Online Interview & Manners

My website gets a lot of visitors every day, and every now and then one of those visitors writes to me about something he or she has read on the site. I'm a big believer in responding to email (I used to include the words "within 24 hours" at this point, but of late even responding at all is apparently worthy of mention). Often when I respond (yes, within 24 hours), a little dialogue begins; less often, an actual business relationship or friendship blooms.

That delightful result happened with Tiffany Yu, a market strategy and business development specialist on the other side of the country from me. We've been emailing and talking on the phone for a while now, to our mutual benefit. I love mentoring younger business women, and Tiffany loves sharing her creative marketing know-how, an expertise that couldn't have popped into my life at a better time given that I have a new book out.

Tiffany is active in Women In Parking, where she serves on the Leadership Board and as Secretary, and when Lost Wyoming was published, she suggested we do an interview for WIP Matters, the organization's newsletter for members. Please click here or on the Women In Parking logo below to read the resulting interview, which is not only a great bit of publicity for my new book, but also a great reminder of why it's worth it to answer those emails.

It's Here!

My new novel Lost Wyoming is now available in paperback and/or ebook editions from:

• BookLocker.com
• Amazon US (Amazon UK, Amazon Germany)
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• Kobo
• Bookstores everywhere (some of which may have to order it for you)

Lost Wyoming tells the story of Maggie Winslow, a bright and thoughtful, yet thoroughly disillusioned heroine, as she discovers how family shapes who we are, who we aren't, and who we have the potential to become.

Disillusioned by a life that just isn't perfect and sick of second-guessing basically everything, Maggie has taken in her late 20s to standing on the sidelines, wondering how everything got so...uninspired. When a family crisis jolts her out of her malaise, Maggie is forced to take charge, to rethink the meaning and the import of the losses that inevitably accompany growing up, and to take stock of the choices and convictions that have kept her from being the person, and living the life, she always envisioned. Poignant, heartbreaking, and unflinchingly honest, Lost Wyoming is an ultimately uplifting tale about the puzzles we must solve for ourselves—and the joys that await once we learn to get out of our own way.

“Examines the complexities of relationships, the challenges of communicating feelings, and the difficulties of discovering what one really wants. . . .[Snider] makes some deft observations and asks some important, universally relevant questions. . . .Her prose remains eloquent and often beautiful throughout.” —Kirkus Reviews

New Novel Coming Soon!

I'm so delighted to announce that my newest novel will be released this fall! Entitled Lost Wyoming, the book is the story of Maggie Winslow, a bright and thoughtful, yet thoroughly disillusioned heroine, as she discovers how family shapes who we are, who we aren't, and who we have the potential to become.

Coming soon! Please sign up here if you'd like to receive release details as they become available.

Sunset?

I can't decide if I want to resume blogging or not. I reread old posts and am pleased with them, and also with the memory of what fun it was to craft them, usually out of an explosive kernel of an idea that niggled and prodded until I gave it its due. The habit of blogging was so infectious. Once I got going, ideas piled up and popped all over the place, begging to be chosen, pinned down and expressed in words. It would be good to experience more of that particular pleasure. And to take on more of that kind of short-term, quickly gratified intellectual challenge.

I didn't deliberately turn away from blogging. For a few weeks after my last post in January 2012, I thought often about posting. After a couple months, I thought less often (and more guiltily) about it. After a couple more, the idea flitted vaguely through my mind every now and then. I took pictures on trips and composed descriptive paragraphs in my head, thinking to write travel posts, if nothing else. But the inspiration was never sufficiently compelling to prompt an actual post. Not even when it got to be November and December and I had to see that accusing January 2012 date looming at the top of my blog whenever I checked it to see if the bloggers I follow had posted anything new. (They had. Often. See "Interesting Blogs" in the sidebar to your right and look them up.)

Twitter was the same. When I tweeted regularly, my brain developed a whole Twitter compartment, a bustling, observant mechanism that parsed the world into 140-character bursts of revelation. Twitter, too, was fun. It, too, was infectious and challenging. And it, too, fell by the wayside in 2012.

Why?

