Between My Face and Your Face

Years ago, I wrote a children's novel.  It was in my third year at U.Va., and involved many an early morning working vigorously in the computer lab, a Super Big Gulp full of Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew surreptitiously fueling my muse.

Wickersnides, it was called.

I'm old, so this was pre-Internet, and pre-cell phone.  The novel lived on a couple of five and a quarter inch floppy disks, one primary, one backup.  It's a silly thing, a story of a boy trapped in a vast store run by an oligarch who has cornered the market on everything.  That oligarch's final plan for world domination: a screen that showed you whatever you want to see.  You could even wear it like glasses.  In doing so, it subjugated you, bending you to desire whatever you were told to desire.

It also involved giant talking waterfowl.

I self-published the critter a year or so back, as part of a promise to my 1989 self.  It's sold exactly the way you'd expect a self-published, semi-edited, unmarketed eBook to sell.  Meaning, it didn't.  Is cool.

What matters is that I had the chance to read it to my boys when they were little, and they loved it.  And I shared it with friends, who, being friends, told me they loved it.

But life has caught up with it.  Looking at Google Glass, the marvelous and utterly desirable wearable contraption that augments your reality and makes the hearts of Google stockholders go pitter pat, I find myself suddenly reminded of that old story.  It's a wearable screen.  You can talk to it.  It can show you whatever you want.

On the one hand, neat.  I want one.  Scrolling my sermon on the HUD would mean never having to look down again.   I'd be Rev. Locutus of Borg, baby.  Seriously awesome.

On the other, well, I don't know.  How will this deepen our connection to the place we are?  Already, human beings with smartphones tend to drift, distracted, through the reality they inhabit.   Smartphone addiction is a real thing, that gnawing sense that something must be...hold on...no...ok...going on in that vast neural net we inhabit.

If it's right there, every moment, does that help?  Or would it be just a more effective delivery mechanism, the difference between snorting cocaine and crack, the difference between smoking opium and shooting up heroin?

It's not even going to be in your pocket.   It will be your reality.   Or, rather, it will be in between you and reality.

That's the challenge with all interactive and social media.  On the one hand, media can connect us with others and open our eyes.  It can deepen our experience of those we might otherwise not encounter.  It can change things for the good, as it did when those images of peaceful civil rights demonstrators being brutalized in the South poured out of America's televisions in the 1960s.

Or it can stand between us.

And that makes me think of that injunction, the one offered to Moses on Mount Sinai.  "You shall have no other gods before me."   Literally, the Hebrew of that passage tells us that we should put no other gods between us and the face of God.  "Let your experience of me be unmediated," said our Maker.

That's the danger of all media, and all mediating structures.  It can become the thing that does not augment, but distracts.  It can become not a path, but a wall.  It doesn't connect, but divides and shatters.

Publishing to Kindle

I have, as of today, finally fulfilled my new year's resolution.   It's a month or two after I'd projected, but hey.  It's still done.  

That resolution was to e-publish a short kid's novel I wrote waaaaay back in my fourth year at the University of Virginia.

For the last month or two, I've finished up the laborious task of retyping it, after OCR scanning proved a bit too unreliable.  

It's edited...well, edited-ish.  I'm hardly the world's most amazingly detail-oriented editor, as my modus readerani is to inhale text for meaning rather than to notice errant apostrophes.  

But it's better than it was when I first pitched the manuscripts to publishers back in 1990 and 1991.  A few nips and tucks and continuity patches, and it was ready to go.

And now, with pretty much no fanfare whatsoever, Wickersnides is available on Kindle, yours for the low low price of three ninety nine.

I was impressed with just how easy it was getting onto Kindle...really no harder than setting up a blog.  Establishing the copyright claim was considerably more challenging, although I'm not entirely sure how necessary it was in retrospect.  Amazon's crack legal review team seems to have missed that my copyright page legal language included prohibitions against not just republication without permission, but also against "excreting" the book and "throwing it at passing aircraft."  

One of the small pleasures of self-publishing, I guess.

Having re-read it during the process of retyping it, I can safely say that it's not the great American novel.  It tends to be a bit talky at times, a bit silly at others, and is pretty darned short by the standards of modern publishing.  

But then again, neither is it mediocre.  It's an entertaining bit of whimsy, one hundred and twenty entirely readable pages.  For a work written in 1990, the core themes of corporate greed, consumerism and the use of interactive media to manipulate the desires of human beings still holds up pretty well, even while masked by a pretty kid-friendly premise.  A spoonful of sugar, as they say.  

So...if you're looking for a quick summer read for yourself or the kids, yours for the price of a grande mocha frappatappalino, well...look no further.