly enough, if you try to understand those other voices you often see that you are a lot closer to them than you thought.

KR: what author influenced you as an author the most?

MP: Boy, that’s… I don’t know I could give you just one. That changes as you read more, so you come to know different writers as they come to you in your life and become important to you for different reasons.

MD: What have you recently been most influenced by?

MP: Recently, I couldn’t put down a book by Jennifer Egan that came out a couple years ago called Visit From the Good Squad. She tells it from many different points of view and many characters. And these characters all have associations with each other, but once one person tells a chapter you never see them again. You never see them fully again. But you might hear from them through others. And she also tells a story—about the last 70 or 80 pages of the book are through power point. And so she actually has a power point presentation in the book, which doesn’t make any sense if I’m just telling you about it now. But when you read the book and you get to that part of the book, you understand why it has to be that way and how it works. So it’s just really inventive, the form of it, and it’s really playful, and it kind of touches on modern concerns. That interests me a lot more than books that are, say, historical fiction. So I’m interested in them as a reader, but I’m not as interested in those as a writer. I don’t like to write straight history in my fiction.

MD: Okay, so much like Jennifer Egan’s power point, has new and developing technology influenced the way you write?

MP: Yeah, I think it’s doing it, and I think it’s going to keep doing it more and more. So I wrote a story while I was moving to Fort Worth, and the story hinges on a text that’s sent to the wrong person. And so it ruins a relationship, but it doesn’t ruin the relationship because it’s revealing that one person is having an affair or one person hates the other secretly and is going to break up with the person. It ruins it because it turns out that the guy in the relationship has been secretly going out with his buddies twice a year and have meat smorgasbords, and pretending to be a vegetarian with his girlfriend who’s incredibly devout to this. But it comes through a text, and I’m interested in that because it seems like a new and faster way to have some of the issues that came up in novels of letters. There are famous books that are based on letters, and people back and forth replying to one another. And I’m kind of interested in how that’s accelerated in our age, and how we can hit “reply all” instead of “reply” and destroy a reputation. How we can have one picture that gets around, and goes through the entire Web in minutes. So I’m interested in that part of technology.

KR: Do consider yourself as an experimental author?

MP: Yeah, yeah, I do. Sometimes I think I write traditional stories. The content or conflict might be traditional, then it’s told in an untraditional way. So I’m much more interested in stories that defy rules or play with rules or they wink at the outside world a little bit. So I like that style a lot more when I’m writing. It’s hard for me to tell just a straight story, and usually I’ll start off with an idea that seems pretty accessible in my head that is something I should be able to do in a couple of weeks. Something happens and twists it, and shapes it, and then I want to play with it. And the more I engage with it, the stranger it becomes. That tends to be the rule of thumb. And I’ve learned to just accept it. It’s probably not going to change. If I could tell a story in a simple way, I probably would try, but I keep trying and I keep failing, so…

KR: Hey, that’s the best way.

MP: Yeah.

MD: So when you write, who do you consider your intended audience to be?

MP: When I’m actually writing the first draft, I am forgetting that there might be people who will ever read this. I don’t know that you can say there is any one way of thinking about audiences. But if I were to think of an audience, it would be clear that I was editing myself or being self-conscious, and that is probably not useful for the story. So I’m not thinking about anyone in the first draft. By the time I get to the last draft, or what I hope is the last draft, I’m writing for an audience that is only going to give me a page of their time, and then they’re going to shut the door in my face. So I have to figure out how to connect with them, and hopefully I’ve already done that. But a lot of times you haven’t done it as well as you need to, so I have to think about it in more of a ruthless way, and alter the work accordingly. It’s still as mine, but it’s recognizing that other people may not have that same impulse to tell a story about that subject or follow that character that I do, so how do I make it interesting to them.

KR: How is the current technological revolution changing your audience?

MP: I don’t know. I haven’t given that a whole lot of thought, but at the same time I know that I had a story that came out last year on a website, and, you know, got retweeted instantly, and people were commenting on it instantly, and I’d receive emails about it from friends or, in a couple of cases, from people I didn’t know. And that rapid reaction is probably one way that it changes. And this was a story I had written only a few months before, haven it actually been published, versus old school publication where maybe it takes years and years for it to see print in a journal. And then after that it might take another several years for it to be in a book of its own, and then maybe it takes time for the reviews to come out, so there is a lot less lag time. That can be interesting, and it can also be challenging because you’ve got some writers who are telling stories in tweets now. And that could be an interesting form. It could definitely be an interesting form. It could also be a very shallow form. So you have to balance the idea of “well here’s a new way to reach an audience” with “are we respecting the audience.” Are we actually giving something that will nourish the mind or challenge you as a reader or is it just about the flash? I don’t know that that’s going to be something easy to answer. It’ll play itself out the way it’s going to, and you can have your own projects and ideas, but sometimes just the technology drives the content.