It could be laziness or a sense of diminishing returns. It could be that I got busy with other, more captivating, things. Or maybe it was merely the end of a natural life cycle. Hobbies, interests, even passions come and go.

I spend the bulk of my time crafting words. For a time, a long time, the challenge of crafting blog posts and tweets complemented my writing work. It was hugely entertaining, it made me some great friends, and it honed my skills. Ultimately, though, blogging and tweeting stopped complementing and started distracting. At first, the distraction was a welcome diversion. I was at a difficult juncture with my book; expressing myself pithily elsewhere served as a needed outlet and a reassuring relief. But eventually the distraction was only a distraction. It lost its enticing appeal, and I turned to different side dishes.

 I rediscovered two former passions in 2012: baking bread and cooking. Like all good hobbies, neither of these can ever be entirely mastered. There's always something to improve on or something new to learn. They offer a constant challenge, and one that, unlike blogging and Twitter, is not verbal. You decide what you want to create, assemble ingredients, apply techniques, and - presto! - you very shortly have what you wanted and it's a tangible thing. This may be a metaphor for novel-writing, but it's the antithesis of writing an actual novel - and not only because you get to eat your results.

It's been cold and cloudier than usual in Las Vegas this winter, and the clouds make for gorgeous sunsets. As I was uploading photos of a recent beauty to my computer, it occurred to me that a sunset is a worthy and enjoyable phenomenon whether or not it precedes a sunny dawn. I may blog or tweet regularly again; I may not. For now, here's the sunset:

Shaking Hands with the Future

Well, I've done it. I've joined the digital revolution. Sort of. I still shudder at the thought of actually reading a book on an electronic device, but I've made my own novel A Merger of Equals available on Kindle. Now, I'm fervently hoping that all the people who assured me this was a good idea, a necessary step, absolutely essential, will get busy proving they were right. Let the e-buying begin.

Little in life makes me happier than cuddling up with a book. It's a sensory pleasure as well as an intellectual one. The heft of a book in my hands gladdens and reassures me. The font and spacing of the text interest me (or, in the occasional case, make me wonder what lunatic thought extreme ugliness or illegibility was the way to go). Equally delicious are the choices of cover art and colors, of matte or shiny finish for the jacket or cover paper, the formatting of the front matter - copyright page, acknowledgments, dedication - and the tantalizing brevity of the About the Author paragraph, which is inevitably pristine and enigmatic in what it says and, even more, in what it doesn't.

And then the story unfolds, a sinuous mental flow of ideas, characters and events evoked by a black-ink parade of words marching across and down each porous cream-colored page. The way letters look etched into paper. That experience of flipping a page because you can't wait to see what the next words will be, then going back because the words at the bottom of the previous page are calling irresistibly. The story's the thing, to be sure, but, for me at least, the delivery package is so intrinsic a part of the enjoyment, so integral to the full experience.

I've sampled a friend's Kindle. (The very friend, in fact, who previewed my book to make sure the conversion process hadn't gone horribly awry - a million thanks to you, Jeanine!) It's a super-cool device, and a superb alternative to hauling a suitcase full of books when you travel. Maybe it even offers tactile and visual pleasures comparable to those of paper-and-ink books. But I seriously doubt I'll ever find out.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

A Rave Review & a Holiday Offer

It suddenly occurred to me that I might have a blog reader or two who doesn't also visit my website or follow/friend/whatever me on some social media platform. In case there are indeed any of you out there, here's a heads-up about a couple current events.

A Merger of Equals just received a rave review in SUE Magazine, which is an aptly (and hilariously) titled e-publication for women in litigation. The reviewer gave my book five gavels, the magazine's highest rating, and the review is delightful. Click here to read excerpts or to download a PDF of the complete review.

To celebrate both the review and the season, I'm offering free shipping and special prices on A Merger of Equals through December 18. If you've thought of buying copies for yourself or to give as gifts, now's the time to do it. The more copies you buy, the better the savings. Click here for the particulars.

Thanks to all my readers - books, website, social media platforms, and blog. Writing is a huge pleasure for me; knowing you're out there reading is the richest of icing on the cake.

