Periscope Up

Been working on the novel as well as putting my new office together. Sorry I haven't checked in, but writing and painting and building Ikea furniture puts the blog down a bit on the pecking order. The office, coated in a pale sky blue, is now this cavernous womb of creativity. "Great things will happen in there," my loving wife tells me as we wearily fall asleep Sunday night after a weekend of domicile makeover. I love her, and I believe her when I finally get past all the acidic demon monkeys who like to plant lies in my head.

That said, the new writing group I'm in, starring my cohorts from the year-long writing program, has some members who are willing and able to shake the tables with some well-cooked prose. While I try not to make this a competition, I'm moved to write harder and sharper, trying to get my offerings as worthy as I think theirs are. We have one member in our group who has her manuscript done while starting on her second book. Meanwhile, there's another author who, like me, is a member of Club Dystopia and the scenes we brought Tuesday were similar in a couple parts. I laughed "I know this because Tyler knows this" sitting next to him, flipping pages of our stories between my fingers. We intersect on a few things, content wise, even if we rocket into different tangents. Sometimes I wonder if we pollute each other. Well, there's always the rewrite.

And in an unrelated note, I found this article about CNN anchor Nancy Grace's complete meltdown after the Michael Jackson verdict was announced. While I have little patience for pundits, this bit caught my eye. It's something that screams ready-made if you look at it the right way. It's also a slap at the technotopian dreamers who think that the Web will erase ignorance forever.

So it is that we find ourselves in an age when people flip to a favored television channel, or buy a specific publication, or click on a particular URL, for one reason -- because they know that when they go there, inconvenient information will not intrude, and they will find their dearest beliefs, their strongest prejudices and their deepest fears reinforced rather than challenged.

The phenomenon doesn't have a name yet -- to our knowledge, anyway -- but it's the opposite of the ancient Greek agora or the New England town hall to which people flock to disagree with one another and to hash out differences.

I think "Logic of Positive Fallacy" is too long. Needs to combine sex and violence and the glitz of 21st century media warfare.

Foxllatio, anyone?