I wasn’t sure what Jim had in mind when I read his tweet this morning. I guess it’s just a little bit of good-natured ds106 ribbing. But it did cause me to continue wondering what this recent endeavor is all about. As if I needed any sort of cue for such navel-gazing.
More to the point, I wonder why this journey is something I need to do in this public forum. On one level, I suppose the one-percent rule that Karamoon recently told me about might explain things. According to this rule, it is only one percent of any online virtual community that ever goes to the effort of creating and publishing digital discourse (content). Another 10 percent or so might at some point be moved to comment or respond to someone else’s stuff. And the remaining 89 percent or so just lurkingly take it all in. It’s kind of an old theory and has probably been discredited since the advent of The Facebook. But one sometimes wants to know which demographic one belongs to, doesn’t one?
Another rule that is probably more applicable in my case is Sturgeon’s Law. According to the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeion, 99 percent of everything is crap. It would truly be a special person whose Venn diagram was the one percent overlap for each framework.
But I keep coming back to the either/or choice offered in Jim’s tweet. It seems the answer could be: all of the above. But there could just as easily be an alternative explanation. The one I offered in a follow-up to his tweet was the Colonel Kurtz Option. Maybe I’ve finally gotten off the boat and am intending to go all the effin’ way.
And yet, I remain as convinced as ever that I’m having a hoot popping in to this virtual space and pounding out the occasional bit of text. So what if it’s crap. Only with such repetitive effort might it become less so. And an experience that happened just a little while ago leads me to believe there is a bit of here here - or should it be there?
The image above was snapped while I joined in a fifteen minute activity called the Writing Dash. Sponsored by the Virtual Writers group, the event takes place every weekday morining at 6:00 A.M. SLT (Second Life Time = PST). Tonight was my first visit and I met nearly a dozen other avatars who each responded to the prompt: Shell Shock. When we’d finished our dash, we were welcome to share our notecards with the others.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with a incoming rush of cards being passed my way. It was wild to see the many different approaches people took the prompt. Some listed sentences phrases and free-wheeling colocations, others wrote poems, and there were several straight prose pieces. The text chat became a buzz of questions, responses and encouraging feedback.
As for me, I had a blast writing a scene that came instantly to mind when I heard the prompt. It was a 25 year old memory from my Army days. It was one of those episodes that had an alternative choice been made at a key moment, everything would have wound up very differently. I wont burden anyone here with a very rough draft. But it is something, based on the kind feedback received after the dash, that I will soon revise.
But first I need to check the twitter.