For Your Reading Pleasure

Inspired by an invigorating literary conversation on Twitter with my friends @Amalari and @Angpang, I decided to compile a list of my favorite books in the categories of fiction and biography, the two categories I love best.

The list below is not even close to complete nor did I go about compiling it in any scientific way. I merely went to most of my bookcases and wrote down the titles of books that have swept me away - from my own work, my own world, and my own sense of time and responsibilities. These are the books that made me glad I was an adult and could stay up all night reading without parental interference or the need for a flashlight under the covers. In a few cases, they're books I did read with said flashlight when I was young enough to be told to get to sleep by said parents.

Because of the "swept away" criterion, I have not included books I think are very, very good, but which fall more in the eat-your-vegetables category of reading than in the tear-through-a-box-of-Belgian-chocolates category. (Don't get me wrong. I love vegetables. That's just a different list.) Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is a fine book, but for sheer delight and irresistible forward motion, it cannot compare to Michael Cunningham's extraordinary The Hours. (If you've only seen the dumbed-down movie in which the central plot complexity is given away in a very early frame, you've missed quite a treat. The book requires you to be smart as it magnetically pulls you in and along; the movie requires only that you be awake.)

Just so you know, it's killing me a little not to include mysteries, which I adore. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Sara Paretsky, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, Dick Francis, Elizabeth George, Elizabeth Peters, Deborah Crombie, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Perry, Sue Grafton, Nevada Barr - and many others whose names I'm sure will come to me the instant I hit "Publish Post" - have afforded me hours adding up to years of pleasure, puzzlement and revelation. But that's also a list for another day.

Finally, I didn't have time to go to all my bookcases this afternoon. Even if I had, there would still be omissions. I loan and give books to people all the time, so my collection doesn't begin to include all the books I once owned, let alone the ones I've borrowed from other people, loved, and returned.

For all these reasons, the list below is only the beginning. I doubt I'll ever manage to compile a truly complete list of my favorites, but I promise to get closer in subsequent posts. Will you add your favorites by commenting on this post, either with the names of your additions or with a link to your own list on your own blog?

Biographies (I think the first four are superb, the others very good):

Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford (about Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Henry James, by Leon Edel

John Adams, by David McCullough

Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson (about Ralph Waldo)

Frida, by Hayden Herrera (about Frida Kahlo)

The Lonely Empress, by Joan Haslip (about Elisabeth of Austria)

Eleanor of Acquitaine, by Alison Weir

Fiction (in no particular order, because I follow no shelving system. I rely on my memory when I'm looking for a book; the occasional frustration caused by memory lapses is more than outweighed by the adventure of running into something unexpected or forgotten):

Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

Robert Girardi, Madeleine's Ghost

Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American

Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Time in its Flight

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Gregory Maguire, Wicked

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Seville Communion

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (short stories, which normally irritate me slightly, but these are a marvel)

Alice McDermott, Charming Billy

Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons (all her books are highly readable; these are my favorites)

John Irving, A Prayer for Own Meany, The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp (ditto the Anne Tyler comment)

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Kent Haruf, Plainsong

William Faulkner, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (my all-time favorite writer; these are the best of the best, but all his books are glorious)

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Pat Conroy, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Water is Wide, The Lords of Discipline

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

Anthony Trollope, The Barsetshire Novels

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (in my opinion, THE Great American Novel)

Mary Renault, The King Must Die

Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina

Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

Julia Glass, Three Junes

Michael Malone, Handling Sin

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (the sine qua non of short stories)

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

John Fowles, The Magus

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, Jo's Boys

Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Jane Mendelsohn, I Was Amelia Earhart

Now Appearing on a Blog Near You

I've written another guest post, this one for M-BRANE SF, the creation of Christopher Fletcher. In addition to being a blogger, Christopher is a chef, a magazine publisher, and a fiction writer currently living "in self-imposed exile in OKC." My thanks to him for the opportunity and to GUD Magazine for introducing us on Twitter.

My guest post - "For Writers: A Story & Three Tactics" - is about my evolution as a writer of fiction, my writing process, and a few of the ways I polish my work. Please click through to read it. While you're on the M-BRANE SF site, be sure to take a look around; you'll find a lot of interesting material.

