Blog – Hi from Gail!
Hi fellow readers and writers – Gail Hewitt here on the sixth of August 2009, writing in this shiny, brand-new blog that my publisher, ArbeitenZeit Media, has very nicely set up for me in connection with the publication of my first novel, a contemporary romance entitled LOVED ME ONCE.
It is very interesting being published by ArbeitenZeit as they are almost totally into new media, much more digital publishing than anything to do with ink and paper. This is ironic for me, as I have always been a huge buyer and reader of books, old and new, produced in essentially the same format established those many centuries ago. (Specifically, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century by a German printer named Johannes Gutenberg from the area known as Mainz, who – in addition to inventing the printing press – appears to have pioneered the use of movable type for printing in Europe.)
At the same time, I can see the convenience factor and also recognize the fact that there are circumstances in which it isn’t necessary or even desirable to have paper copies of a particular title. For one thing, no trees perish for a digital title. I’d never thought of it that way before, but as I look at my own shelves I find myself wondering how large a forest my one not-very-large library is responsible for felling. A sobering thought indeed.
Anyway, LOVED ME ONCE is available in both digital and trade paperback editions. If you’d like to check out what it’s about, read an extract or watch the trailer, stroll digitally through the site and see what you think.
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WHAT’S WORTH WRITING ABOUT?
An interesting thing happened just now. A friend – a very smart woman – called with the idea for a new web site dedicated to the proposition that everyone has something they want to gripe about. She thought it would be interesting to set it up so that users could subdivide it in any way they wanted. An area for griping about lousy romantic attachments. Another for complaining about stores that’d done something peculiar. Another for venting about parents who wouldn’t leave a person alone. Etc., etc., etc.
My immediate reaction was negative, and I told her that I thought that was pretty much what the blogosphere was already – a place to get things off your chest. She laughed and agreed. Of course, she’d been joking – sort of – all along, but it did make me wonder. Why do we think some things are worth writing about and others aren’t? Is becoming discouraged about a failed car repair any more or less noteworthy than suddenly getting a fresh insight while perusing an encyclopedia of philosophy? Yet if you write seriously about the first, you’re accused of being obsessed with minutiae, while addressing the second is accepted as a logical intellectual pursuit, even by those who don’t agree with any specific conclusion you may have reached.
We are so totally brainwashed as to what we should take the time to contemplate. Extending the above analogy, I suppose the trick would be to bridge the two, the practical and the theoretical. That is, one could write about the bad car job within a context of the repairperson’s work ethic and how it derived from his philosophical orientation or – to turn it around – mention one’s reaction to the lousy repair within a framework of how one’s philosophical orientation affects the way in which specific events are viewed and dealt with. One thing’s for sure. The encyclopedia is openable whatever one thinks of it, but the car – whatever opinion is held of it – won’t go unless it’s fixed properly. So score one for the pragmatists.
Quick followup to the above – you can also check out some of my writing history and philosophy.
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