A Random Selection from Thinks Out Loud, a Blog at First

Okay, I grabbed a copy of Thinks Out Loud, closed my eyes, and twirled the book around. When I could no longer tell front from back, top from bottom, I opened the book and touched a spot on a page. Where my finger made contact became the randomly selected portion shown below. Totally random! Pure fate! Eyes closed! And here it is:

Random selection of an entry from Thinks Out Loud, A Blog at First:

After another bountiful dinner, some of the villagers made a fire and stood near it to talk and relax. Vaea was in light conversation with several of his friends over near the pool I’d bathed in. I found myself walking toward the beach with Vaitiare.

“I am still trying to decide if you are here to harm us,” she said as we followed the top of the wave line. The ocean before me, the palm trees and flowers and distant mountain behind, this intriguing woman beside me, I felt as if I were inside a Gauguin painting.

That’s it. Unless you’ve read the book, you wouldn’t know the narrator is a burned out blogger now living in the South Pacific on an island that eschews modern technologies in an attempt to maintain its traditions. Vaitiare is the island’s visionary princess.

That was fun. Should we try this random selection one more time? Here goes. . .

She came to my side and leaned toward the computer. “I have this crazy theory. Say, do you think your brother could get us into The Hive, let us take a look around?”

“Emily, I don’t know if we could get in,” I said as my vocal chords began working again.

She nodded as though she agreed how tough it would be and then kept going. “Hey, how about if we get the whole class to take a tour?” she asked, her green eyes impossibly bright.

“Well, tallboy just started. We should probably give him a couple of weeks to settle in, “ I suggested.

“I think the sooner we do a tour the better. Are you in?”

So, this scene takes place in Seattle on the UW campus where Emily and the blogger [Eddie] are taking a History of High-tech seminar. Eddie’s brother, tallboy, just started a blogging job at a mysterious startup called AltaSystemics. Trouble is, he can’t figure out what the company does or what to blog about. But the place is very cultlike and run by a flamboyant CEO who calls himself PrimeMover. Emily is keen on finding out what is going on there while Eddie is a bit hesitant. . .

All the above and much more is available via Thinks Out Loud, a Blog at First.

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THE BOOK AND AMAZON: If you order Thinks Out Loud from Amazon Prime, you will be receiving an older version that is out of date and whose printing is lighter than the current edition. If on Amazon, order from the Thinks Out Loud seller option which will be the newer better print version. You can also order the newer version directly from the publisher via this website, thinksoutloud.com, or from your local bookstore, which will either have the book in stock or available via a quick special order from Ingram, the wholesaler. 

To Read or Not To Read, Part 2, or How to Read

Oh, another idea. Different subject. . .As I was thinking about my friend’s non-read, I came up with an idea, a way of reading Thinks Out Loud that might just make it easier to keep going. Here it is: Read only the blog postings for each day per day. That is, if there are one or two postings on October 27 (Lunch at the Lagoon and Trying to Focus), just read those two that day.

While the entire read would take many times longer than ‘normal,’ the rhythm would duplicate what it would be like to be reading a blog whose postings are one or two at a time.

Note: In the nineteenth century, novelists like Dickens would publish their works by chapters in magazines, so that readers would have to wait for the next installment. (Dickens was also writing madly to meet deadlines.) The delay helped to build suspense and wonder about what’s would be coming next. Any takers? If anyone does decide to read TOL in this manner, I’d love to hear what the experience is like.

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THE BOOK AND AMAZON: If you order Thinks Out Loud from Amazon Prime, you will be receiving an older version that is out of date and whose printing is lighter than the current edition. If on Amazon, order from the Thinks Out Loud seller option which will be the newer better print version. You can also order the newer version directly from the publisher via this website, thinksoutloud.com, or from your local bookstore, which will either have the book in stock or available via a quick special order from Ingram, the wholesaler. 

A Blog (Novel) Is Born, Part 2

I’d been blogging two or three times a week for about a year and a half, mostly social and political commentary. Sometimes I was pretty good, other times rather lame. I’d say I was a minor blip on the blogging screen with several  thousand hits a month, depending on how much commentary and other interaction I did in the comments sections of related articles and other blogs.

One of the main features I became aware of was the number of hats a blogger wears: idea generator, researcher, author, editor, marketer, self-critic. Then I started thinking about veering away from my blog as commentary and doing something untried, approaching blogging from a different angle. What if I created a blog about blogging, a pulling back of the curtain to reveal what really goes into a blog, kind of a reality-blog show? That sounded promising. . .until I actually thought about the content. If I were going to be truthful about how I blogged and included all the steps leading up to a posting, that would probably be a contestant for the “Worlds Mostly Boring Blogs” contest: Woke up, checked Huffington Post. Saw article about latest Obama birth certificate rumor.

Beyond boring. No, a blog about blogging, at least for me, would never be launched into the blogosphere.

I went back to commentary on contemporary issues. Until a night in August. (I wrote most of my entries in the quiet of night.) I was casting about for a topic when (and I need a leap of faith on your part here) unexpected words entered my mind and flowed through my fingers onto the keyboard. Here is the original text:

Break time:  Guest bloggers coming your way!

Blogging can be taxing! After months of facing the daily pressure to perform, I'm taking a week, maybe two, off from blogging to pursue non-electronic forms of entertainment, relaxation, and procrastination. And discovery, both inner and outer. Truth be told, I need to figure out why page views seem to have peaked and are now beginning to decline. Not to mention, most of my visitors seem to be from former Soviet republics. Have I in some way peaked in my own life? And in a larger sense, if I were to really stop blogging, what would become of me?

On a more immediate front, to keep the pages fresh, a bevy of young Guest Bloggers I found on Craig's List have signed on to keep you in the know.

Stay tuned.

The “I” in the above posting was not me, the me sitting at my desk, in my house, in Seattle. It was a different voice, a character (who turned out to be Isaac). This other character, not me, was burned out and about to go on sabbatical and end up in Polynesia. Who these new bloggers were, I didn’t know. What they were up to, I didn’t know. From this moment on, the blog took on a life of its own. Thinking Out Loud became the novel Thinks Out Loud, a blog at first.

More at: thinksoutloud.com

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THE BOOK AND AMAZON: If you order Thinks Out Loud from Amazon Prime, you will be receiving an older version that is out of date and whose printing is lighter than the current edition. If on Amazon, order from the Thinks Out Loud option which will be the newer better print version. You can also order the newer version directly from the publisher via this website, thinksoutloud.com,  or from your local bookstore, which will either have the book in stock or available via a quick special order from Ingram, the wholesaler.