Frontiers, Crossed and Crossing

My Twitter and Facebook friend Raul Ramos y Sanchez is the author of AMERICA LIBRE, a novel coming out this summer that is already an International Latino Book Award winner and one of USA Today's 2009 Summer Reads. Raul is thoughtful (in both senses of the word), and his passion for exploring issues of ethnicity in American life, culture and politics mirrors mine for exploring issues of gender. He is always posting provocative questions along these lines, and we have enjoyed stimulating conversations on Twitter, on Facebook, and here on my blog.

(In fact, Raul is the reason I now brave Facebook once or twice a week. The nicest thing I can say about Facebook is that I don't get it. The interface makes little sense to me, I have better ways to stay in touch with people I already know, and all those sophomoric quizzes and applications may well, it seems to me, put the final nails in the coffin of Western civilization (and, for all I know, Eastern civilization too). But Raul's thoughtful conversational prompts are great, and I can't stand the idea of missing one, so into Facebook's shallow, silty waters I now wade. I should also acknowledge, before I close the parentheses on this paragraph, that I recognize I'm standing in a glass house throwing stones when I diss Facebook. Twitter can certainly be sophomoric too, but I've found it much easier to tailor my own experience there. To each his or her own.)

Anyhoo, Raul asked today whether President Obama will name a Hispanic to the Supreme Court and whether achieving ethnic balance on the Court should even be a factor. I answered that it should indeed be a factor given our current circumstances, which are that there are eminently qualified Hispanic (and female) candidates for Justice Souter's seat. It is not necessary to relax standards to appoint a replacement who is not a white man. Given that, and in light of US demographics, I think achieving ethnic and gender balance on the Court is a completely appropriate goal.

In answering Raul's question, I lifted some ideas and paraphrased some sentences from A MERGER OF EQUALS. I concluded long ago, somewhat shakily, that quoting myself without attribution is not plagiarism. I feel...I don't know, derivative, I guess...whenever I do it, but I do it all the time anyway, secure in the knowledge that no one but I has read, let alone committed to memory, virtually every sentence I've ever written.

Today, however, my character Charlie keeps interrupting the writing I've been trying to do (on another book altogether) with a strong message to the effect that I didn't do justice to the point I lifted from him. So here it is (redacted to delete spoilers, for those of you who haven't yet read the book):

That created the first vacancy on the Executive Committee since the coup, and I felt strongly that we should fill it with a woman.

At the time of the coup, I had regretted that our slate didn’t include any women. But there were none of sufficient seniority at the Firm and we’d decided we had enough to manage without adding the effort of identifying and recruiting someone from outside, then selling her to the rest of the Firm. One step at a time, we’d told ourselves.

There was something about [recent events] that made me feel our “one step at a time” approach, however practical, had been essentially a rationalization. Women seemed to me to be able to handle just about anything, and it started to strike me as shabby that we hadn’t yet managed to handle getting even one into the Firm’s management.

The Firm still had no women positioned for appointment to the EC, although we had made good progress in the last year. I had no doubt that in another year or two several women would be good candidates for the EC.

We considered naming one of them to fill the EC vacancy even if it was premature. A couple were probably strong enough to make their voices heard even without a more established power base. But we weren’t looking to put a woman on the EC just so we could say we had one. The goal was to realize the actual benefits, financial and otherwise, of inclusivity and diversity – and to demonstrate that it wasn’t necessary to relax standards in order to include women.

Putting a token woman on the Committee satisfied neither of these goals. We needed someone with proven leadership skills and either a client base or some other equally credible value to bring to the Firm. All the EC members had strong client relationships; most were (or had once been) group heads and also chaired important Firm committees or held other administrative leadership positions. Naming a woman without these qualifications to the EC would undercut both the purpose behind our stated diversity goals and her ability to feel and act like a full-fledged member.

Because we’d have to look outside to fill the immediate vacancy with a woman, there was a fair amount of discussion at the EC about waiting for the next opening or seeking a woman for the open spot but filling it with the best candidate we found, irrespective of gender. As far as I was concerned, this was just so much bullshit designed to put off diversifying the Committee. I argued hotly that there was no reason we couldn’t find a qualified woman unless we failed to look seriously for one and that we shouldn’t settle for filling the vacancy with another man.

