Step Right Up

I love the Internet. I also hate the Internet.

Since I’m sitting on the front steps watching my neighbors ready their rigs and rides to move out for the carnival season, I’m going to put it this way: Remember that game for little kids on the midway where you’d turn over a floating plastic duck to see if the number on its underside was the same as the number your quarter had landed on when you tossed it?

The Internet is like that.

I’ve been floating around online since a little thing called Compuserve existed. Didn’t have email, but via Compuserve I could have long, involved conversations about the merit of the previous night’s episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I wasted a lot of time that way for awhile.

AOL sucked. I got an AOL account and their practices and pricing were out of control. Remember the days where you paid for your online access by how many minutes you spent online each month?

No?

Good for you.

My first introduction to how powerful and helpful the Internet can be happened when my cat Clancy was diagnosed diabetic and I fell upon the message board for caregivers of diabetic cats and made lifelong friends. That was in 2003. Seven years really isn’t that long ago, but in that short span of time the Internet has just become this juggernaut of people and ideas and completely ridiculous places to waste time. It’s also become indispensable to life as we know it, for good or for bad.

I’m going to talk about the good. MY good, to be exact. Your mileage may vary.

I resisted every form of social networking that has come down the pike in the last few years. Myspace sounded like a waste of time. In retrospect, I was right. Myspace reminds me of the prehistoric days when a person had to mute the volume on their computer so they wouldn’t hear the modem screeching as it connected (I’m standing here with my laptop resting on the railing of the porch, recipe for disaster in my life, and one of the carnies just ambled down the street pulling his rolling luggage behind him. I love technology).

I wanted no part of Facebook, and when I was dragged to it flailing against my captor I got hooked fairly quickly. Facebook is my, well, private thing though. That can’t make much sense, but it’s a place where I keep up with the people who really matter to me. You’ll remember that a couple of months back I cleaned house on Facebook and ditched people who really didn’t contact me on there or simply ignored me when I spoke to them. It’s been a much nicer experience since. I’m no longer on there as much as I used to be, but it’s sort of comforting to have it there for brief scans throughout the day to catch up on what’s going on with folks.

Twitter, though.

I hate two people. I hate Jennyquarx for having tweets that I wanted to read. I had to have an account to do so. I used it at first mainly to keep up with what she was saying. Then Chuck Wendig took out his Boomstick of Words one day and fired a directive at us to use it for good and evil, and also to pimp ourselves mercilessly. I paraphrase.

Us “writer types.”

I use that term loosely, because once I started to follow more people and get more followers in return, I was reading tweets and clicking links that let me know that I had just jumped into the deep end, and I was more or less doing the dead man’s float (I want code inserted in this post to count how many shitty metaphors I’m using. Forgive me. I’m currently outside playing with the kids and typing whenever they choose to ignore me and play by themselves. Disjointed? Sure. Take what you get). I’ve been reading tweets by folks who have been writing for decades, tweets by people who just started out and still run circles around my booty, and clicking links to read their work and wanting to crawl into a dark hole with a supply of Snickers bars and a case of MGD.

Remember when I said I sucked, I was a hack, and I couldn’t write?

Yeah.

Know what’s different now?

I can go anywhere and read anything and everything and learn from it. I decided that last night, when I read some of the aforementioned Mr. Wendig’s short fiction. I was blown away. I’m pretty sure as a reader I reacted the way he was hoping I would, and I saw things there, techniques, that actually worked as tiny teachers of the medium.

Jealous? Yeah. But also encouraged to try harder and do better.

I only “know” Chuck because several months back Robert McCammon posted a link on Facebook to Chuck’s review of McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and I took a second to comment on the post. For some reason we clicked. Now, thanks to him, I have resources that I didn’t even know existed before.

Dudes, the Internet is awesome.

Ok, yeah. It’s also full of acres of really, REALLY bad stuff. Used to be that wading through it all to find what you needed was a piece of cake. Given now that it’s about to run out of room anyway, you can imagine how much Dreadful is out there among the Awesome.

However.

Sometimes all you have to do is click one little link, and your life can change.

How cool is that?