A Tree Falling In The Woods.

I think I’m taking a stand. 

Hopefully not a last one. 

Not exactly the boldest or bravest of positions I can take. 

I’m going to try blogging again. Using this little corner of the web. I’m hanging my shingle out and saying, let’s party like it’s 2007. 

Seriously. This ‘social media’ thing. It’s neither a sickness or a cure. It’s a placebo. Whatever you want it to be, it’ll be. But here’s the catch. In the difference between our conscious and our subconscious, in the difference between our text and our subtext, I think social media is our Id rather than our Ego. It forms out of what our basest instincts want. 

I’ve developed a theory that the real narrative journey, the real story we all want to tell, is not about characters who change, but rather about characters who become better or worse at being who they always were. I think there’s something intrinsically Elmore Leonard about that. And if something was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. 

Social media enables me to be very bad at who I am. 

We're all in each other's face. Each other's space. Standing on each other, and shouting. There are people who need to be heard, but we're not adult enough to make room for them. And content is about shares and likes, ultimately playing by someone else's rules. I think we lost something important when we took our communities into these shared spaces. We lost our breathing space, our individuality, our self-control. 

And I’ve learned some interesting lessons about the crime fiction community in the past year. Maybe I’ll be sharing some of that. Or maybe I’ll just revert to type and write about Paul Westerberg and Tom Waits. 

Who knows?