As I said to Raul, I applaud President Obama for taking into account the goal of achieving ethnic and gender balance and developing his Supreme Court candidate list accordingly. As Charlie reminded me, there is no reason we can't find a qualified and diverse candidate unless we fail to look seriously for one.

Pleasures Expected and Unexpected

I finally finished the last of the items on my current to-do list that fall into the "obligation" category. Since mid-September, I've had more than my usual complement of these things. They're not all bad. Preparing for and giving speeches, co-conducting a business development workshop, writing articles, etc. are all fine. But they have deadlines, and so they usually end up creating some pressure for me. I get all enthusiastic when someone makes a request and I tend to say yes too quickly and then regret the feeling of obligation, the knowledge of a deadline, the compulsion I feel to do a bang-up job. These pressures don't really get in the way of what I consider my real life, but they do take up space in my mind and eventually, even as I resent the distraction, it becomes more trouble to ignore them than it does to handle them.

Finishing the last of them this morning felt absolutely fantastic. I decided to celebrate by writing a poem in response to a prompt from a new Twitter connection. It's amazingly difficult to try to be pithy and rhyme at the same time - and totally gratifying to come up with something you're not too embarrassed to post. My poem is quite bad, if slightly charming, but it does manage to express how I'm feeling about social media at the moment. Just when you think it's all one big self-serving infomercial, you find some cool, interesting people and get inspired to do something unexpected.

(In case you're a glutton for punishment, my poem and several others may be found in the comments to the December 13 post on Blogging Roads, an interesting and thought-provoking blog from a person whose Twitter bio endearingly reads "Marketing Copywriter, Professional Blogger, Mom, Soc Media'er, Lover of Butter.")

Distracted & Slightly Reluctant

How can it be so long since I've posted? I knew it had been a few weeks, but apparently it's been a month and a half. Yikes! I guess I can stop trying to get used to writing 2008 on things and just start thinking about writing 2009 instead.

The last couple months have been crazy with travel and responsibilities, very much like having a job. And they've been packed full of things to write, too: my new book, two speeches, an article, a treatment for a web-show, stuff for my website, and about a zillion emails (many of them relating to the thrilling election; three conversational threads with new friends/penpals; one renewed conversation with an old friend normally on the opposite side of the political spectrum). I've also been experimenting with Twitter and Facebook. (Feel free to follow/befriend me on either or both. I use my actual name.)

All that was evidently enough writing to stem the flow of blog post ideas. Also, my mind tends to move less along blogging lines when I have a lot of interaction with real people, and I've been face-to-face far more in the last couple months than my life normally requires.

Well, and to be honest, the few times I've thought about blogging, the topic - or my view on it - has been controversial enough to be better spoken/written to friends than blared without context into cyberspace.

I've realized a few times before that I censor myself here, not so much to avoid offending someone (I have no doubt I've already done that, however unintentionally, via some of the things I have posted), but because some opinions and ideas can't be properly conveyed out of context to total strangers. All evidence in the blogging world to the contrary, this is not a private diary. It's also not a written chat among friends who know each other and can recognize inflection and resolve disquieting concerns based on familiarity and shared history. I don't pretend to be someone I'm not here, but this is a public face, not my whole face. And expressing in this forum certain of my "what the hell is the matter with people?!?" views on the ideas and causes my fellow human beings hold dear is something I just don't feel comfortable doing.

Book Announcement

Two of my works were selected for inclusion in Heart of a Woman in Business, an "inspirational collection of stories, strategies and ideas to help working women everywhere." Written by teachers, coaches, experts, businesswomen, speakers, CEOs and others, it's a "here's how" book that combines insight with guidance, ideas, stories and encouragement.

My pieces are:

• an excerpt from A Merger of Equals called "The Nature of Leadership and Personal Ambition" and
• an essay adapted from one of my popular speeches called "Suit Yourself and Become a Star"

Heart of a Woman in Business is a 288-page 6"x7" gift book that retails for $16.95. Click here to order the book from Sparkle Press, the publisher, or here to order from Amazon.com.