MD: How did you initially find a publisher for your book? And how long did that whole process take? You mentioned years…

MP: Yeah. So I started… When I was writing in grad school, there was one story in grad school that was—actually in my first year of grad school—that was in the collection. And, from the time of that first year in grad school to book actually coming out on shelves was almost ten years. Now, there were a lot of other stories I was writing, and I published some of them, but some at certain point I felt they were no longer part of the book. So you have to make these choices that they’re important to you, but they don’t represent the best of what you do anymore. So the collection—it’s a little different with a novel, but not entirely—but with a collection you’re always rethinking what’s in there. And you’re always thinking about how they order and how they match up and what overall story they’re telling, things like that. So the collection that I first had is probably about half the stories that are still in and half the stories are new in the collection as it wound up being published. I sent it out to different contests, so different publishers have prizes, and a friend of mine calls it “the literary lotto.” You have hundreds of people in a lot of cases, and in some cases a thousand people sending in books, and one of them gets in. One of them wins. Like a lot of writers who go that route, it means a lot of rejection. It’s tough, and you don’t know if that’s a reflection of your work sometimes, or if it’s just the cold, hard fact that you have a one in a thousand chance. What luckily happened for me is, pretty soon after I sent it out to those types of contests—those types of publishers—I started getting in finalist or runner-up positions. And that was really exciting. It’s got enough of a presence that people were paying attention to it. The problem is you get a couple of those, and you feel like the eternal bridesmaid then. It’s difficult then because you’re thinking, “what if there’s just one thing I need to do here, and alter it.” That can be really frustrating to tell yourself to just trust that it will happen. It happens in stages. None of them happen the way you expected them to.

 

KR: How much did your manuscript change? Well you did mention that actually, you mentioned that one.

 

MP: Yeah.

 

KR: So, do you have a definite specific organization or structure in mind when you begin writing?

 

MP: Like organization for a whole book?

 

KR: Do you start an outline or…?

 

MP: For an individual story?

 

KR: Yeah, for an individual story.

 

MP: No, I try to keep myself as surprised by what I’m putting out there as possible, and if it’s pretty soon in the process then I know what’s going to happen. It’s probably not going to be a good story. There have been a couple of occasions where I’ve scrapped a story and it’s always been because of that, because I’ve seen where it’s ending.

 

KR: So you like not knowing where it’s going to end?

 

MP: Yeah.

 

KR: Even though you’re almost there you want to be surprised all the way?

 

MP: There gets a point where you start to figure it out. But it should be something like you’re in a haunted house or in a hall of mirrors and you start to see the exit but you’re not entirely sure, you’re not entirely sure what step you’re supposed to take, but you feel like you see it. And even then you feel a little uncertain, but that means you can separate yourself from the work when it’s done and say: ‘Was that really the right ending or if that ending was the easiest route to take and keep asking yourself those questions.

 

MD: So, how would you describe your writing process?

 

KR: Do you do something specific or ritualistic?

 

MP: Um, I, sort of.  I do in that I use some of the same notebooks and same pens and a lot of other writers get asked those in readings and, as though that is the answer, that all you have to have is the right pen or the right notebook.

 

KR: Yeah.

 

MP: It’s not, but sometimes it’s helpful to trick your mind into going into the places it needs to go. So that’s useful. But the main thing is to look to write, I look to write something that maybe excites me and scares me a little. Something I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pull it off. That’s fun because when you know that you can write your own life and you know exactly what happened some people feel that some parts of their life or some episodes are incredibly boring to do, because you’ve lived it, you already know the end. And so when it’s something you don’t know the ending to or something that you shouldn’t even be beginning…it’s kind of, a little bit kind of an imagination amphetamine, that’s good.

 

KR: Would you call it writer’s high?

 

MP: Yeah! Yeah, it is. Because it’s the high of saying, you know, it’s new material to me, it’s interesting to me and also the high of saying that ‘What if I fall back on my chair and hit my head and this is what people see?’ I’d be mortified. So that can be exciting too. So yeah, I think the writing process has to be…I think that you need to go back to it every day. You need to take all of your excuses to procrastinate and put them in a firing squad and shoot them down and you just need to do some work.  It doesn’t matter if it winds up being one-hundred words or a thousand words.  You just need to go back to it every day and find your way back into the material.

