Writerly Online Pleasures...

[Richard Sutton]

As a writer bound for continual procrastination and occasional flurries of useful activity, I've discovered a couple of new online pastimes that I really enjoy. My favorite is wading through all the academic and writerly spam and advertising messages and coming across the name of an author I know among the book promotions within a general media vehicle, not of their own making. Fussy Librarian is one I check out, Awesome Indies another, and Publishers Weekly. NY Times Book Review had one of my friend Henry's books featured a couple of months back. It always brings a smile when I see a book I've beta read or an author I know mentioned, and it's happening two or three times a week now. Most of them, I've met right here. Anyone else have any favorite online pastimes -- besides posting in writing forums?

 

[Carol Rose]

I'm addicted to Facebook. I admit it. LOL!! Most of my online interaction is on there, but I've made real-life friends from those interactions as well - readers and other authors alike. I've met many of them in person now, and talk to them via text messages or on the phone quite often.

 

[Marc Joan]

Favourite online pastimes - apart from finding videos showing variations on the theme of 'cat plays piano', of course - I am afraid are limited to expressing my paranoia by searching for published material which contain ideas or themes which I had previously thought my own. As has been said many times, if you have a good idea, the chances are that someone else has already thought of it; this seems to be doubly true for fiction, given that all fiction - as has been said many times (so it must be true) - is simply the retelling of a few basic stories (but how many, and what? aye, there's the rub). So far I have only found a few bad puns which others have had the temerity to steal from me - OK, independently think up - and publish, but I'm sure it is only a matter of time before my collected unpublished masterpieces are published under someone else's name. Also, the milkman wants to kill me.

 

[Richard Sutton]

That's a good one, Marc! I spent a couple of years refining a concept I believed was a unique one, too. When the Neanderthal genome was complete and the crossbreeding revealed, it seemed to provide scientific corroboration for my basic theory, based upon an expanded length of time the two species shared Europe. I titled the book, Troll, which in a single word expressed the outcome of the sharing of space... Once the book was released, I talked it up with a recognized paleo-anthropologist in London, who mentioned that a Finnish writer I never heard of also called them trolls. Well... the story's still mine! MY inspiration was from Tolkien's scholarship of folk tales and myths, but at least two of us came up with the same idea separated by years and miles.

 

[Marc Joan]

I like the idea of different human variants overlapping in space and time very much...you can only imagine the infinite individual dramas and tragedies that must have been played out as natural selection and blind luck churned up the interface between Neanderthals and other human types. By the way, have you ever read The Inheritors by William Golding? It's an imaginative account of precisely the above, if I remember correctly. Better go now, I can hear the milkman.

 

[booknut77]

Obviously I'm a glutton for punishment where online writers groups are concerned, as I'm back here and still planning to keep tabs on some other venues . . .

 

[flootzavut]

I do tend to get very excited when I see a book by someone I know. I remember when Rosy Thornton's Ninepins was the Kindle daily deal a while back I spammed everywhere I could think of because I was generally overexcited about it. Yes, I am five.

My guilty pleasure is Tumblr. There's an awful lot of total crud on there, but there are also some genuinely funny/educational/thought-provoking people and things, and for some reason it's utterly addictive and a complete time sink. If I have time on my hands, and especially when my health gets dodgy and I'm neither use nor ornament for anything else, I can happily bounce from blog to blog for an age.