You Exist Even if We Aren't Watching

I just read a post written by my favorite of the bloggers I don't know personally in reaction to the apparently now infamous May 25 story about blogging in The New York Times Magazine. My husband left the magazine on the coffee table for me to read a few days after May 25, but I wasn't intrigued enough to pick it up and start reading the story until today. Having now read both the story and my favorite blog-stranger's take on it, I have to say I'm utterly mystified.

These young women (interesting writers, both) seem to crave not approval, but notice. Like little children at play who scream "Watch me! Watch me!" every five seconds (sometimes exuberantly, sometimes with panic), they seem uncertain that life without an audience is worth the effort or, for that matter, even real. Overlaying and permeating their musings, like glaze on a cake, is a yearning for the validation of their existence that only other people's awareness of it can provide.

Why do they need this, I wonder? Why do they lay themselves bare to attract it? Why are they willing to endure savage commentary to assure themselves that they have it?

Of course, I too use my private life as fodder for my writing. My innermost thoughts, feelings and experiences (including the intimate and embarrassing ones) inform, and sometimes appear in, my books and essays. But their purpose there is to make the writing true and compelling, not to assure myself that I exist or to draw attention to me personally. I love the freedom of anonymity.

I can't imagine merging my private life and my blog, not because (or only because) I have no desire to lay myself bare on the Internet or, for that matter, to be famous. I don't merge them because the privacy of my private life is what allows it to flourish. Its privacy enhances its immediacy, its authenticity and its meaning to the only person who needs to find meaning in it - me.

Perhaps this is simply the difference between a 54-year-old who has already enjoyed/endured enough notice from other people to last her comfortably for the rest of her life, however long it may last, and someone in her 20s who is, evidently, somewhat unsure about what form her career and life will/should/can take.

Maybe it's all connected somehow to social life having evolved from entirely face-to-face interaction to largely electronic interaction where no one has to know the real you and you can create any persona you like (at least until you're outed). It's hard, not to mention really rather inappropriate, to discuss the intimate details of your life face-to-face with any but your closest friends. Those of us who grew up in a face-to-face world are, I suspect, as unlikely to share intimate details over the Internet as we are to discuss them with the cashier at the grocery store or our colleagues at work.

But if your social life is conducted more from a keyboard than a larynx, maybe you don't feel the same inhibitions. When you're as satisfied with a typed "Hahaha" in response to your joke as you would be with a guffaw and the sight of someone's face creased into the wonderful-to-see lines and angles necessary to produce laughter, maybe it's not such a leap to skin yourself alive in public.

That still doesn't explain the need for external validation of one's very existence, though. I totally understand craving approval. Who doesn't crave it at least occasionally? But approval is not the same thing as notice, or even celebrity. Both linked articles evince a depressing suspicion that a life has no satisfactory meaning and possibly no actuality if no one else notices it. This goes well beyond the old "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?" conundrum. (BTW, d'uh. Obviously, it did. The existence of sound doesn't depend on the presence of ears to hear it - it's only the meaning of the sound that requires ears and the consciousness that goes with them.)

Two very successful 20-somethings told me over lunch recently that they know many people in their generation who can't overcome a certain aimlessness and lack of passion for their careers and their lives. My lunch companions said they thought a big part of the problem was that young people feel overwhelmed by all the options open to them and incapable of choosing among those options and getting on with their lives. This is hard for any Baby Boomer, especially a woman, to hear. We would have killed for the options available to today's version of our 22-25 year-old selves. (As one of my 50-ish male friends said when I repeated this to him, "That's total crap! What a bunch of crybabies! How can having lots of options be a bad thing?!")

Now I'm thinking that there's a similarity between responding to virtually unlimited options with paralysis and needing other people to assure you that you actually and meaningfully exist.

Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost our faith in internal standards. What happened to to living your life and pursuing your dreams and making your contribution to satisfy yourself? What happened to using your own ears to validate your existence and suss out its meaning? Other people can't really do this for you, and why would you want to let them even if they could?

