Rewriting a book is like opening your mouth in front of a mirror,
picking one of your molars at random, and then pulling it out with a
set of tweezers. I know I've said that a couple of times before, but
until I find a more apt metaphor, we're all stuck with that one.
There are a trillion little places in 'In The Dark' that need
patching, smoothing, or nuking and paving, and going through it is
slow.
While I'm at work I'm cruising around a warehouse on an order-picker,
sometimes muscling ninety-pound reels into a cart while fifty feet up
in the air, so I can't keep a paper or digital copy with me. Not
that I would ever write when I should be working. Never.
But I do get breaks, and it's not worth it to haul stuff from my car
and then back again. So to fill those voids that would otherwise be
spent talking to my co-workers about baseball or football, I've
started rewriting an old story of mine, from scratch. I had the damn
thing done and finished some years ago, but I think it was one of the
ones that never got typed in. It was all on paper, and somewhere
during a divorce, a move, and then another move, those pieces of
paper ended up somewhere besides where I can find them. So I'm
slogging through familiar territory and hoping I can remember all the
cool parts. Of course I won't be able to, but the fun part is that I
have another chance to not write all the mistakes that the first
version had, whatever they were.
With Handsome Devil coming out in January, I've been putting thought
into promoting it, and myself, in every single way that I can. Which
means it's time to get dragged another precious few inches into the
twenty-first century. So one night I wrapped my security blanket
around my shoulders, and (with the help of my wife, who has mumbled
more about this type of thing in her sleep than I will ever know)
tried to buy a website with my name on it. Now imagine the look on
my face when I found the dot com address already taken. I've known
that other Stephen Pope's exist for a while now, and some of them
even have my middle initial, but there was nothing about a person on
the site. Just a colorful, cheery-looking ad for all the great stuff
a certain web company offers. Nothing at all to do with the site
name.
Was the site mine to begin with? Heck no. That company could and
probably has made the claim of just taking the initiative and getting
their name out there. But of course, the old, childish argument of
'I didn't see your name on it,' comes to mind. Websites are
organized according to our language system, and that means some have
people's name on them. That makes them not interchangeable, as it
makes no sense for Ed Gruberman dot com to be a page dedicated to the
life of Albert Einstein, and it was about Mr. Einstein hardly anyone
would ever find it.
Should we have to pay for those sites? Yes, because that's how the
computers that store the sites are paid for. That company paid for
the site, and they got it. There's not really a right or a wrong at
work here, I believe. Just that sense of recognizing, again, that
the universe does not take our feelings into account.
So I bought Stephen Pope dot net. Now all I need is to pay someone
who knows what they're doing to make me a really cool website on it,
full of zombies, ninja, and sparkly unicorns that twerk. Fame and
fortune are bound to follow.
Until then I'll keep writing.
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