Saturday, March 6, 2010

A Cheesy Clip Show

I got the nicest note from one of my Twitter friends a couple days ago. She noticed I hadn't blogged in a while and wanted to know if I was OK. She also said she missed me. This started me thinking about how oddly wonderful Internet friends can be.

The term "Internet friends" has more dubious connotations than anything else, at least for me - can't help remembering the end of Old School, when Juliette Lewis' character invites Will Ferrell's character to a party: "yeah, you know, just some Internet friends."

But I've found some of the most charming, intelligent and delightful people on the Internet. And it's weird: we've never met, we've never spoken voice-to-voice or face-to-face, but I have the sense we know each other. Turns out a lot can be communicated in the accumulation over time of 140-character snippets.

Anyway, I feel remiss about blogging, but I've been in a writing frenzy for several weeks. I'm working feverishly on my new novel; my characters have co-opted all the space in my brain. I have no unexpressed thoughts that aren't going into the book. Every now and then, I get a nubbin of a side idea, but both these and my will to explore them are too weak to flower into a blog post. They're barely enough to sprout a tweet.

So how about a clip show instead? (Cue the Simpsons singing about how lame it is "when a long-running series does a cheesy clip show.") Still, I'm always a little sorry old posts get buried in the past. Even if the ones linked below aren't new to you, I hope you'll enjoy the encore.

What it's like to write obsessively

Where blogging fits into life

Where blogging doesn't fit into life - or the value of privacy

A little tidbit about the new book


Glaciers


Why I dislike and try not to use the noun "bitch"

The dangerous silliness of political correctness

A spreadsheet approach to sex and parenting

Ode to a lost friend