Technical Difficulties

It's really unbelievable how unsettling computer troubles can be. A couple days ago, a black border showed up out of nowhere and starting dancing around the cursor on the screen of my beloved new Mac. I grew increasingly upset and anxious, desperate even, as nothing I tried succeeded in making it disappear.

The black border drove me crazy on general principles, but it also alarmed me because I seem to recall that random geometric shapes appeared on an old laptop of mine before it died a punishing death several years ago. Punishing for me, that is, because the laptop took with it over 10 pages of freshly written material for my first book. To this day, I'm certain that the lost pages were better than the replacements I came up with. The incident also turned me into an obsessive backer-upper. When I write large chunks now, I typically email them to myself and store them on an external jump drive - all this in addition to the backup that automatically occurs on my external LaCie Time Machine, which has to be the coolest system there is. Everyone who knows about this compulsive storage thinks I'm insane, but I'll be damned if I'm ever again going to struggle through the crushing processes of grieving, failed reconstruction and, ultimately, less satisfactory rewriting.

Anyway, the black border on the Mac. After I failed to solve it on my own, I Googled the problem. This usually works like a charm, but evidently I used the wrong search words because the results weren't helpful. Then, I called Apple Tech Support and got a guy who apparently had marbles in his mouth. He ran through his standard Tech Support Script with me ("I already rebooted." "Yes, ma'am, I understand. Please shut down your computer and then we'll turn it back on."), all to no avail. He kept telling me to do things that took time, then muted the phone while he was waiting (to "help" another customer? to ask questions of someone who actually knew something about computers? to trade stocks?). Whenever I told him the time-consuming function was finished, he started talking again without unmuting his phone, so I heard silence until I said, "Hello? Hello?" Then, he'd come back, pretending nothing was amiss. ("I'm here, ma'am.") This happened at least a dozen times.

After 45 minutes of inserting discs and doing scary behind-the-scenes things to my computer, all of which had no impact whatsoever on the black border, my patience, never my strongest suit, was at an end. When Marbles instructed me to drag a bunch of things to a new place, then was bewildered when the computer wouldn't let me do so, I decided he and I were finished and called the only IT guy I trust - my son. He was at work, but I knew he'd get back to me ASAP with a solution. Sure enough, he did. We had a lot of guests over the weekend, one of whom had inadvertently pushed the buttons on my computer that activated the Universal Access feature - thus, the black border to highlight where the cursor was. A simple click to turn off that feature and, presto!, the border disappeared.

Both my original agitation and my relief were out of proportion to the actual events, but I couldn't be more delighted that the problem wasn't really a problem. I would have thought less of my Mac had it developed a mysterious computer ailment within its first six months. Like my father, who considered a car to be ruined once it required any sort of repair, I don't like intimations of imperfection in mechanical things. I much prefer to think of them as perfect, wonderful, and not on the brink of disaster.

Displacement

I'm sitting outside a nearby coffee shop, having been routed by my cleaning people. (They're as unobtrusive as any I've ever employed, but the whine of vacuuming punctuated by the occasional alarming crash is almost always enough to drive me elsewhere.) It's a gorgeous breezy day and I'm sipping a luscious green tea and wild berry smoothie - slowly so as not to get brain freeze. My laptop battery is draining its juice at a much faster clip, so in a few minutes I'll have to go inside and find an electrical outlet.

I'm writing a book about a young woman struggling with disappointment. The section I've been working on today takes place in the summer in Chicago because I can't think of a better metaphor for disappointment than humidity. As I wrote about my character heading home from the Loop at the end of a long irritating day, I could feel the hot blasts of air like bus exhaust on the street and the close stickiness on the packed bus she takes. It's one of those allegedly air-conditioned CTA buses, so its windows are tightly closed. Everyone is limp, dispirited and, I imagine, dreaming about cool breezes, cold showers, icy drinks. I don't think my character wears pantyhose, but I'm remembering the precise physical feeling of being slimily encased in those horrible things on hot, humid summer days early in my career when wearing them at least occasionally was impossible to avoid.

Writing this segment put me so convincingly in summertime Chicago that I started to feel bad for all the people actually walking through that sticky air and packed into those stifling buses. Then it occurred to me with a jolt that the real Chicago is still in the throes of winter.

