You Know You're... (Part II)
From a period beginning in the mid eighties, I started collecting funny faxes. These were occasionally humorous one-pagers sent between workers in different offices. One of the originals that you may have seen and still recall was titled The Rules – a list of things the male was expected to do/not do, according to a rather demanding female. Another was a crude sketch of a rowing boat with a cox calling through a megaphone at eight rowers. Beneath it was a second boat on which you inserted the name of your company. This boat had eight coxes shouting through a megaphone at one rower. After a couple of years I had enough of these to make into a stocking-filler-type book, but someone beat me to it by a few weeks.
It wasn’t long after that the internet started to blossom and I was in on the act with IRC and then email when it came along. It took me a while, but I finally recognised that you could entertain friends and colleagues with the same kind of stuff that jokers faxed to each other. In seconds, you could send it to everyone you had an email address for, and they could easily forward it on to everyone they had an email address for. Eeh, i’nt technology grand.
In 1997 I contributed to an email titled You Know You’re Living In The ‘90s When... I sent it to the folks in my contact list who I thought would appreciate it. A couple of years later the email found its way back to me. A few times after that, various incarnations of the email found their way back to me, including You Know You’re Living In The ‘00s When... Despite the update, my contribution had remained intact word-for-word.
Judging by the lengthy list of forwards, a fair few people had read each of these emails and forwarded them on to friends around the world. There were hundreds of email addresses on each chain, representing just one route through to me. How many other chains through to other people were there? How many people had read and forwarded these emails?
A few days ago I posted a blog on here called You Know You’re A Writer When...
http://www.thewordcloud.org/members/profile/114/blog-view/you-know-youre-a-writer-when_1680.html
It doesn’t have the same universal appeal, so I haven’t forwarded it on to anyone by email. Our Cloud community was as far as it would go.
Or so I thought.
Then Weens suggested that Writing Magazines might be interested. I hadn’t considered this, but I thought it was a good idea, so I approached a few.
The Editor of a leading Writers' Magazine has just responded. Someone’s already posted a link to The Word Cloud blog on that mag’s forum, so he was already aware of it and mulling over whether he was going to use it. And there was me thinking this was a Cloud where our shenanigans remained pretty much just amongst us. It appears that others elsewhere are watching us. The Ed’s asked one of his in-house writers to mention the You Know You’re A Writer When... blog and publish a link to it in the next edition. That means no actual publication credits in the magazine and certainly no dosh, but you know what? I’m secretly pleased regardless.
If you were wondering if anyone was ever going to notice your writing genius, there is a sliver of hope. The Cloud is attracting attention from outside. (Or should that be beneath?) Sometimes you just don’t know... your writing could have been read by a multitude already. So are you distraught that people might be reading and forwarding your work without your knowledge as you remain unpublished and without a pot to piss in? Or are you excited by the idea that potentially tens of millions could read your work in an email chain you, as yet, know nothing about?
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10 Comments
Yours is a well written blog. It is quite possible everything you put on the 'net' can be accessed. My brother told me not to to use 'hotmail ' Did I want Bill Gales to read my mail? He to me to use 'Thunderbird' instead. However, the majority of information put on the 'net' is most likely only read by the recipients.
Mr. Unreasonable - folks can put up their work and point great flashing pink neon arrows at it from all over the net with the absolute intent of getting as many to read it as possible. Any which way, I have traditionally perceived it as fortunate if anyone gets more than a blind hedgehog called Horace to stumble on their work by mistake. But I may have to readdress my perspective following the above. Tens of millions of readers is my bistromathics guesstimate at an email that's been doing the funnies-past-on rounds for a decade. Any thoughts on how far out my guesstimate is?
Letters could always be steamed open too! On another matter - re travel writing. I am not to sure Bill Bryson is a travel writer? He has become a 'National Treasure too' Perhaps his rather benign view of human nature is fiction? He is clearly a likeable person and this is reflected in his writing. (Alan Bennett tried o convince his TV audience that he wasn't really a nice person but his appearance belied this!) Perhaps it is time for a really nasty travel writer? I have not gone abroad for years and the last place I visited was Cuba. I loathed the place and saw a return to Baptista.
If can only serve chicken and rice - or if you are lucky fish and rice - why not dig up a few acres of as sugar crop and plant something to eat? Blasphamy!
On the matter of a nasty travel writer, there is absolutely room in the market for this, and if done well, I think would lead to great success. Perhaps Stephen Clarke has gone some way to opening the door to this. But I certainly couldn't pull it off. Firstly, I love travel itself and would want to be welcome anywhere I went. Secondly, such writing would inevitably lead to being branded a racist. I simply couldn't live with that.
I wouldn't call my original post bloglike in any way - it only ended up here because I couldn't find a natural home for it anywhere else. But it seems that I am finally coming around. I recently saw a film called Julie & Julia (strong performance from Meryl Streep) which in itself demonstrates the ample success that can be achieved through blogging in reality. However, what have really won me over are the blogs posted about the net to provide writers with up-to-date information that each of us can query and receive timely responses to. On The Cloud these tend to be in specific forums, but wherever I find them, and whatever title they come under, I am rather grateful for them and to the people that take the time to write, post and respond.
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