 

MD: Do you specifically have any time of day or place that you prefer to write?

 

MP: If I had my druthers I would probably work from sometime around 10:30 PM to about 3 in the morning. I am really more of a night person. But I don’t, I have a job and I have children and that has all changed, but the nice thing is having the children you realize it doesn’t really matter. The main thing is to find the time. When you’re pushed into a corner you say ‘I only have thirty minutes.’ When you just have ten minutes you let it all hang out and just let it fly. I’m gonna have a page, I’m going to have a couple of pages and that’s the route you have to take. Now, I still will be up at 3:30 working on something and that makes up for a long day the next day.

 

KR: And a lot of coffee.

 

MP; Yeah, a lot of coffee, exactly.

 

KR: Do you write in multiple genres.

 

MP: Hm, this is a good question for right now. After I finish up with you I am going to speak to our research librarian, I put her on the trail of a court case that really interested me, but usually something announces itself to me in the form of a story or an essay. This announced itself as a play and it’s been a while since I wrote a play. So I think they’re kind of different muscles. It’ll be fun to try to get into it and I’m getting into it through this research instead of the way that I usually do with storage, which is maybe image or character or a voice. So I’m thinking more in terms of history and material and trying to view it through that lens. I don’t know exactly why yet, but that feels yet. So yeah, I work in fiction the most, but I’ve done a lot of non-fiction and I seem to be doing more of it too. It’s shoving its way into the picture. There’s some plays, there’s some journalism, there’s some food reviews. Then there’s a little bit of poetry. Maybe someday I’ll write the poem that’ll give me a source of publication, but for now it’s more for pleasure.

 

MD: Beside teaching, and authorship in writing. Have you dipped your hand into any other aspect of writing?

 

MP: I’ve done a lot of work for magazines. It’s not straight journalism, it tends to be feature or memoirish in its journalism or reviews. I did a lot of food reviews when I was in Mississippi and I kind of fell into that totally by accident. I started getting into it and I started really appreciating how the dishes had been constructed. It became more and more fun so I did food writing for a food network or hung out with some of the Iron Chefs.

 

KR: I also saw you also dipped your hand in Sitcoms?

 

MD: Oh yeah, I did. My first job was to work on a Sitcom. I was going to be and unpaid intern and then I had a conversation with a line producer and I didn’t know enough about TV to know that meant the money person. But she and I really hit it off so suddenly she found enough money in the budget to make me a paid intern. Then a week later I was actually asked to be staff. It was weird because now that I had the job, it went from getting to lobe off to becoming a person who on the one hand when it came to be taping day and the joke bomb someone would turn to me and say ‘Give me three jokes to replace it now’ Then on the other hand they’d turn cue and point a finger at you and say ‘ Get us 8 lattes and 2 Moccachinos’ I liked the energy going on and I liked the collaboration, I had a theatre background. But when it started getting serious and when they started talking about real writing work and real positions I started getting nervous because I thought it was so formulaic and I thought it was 3 jokes to a page. There were things in regards to a Sitcom that were terrifying to someone who wanted to write with broader or deeper strokes. I thought that if I really entered into that world, I would never really get back to this writing world, probably.

 

KR: What do you think reading and authorship will look like 50 years from now?

 

MP: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that one. Sometimes it feels like there may be amazing possibilities to more access and more people getting access to books and then sometimes it feels like it could be a very bleak time. So, I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know the answer to that one. I hope that the people still reading books and hope there’s still room for physical books and stories in the traditional sense and hope there are things happening that are interesting, not just that surface flash. I hope there are still libraries. The brick and mortar store is going and the library is changing and books as the physical object of holding a book is changing. But I do hope that there is room for both in the world ahead. So, we’ll see.

 

MD: What was your first publication?

