Friday Mixed Bag: I'm super lazy

Such a loser. Me. Loser. Bad at this blogging thing. I tried setting up a schedule to encourage me to write more routinely. But here's the problem: When you spend hours every day writing, and then more hours editing, carving out another 30 minutes to write a blog entry just manages to always find itself at the bottom of the to-do list.

Plus: I'm seriously boring.

For example, my week consisted of finishing my revisions for Deathday and turning them in, working on my WIP, and watching Six Feet Under. My dog is always good for a couple minutes of amusement, but he has his own life and can't entertain me all the time. Oh, my other big thing this week was upgrading the hard drive in my laptop. I went from a 120GB to a 500GB. Super Big Fun.

I read, "When You Reach Me," a middle grade book that I really liked. I think I would have been in love with it if I'd actually read it in middle school. The great part about the book is that it deals with complex issues without ever playing down to the reader. No small feat when your book is about time travel. The only downside to it is that it's set in 1979 and two of the main plot threads (The $20,000 Pyramid game show, and Latch Key Kids) are relics. These days it's common for kids to be home alone after school. Back then I guess it was more of an issue because more women were entering the workforce. It didn't detract anything from my experience because I watched the show and grew up around some latch key kids, but I wonder if kids reading this today would understand the significance.

The other book I'm reading is Paper Towns by John Green. John Green is one of those writers whose work I both admire and dislike. I have the utmost respect for John Green. Not only do I think he's a fantastic author, but his blog posts and video blog posts and sundry other internet projects, are brilliant in a way I could only hope to be. Mostly I'm just happy with my blog posts if they're mildly intelligible, which they're usually not. Green puts together amazingly cogent arguments on everything from healthcare to censorship to why we should like Catcher in the Rye. It's that admiration that led me to pick up Paper Towns despite not really getting Looking for Alaska.

Okay, that's not true. I did get it. I liked everything that happened BEFORE. It was the AFTER section of the book that left me a little, "eh."

As writers I think we tend to mine the same subjects, whether we know it or not. Deathday reflects my own inability to live life to the fullest all the time. It mines my fear of dying without doing all that I want to do. My current WIP carries similar themes, even though they're significantly different stories. Both have boy protagonists who are unsure of themselves, who flounder through life until something happens to make them take charge. But even when they take charge, they still become barriers to their own success.

Similarly, I feel (notice the "I feel" part, because these are only my opinions) that Margo from Paper Towns, and Alaska from Looking for Alaska, are both manifestations of the same unattainable girl that Green likes to explore. That came out dirty and I didn't mean it to. I didn't read Green's second book...maybe I should...but it became clear to me after the second chapter of Paper Towns that one of John Green's themes that he will probably explore until it's out of his system is the idea of the plain but overachieving boy who is infatuated with the crazy, kooky but ultimately unattainable girl. This theme is nothing new and teen books and films have been doing this for quite some time. My problem thus far (since I haven't finished the book) is that Margo, like Alaska before him, feels two-dimensional. Why does Q love her so fully? I'm hoping I'll find the answer I'm looking for by the end of the book. However I'm beginning to suspect that I, like Q, will only come to realize that there is no real Margo. Margo, and all unattainable girls like her, don't actually exist.

And maybe that's the point of the book. That all unattainable girls (and guys) are little more than Paper Towns. But so far I feel like that's a bit of a cop out. If Q's discovery that the Margo he believed existed never really existed is the point of the story, then fine, but what's missing for me is seeing, at least, the Margo that Q believes existed. It's great that we're getting to see all the places where Margo is supposed to have existed but I'm not buying that Q is obsessed enough to go to such great lengths to find her.

And before I go, I'd like to take a second to discuss the difference between liking a book and not liking a book and being able to say so. For me, loving a book and hating a book produce similar effects. When I loved a book, such as Harry Potter or The Chaos Walking series, I tend to buy every book multiple times so that I can loan them out with abandon and make people love them as much as I do. I talk about the books with anyone who will listen and foster a dialog about them. I then go on to read as many things by that author as I possibly can. When I hate a book, like all the works of Hemmingway, I buy all the books and read them several times, loaning them to my friends to make them hate it as much as I do. I talk about them incessantly because I think talking about books I dislike is even more educational than talking about the ones I liked. I also tend to read everything by that author so that I can form a well rounded opinion.

Making me dislike a book is just as great a feat as making me like it. The biggest failure a book can make is to be uninteresting. I just want everyone to understand that when I hate on a book, it's almost as big a compliment as gushing over it. Because it inspired major feelings in me, and isn't that what books are supposed to do?

Okay, I'm out now. Have a safe labor day.

Friday Mixed Bag?

I got nothing. Okay, that's not true. I've always got something to write about.

Tomorrow I get to begin on my next project. I don't mind admitting that I'm terrified. The project is risky. At the same time, I think it's my most mainstream project yet. It's the kind of story that I have to knock out of the park or it'll be a failure. But, you know, no pressure.

I've been thinking a lot about news and social media and people-based knowledge sources like Wikipedia. I am not ashamed to say that Wikipedia is the first place I go when I need to know something. I AM ashamed to say that I rarely check the "facts" I get from there. I've come to rely on Wikipedia so heavily that I rarely stop to wonder about its validity. And I'm not the only one.

Such blind faith has spread to Twitter where fake death announcements have been made.

Events such as Amazon using its Skynet Whispernet online network to delete the illegal copies of 1984 (and some poor kid's homework), the constant pronouncements of the death of books, and even experiments like John Green's have made me wonder if the rise of the internet will actually cause the collapse of the physically written word or if it will give us a reason to keep physical books around forever.

How, you ask, will more digitization lead to a greater reliance on paper books? Here's how: Twitter and Wikipedia and John Green have shown us that information can be manipulated to such a degree that it can become nearly impossible to know what is true. Digital media can be manipulated by anyone at anytime. He who controls the media controls the world. Amazon has shown us that it has the capability to control what you read. Yes, I know that its purposes were not so nefarious, but their PR nightmare demonstrated that they COULD. And once something is done, it'll be done again.

Imagine a scenario where parents protest Catcher in the Rye. Bending under the pressure, an Amazon-like company replaces every instance of the word "goddamn" with "golly-gee." They then go to every Kindle-like device and swap out the digital copies. People who have never read the book won't know the difference. Eventually the Golly-Gee version of Catcher will be the only version and thus the REAL version.

Because what is real? The version that exists.

Wikipedia can be used to erase the sins of our past. Slavery? Never happened. Not if it's not in the Wikipedia entry. If a lie is propagated long enough it will become the gospel truth. People have known that for centuries. People have practiced that for a millennia. But hard copies of our information limit the damage. Sure, they can release a Golly-Gee print of Catcher in the Rye, but you'll always be able to find the unmolested version. You can burn the Library at Alexandria but books will always survive.

Not so in the digital age. Not so as we move toward a digital model that doesn't even give us ownership over our own property. We rent our books from a source that tells us how we can use them, what we can read them on, how long we can read them for, and eventually whether we can read them at all. In this digital age, knowledge is at the mercy of anyone with a login and password.

Which is why I believe that as we move forward, book will become an even greater treasure. Digital copies can't be trusted. If a new version of a book is printed, the two can be compared for differences, but if a company has the ability to change a book and replace...REPLACE...the digital copy they're letting your borrow, how will you ever know?

Books are more than just repositories of fun stories. They're who we are as a people. That kind of knowledge should not be mutable. Not easily anyway.

In a world where history and the vast sum of human experience can be altered with the click of a few keys, books will be king.

Happy Friday!!!