Mini-Blog

I'm fascinated by how differently men and women experience and are shaped by forces like ambition, brains, beauty, work, sex, love, marriage, etc. It's one of the central themes of my novel, and I'm consistently intrigued by how it's both reflected in - and prompted by - the media. There's no shortage of illustrative articles, and I collect and comment on the ones that strike me. If you enjoy reading my blog, check out the collection on my website for more fun, thought-provoking and frequently updated commentary - mine and others. You can get to my Relevant Articles page by clicking here or by clicking on the Commentary button that's on every page of my site.

I Don't Get It

OK, get ready for some complaining. I continue to be amazed by the relatively high traffic to my website and the relatively low number of requests for essays (excerpted on the site on pages that get a lot of hits), questions for the Q&A, and book purchases via the site. A marketing friend told me that people like interactivity and suggested I put up a short survey for people to click on and complete. So I did that. The survey has 7 questions; you could easily do it twice in less than 90 seconds. Hundreds of people have visited my site since I posted the survey link on it last week (in 3 places), and 8 people have taken the survey. My sincere thanks to those 8 and a respectful "What's up with you?" to the rest of my site visitors.

I don't consider this most recent attempt to understand my audience a complete waste of my time since I had fun creating the survey (Survey Monkey is great), but what the hell? Am I forced to conclude that I have the most passive website traffic ever? Is every site's traffic this passive? Are my hosting company's Site Hits Per Day and Page Hits counters cooking the books?

I'm feeling rather last-ditch-effort about all of this, so now I'm making a specific request. If you're a reader of my blog and you haven't yet taken the survey, click here and throw me a bone, would you? I'll be eternally grateful.

As Good as Fiction

I complain often (including here and here) about the stupidity of the scripts underlying movies and TV. Fabulously intelligent and scintillating writing rarely characterizes popular entertainment. This irritates me because, the success of certain dumb shows to the contrary notwithstanding, I don't think people are as stupid as most programming would indicate and it's offensive to be treated as if we are. I also think the more you expect of people, the more you get, and that it is not necessary to pander to some demeaning notion of the lowest common denominator.

The Wire is, in my opinion, in an extraordinary class by itself on TV, and for every snappy moment on an old Frasier or Will & Grace episode, there are hours of lame, idiotic and often sexist garbage. Or at least I assume there are, by virtue of the bad shows I've seen and the ads for others I TiVo through, which purport, I presume, horrible as they are, to be the best parts of the shows they're peddling. Similarly, movies are too often characterized more by explosions, scantily-clad women and unpleasant vocabulary choices than by scintillating writing.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across Stranger than Fiction, a beautifully and perfectly written movie. Who would have imagined that a movie starring Will Ferrell would be intelligent, poignant, gripping, thought-provoking and still vividly occupying my mind two days later? (It also stars Emma Thompson and Maggie Gyllenhaal, so there you go, but still...Will Ferrell??) The movie is about writing, which of course appeals to me, but it's also about what life should be compared to what it often is. And I challenge you to watch it without needing to bake cookies as soon as possible after you finish. It's a glorious movie, with amazing performances (including by the aforementioned WF), striking visuals, and a script that absolutely crackles with brains, humor, charm, and depth. See it immediately, if not sooner.

Decline and Fall

The following paragraph was in an email I received inviting me to something called Amazing Woman's Day:

"The day long program will empower through an active discovery and exchange designed to identify each woman's unique calling of greatness while expanding a web of personal relationships and setting free new possibilities for a brighter future."

Huh? As my daughter said, the sentence reads like it was created with Mad Libs. Honestly, it makes me wonder about the decline of the English language into complete gibberish. I guess I can figure out what the words are trying to convey. The queasy feeling they give me about the likely New-Age-y content of the program (and about the opening they give anyone inclined to disdain women to conclude that we really can be feeble-minded, at least as a group) is unmistakable. It's also pretty easy to see that the sentence was drafted by a committee, each member armed with her favorite buzzwords and determined to fire away. But yikes! What a mess! Can you even imagine trying to translate the thing into another language?