 

MP: The first, I did a story that won a prize when I was an undergraduate. It wasn’t a college prize, it was a national prize. It was $100 and you know, I wanted to frame that check. Actually I did make a copy of that check. So it was published in a magazine and it was called ‘Fisherman at Night’ and it was kind of close to my own life in a couple of ways and very far away from it in others. I still remember writing it and I could tell it was something more than the stories I’d written before, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. And I remember turning it in to the workshop. It was definitely during the time when I was doing a lot of experimentation, but I was getting some blowback from some of my professors at that point and thought it was interesting in one hand but they wanted me to go deeper. I had one teacher who I really respected and admired a lot and she said ‘I don’t know if it’s because it’s a fish story, but this one reeled you in, this one grounded you in a way you haven’t had in a while and you should pay attention to it.’ So that meant a lot to me. I thought about it and wrote the next one. She said ‘It’s hard to see exactly when it happens, but in this story you re-map the sky.’ And I thought: ‘That’s exactly what I want to do. She’s got it, that’s…that’s exactly what I want to do.’ So, I never forgot that line and hopefully never forget that lesson.

 

MD: Have you tried to revisit that story recently? How do you feel about it now?

 

MP: Like if I write it now?

 

MD: Yeah.

 

MP: I haven’t read it read it. I’ve read it when I came across it, I read a few lines and I liked it. It’s going to be different from the artist you are, changes just like the person you are changes and you have to be accepting of that and you have to understand that what might embarrass you to see now is still who you came from, it’s still what you came from and you need to appreciate that. You wouldn’t be writing work that you really loved at this moment if you hadn’t had the moment that you loved years before that.

 

KR: Like, don’t forget your roots.

 

MP: Yeah, yeah, it’s going to instruct you. It’s going to help you if you write something good at that moment it’s going to make you stretch and it’s going to prepare you for the better story, for the next one whenever it is.

 

KR: Thank you very much!

 

MD: Yes!

Love, Authors and Winter Rains

It has become clearer to me just how far authorship has come in the last fifty years, or even the last two hundred years. Printing and writing has evolved from a need to spread news and information  to a highly fantastical, factual and fictional concept. Not only has the content evolved, but as mentioned above, authors have as well.
Back in the day, before 1710, authors never had a chance to claim ownership of their own design. If they wrote a novel, or play, or even a book on science, it was automatically fished up by thieves better known as pirates, who printed it off in different printing presses and claimed it as their own. Once the Copyright laws were placed authors really started to truly fall into the role of what an author is known as today.
Shakespeare had full ownership of his plays because of this law (thank goodness too) or he would have never received the accolades he does in this day and age. Charles Dickens would have found his work stolen all across Europe and even though his writings may have suffered some piracy back in the U.S. his rights to his work stayed long after he died. But with authorship came a new wave of criticism and restrictions that many in the past did not have to face.
Authors were subjected to lawful punishment for their writings at times and even ostracized by the community or people who did not come even close to agreeing. The printing of an author's name on a story also brought forth Focault's essay concerning "Author Function" and the analysis of how an author the man/woman and an author's idea are not interrelated.
This dilemma came along with Copyright laws and the romanticized idea of authors writing based on their own personal experiences.
Today authorship is seen a little differently, writing is a hobby many people have and many other bring to light through the use of Amazon or Nook technology. It is a User based interface, writing is, and it has spread like wildfire, making many name themselves authors and publish works big and small. Not exactly for the sake of money but for the sake of being one of the many names out there with a voice and an immortalized idea.

Where writing is going is still a question asked by many and answered by many more. But, I myself do not have the full answer and so I would like to end this blog in the spirit of today's holiday:


Happy Valentine's Day!
I hope you have many, many more!

A Dying Breed?

Ebooks have taken over the traditional form of reading. Where once we needed a nightlight to see, now we have a screen that glows in the dark, bringing to light the once obsured words at 11 P.M. on a Thursday night. The sound of a page shuffling in the middle of a bus ride is now a rare occurrence, instead we see children poking at screens and giggling as the next image pops up on their tablet. Many call this an innovation, progress, a step forward in technology and life as we know it.

But is this all merely the sweet tasting frosting atop a badly made cake?

Reading in depth is losing its value and attention deficit disorder is said to be on the rise. Is this because we were too greedy? Is it because we have latched onto technology to tightly? Predictions have been made that books are eventually going to disappear. That in time people will find no comfort in socializing, unless it's through the cloaked identity provided by the internet. There are rumors going around that language is changing and not for the better.

My belief is that language has changed. Internet talk has spread into the real world, into actual conversations. My sister has a tendency to say 'brb' as she walks away from me. Another good friend of mine blurbs out 'lol' from time to time. Still, I do not think we are deteriorating as a society. Instead readers are growing in number and many aspire to read more after that last series is finished. Yes, the people who desire to string together a sentence enmeshed with complex words and hidden meanings are now part of a dying breed. But progress is progress, change is change. What comes will come and all we can do is ride along.