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I think a lot about the purpose of life. The purpose and meaning of my life, of that of my loved ones, friends, strangers, my fellow human beings. All of us, as a species. A society. A neighborhood, a city, a nation, a family. I wonder why we have all these intrigues, politics, issues, differences, hatreds. Why we try to control each other to the degree that we do.
Some control, discipline, structure, and all that, is of course good, otherwise we'd have complete and utter chaos. No author would be able to find parking for their sold-out rural library event at 10am on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and all publishers would deliver their books on time.
But when that control and structure starts to kill off creative passion, that's when I stand up.
You really need to define who you are as an author so that your readers can get to know your brand and know what to expect every time you release a product—er, book. Er, literary masterpiece.
So. they. say.
Translation: write in one genre and one genre only and don't ever try to do a children's book if you've been successful with a thriller because you'll confuse the hell out of your readership and perfectly stable people will run home sobbing uncontrollably on the shoulders of their lovers, before they realize that's actually their recently moved-in neighbor.
Personally, I feel like I've done one of nearly every format known to published authordom.
Send your passion out on that red carpet in whatever dress suits it best, I say. We've been "fitting in" (or perhaps "fitted") for centuries. Hell of a lot of good that did us.
Time to break out a little. Dare a little. Risk a bit more. Live your life like your swashbuckling grandma always wanted you to.
And then write about it in at least three different genres for your grandkids.
~ Birgitte
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Book signings are part and parcel of a writer's quest to attain that nebulous nirvana of recognition, respect and renown. Coveted literary awards and all those millions in royalties aside, an author's signature does make a book special.
So it was that on the morning of December 23, 2014, Dan and I each set out from opposite sides of San Francisco, converging upon a picturesque bistro cut into the cliffs on the city's Pacific coast, to sign and number the first one hundred copies of Tsunami: Images of Resilience. A brief time warp later, a video of this momentous culmination of our ten-year journey is done.
And it wants you for four minutes.
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Have you heard the latest about Smart TV's? If you haven't, maybe your Smart TV has heard YOU.
That pesky fine print, revealing things about our shiny new technologies we don't really want to hear, see, or know.
The very same technologies that make it easy for you to tell them what to do instead of typing in commands or pushing buttons, also make it a rather seamless affair to record you and your immediate surroundings.
Not that, mind you, it was necessarily intentionally, purposely designed that way. Let's just give it the benefit of the doubt. It just so happens that in order for it to work, voice recognition needs to capture your voice, store it somewhere, translate your melodious sound waves into bytes, and trigger the appropriate command, in computer code, that you originally intended. All in a matter of nanoseconds.
It's the fine print, which none of us ever read, that calmly informs us that more than just our voice commands might be recorded when the voice recognition feature is turned on. Naturally and necessarily so.
But just like with images and videos that now hang around in perpetuity (remember the good old days when you could just get your ex drunk and then fling those risqué film negatives into the fire?), apparently sound too has now lost its innocence.
In the brave new world of the Internet of Things, nothing is sacred anymore.
So read that fine print... lest one day your eBooks record what you really think about them. :-)
The authors are listening..........
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