Sherri Cornelius

[Reading over this, it seems like all these paragraphs should be in a different order, but I don't care enough to change it. Read them in any order you like.]

Maybe it’s a good thing I haven’t snagged a publisher yet. It’s an accepted fact that publishing is changing in ways we can’t foresee. It’s possible that when the dust settles the Kindle will be law and physical books will be a novelty item. Of course the dust may not settle for years, maybe decades. We are in transition, for sure.

I don’t want to wait till the dust settles completely, but I would like to debut in a more stable marketplace than we have now. My goal for a long time has been to sign with one of the big sff publishers, like Tor (whose parent MacMillan just had a tussle with Amazon), DAW, Baen, etc. in book form, with electronic publishing secondary. I think this is still a viable goal, but in a few years it may be the other way around. Some of these little eBook publishers like Damnation Books/Eternal Press may emerge as the brass ring eventually.

But really, there’s no reason for me to speculate because I can’t control how or when I get published. All I can control is the book I’m writing right now and let the rest take care of itself.

Don’t know if any of you noticed, but I haven’t been interacting online much. I’m bored with all my usual things, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, plus there has been an unusual development in my psyche, whereby the need/desire to write outweighs the distraction factor of the Internet. I’m still keeping up with what everybody’s doing, but it’s more out of habit. Probably twenty times in the past few days, I’ve typed out a whole comment and decided not to share, because I didn’t want to be distracted by the ensuing discussion. What an antisocial a-hole I am!

Nah, not antisocial. I find myself wanting to email people instead of commenting with a mass of other people. I’m tired of the Internet with its constant barrage of other people’s opinions. I’d rather be discussing things with folks one-on-one. This blog is a comfortable space for me, with a small circle of commentators, but then I’m forcing y’all to come here, and that’s not fair.

Besides, I’m getting tired of the whole blogging scene. I’ve added very few new blogs in the past two years to replace the ones that folded, and my circle is shrinking. I’m in a rut. A rut I’ve seen before, no doubt, but a rut nonetheless. Anybody know what the next big thing is going to be? Because I’m ready to jump on it.

I’m not hiding and I’m not mad and nothing bad is going on in my life. I’m happy to get emails and comments and tweets from you, and I’m sure this isn’t my final post. I’ll still be around on Facebook, too, but I might stop announcing what I had for breakfast. Just slowing down on the info overload.

On Facebook, they have these memes circulating, where you ask your friends to describe you in one word, or tell a memory they have about you. I usually avoid the memes because they feel faintly narcissistic (can’t believe I spelled that right on the first try)–not when others do them, but for me, yeah. I’m always harder on myself than I am on others. Anyway, last night I did one that seemed fairly harmless: How did we meet? I am saddened by how little I remember, and amazed by how much others do. It was a fun exercise.

I realized that I have three main time periods in my circle of everyday buddies, and those are high school, college and blog, i.e. the past 3-4 years. There’s a biiiiig, empty space between college and blog. It’s not that I was completely isolated, I worked during most of that time, but the demands of family life kept me from creating a lasting bond, I suppose. It’s hard to make friends when you can’t just hang out and have fun.

That’s why I hate it when people dismiss online relationships out of hand, or even ridicule them as pathetic. When online communication started years ago, it was generally accepted that relationships online were pretty much meaningless. After all, you’re not really talking and interacting with a human, just words on a screen. I’ve found, though–and I think a lot of other people have, too–that the interactions we have with each other online can be just as meaningful as real life friendships. Is it healthy for online connections to replace real-life ones? Probably not. But can they be a supplement, enriching your life in countless ways? Indubitably. (That word took three tries.) No matter how cynics enjoy reducing solely-Internet friendships to their electrons, there is a human being sending his or her intentions to you. The method in which you receive those intentions doesn’t matter much.

Granted, it’s harder to know what those intentions are without body language and inflection, but it’s like having a hundred pen pals. And for someone like me, with limited opportunities to interact face-to-face with people who share my interests, this has worked pretty well. Don’t you agree?