i know, i know: never love anything that can't love you back.
When I hear about writer's block, this one and that one! Fuck off! Stop writing, for Christ's sake: Plenty more where you came from.
Microsoft was found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. What is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and when was it created?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Oh my God. I am such a fool. But who knew? Who knew, I ask you?
I react to most noises Sophia makes during the night. I figure that a bunch of noises means she's waking up and wants to eat. So last night, she started to make noises, and I told Darin to go change her so I could feed her.
She didn't eat. In fact, she fell right back to sleep immediately after getting started, so she wasn't particularly hungry. And she slept straight through 'til morning.
She probably would have slept through the night -- or a great deal more of it than I let her. I woke the baby up and not vice versa.
She might actually know it's nighttime already.
Now if we can only get Mommy to buy into that plan.
I spent a lot of time on the Well today. I posted in a few places but mostly just read topics in movies and screenwriting (where I'm a host), in media and current (affairs), in books and writing, in the private women's conference.
One of the great things about the Well is that there is no anonymity. None of the AOL nonsense of changing your username at will. The average poster on the Well is intelligent. There are the cranks and the fools, but on the whole you run across well-meaning, friendly people who can write cogently and who listen.
Still, the Well isn't the best online community I've been a part of. That distinction is still held by GEnie, which was finally put out of its misery last year after having been on life support for years. (Some company bought whatever lifeless husk was left and charged the accounts of ex-members the monthly fee. There's a class-action suit being planned, if you're one of these people. No, I don't have the info, but I can probably find it.)
GEnie was jam-packed with interesting people engaging in fast and furious dialogues on just about any topic. I mostly hung out in the writing areas -- I'm sure that comes as a big surprise. I must have printed out a dozen (if not more) of the topics on the business of writing, as explained by working writers and editors. I probably still have those files around somewhere.
And the writers they had on GEnie! Tons of writers who participated in their own topics frequently -- lots of friendships got made there. Five who come to mind are Neil Gaiman, Harry Turtledove, Billie Sue Mosiman, Josepha Sherman, and Diana Gabaldon, although I'm sure if I give it a minute or two I can think of several others. (There were lots of writers in the Romance section as well, but I didn't go there and wouldn't have known any of the names then.)
I met a ton of people in the Writers Exchange section, where I hung out the most. I'm still in contact with a lot of those people (like the infamous Pooks!) years later. In fact, I'm in contact with more people from GEnie than I am from Apple, and I knew them in person. There was a literary trivia contest every Sunday night that I was famous for winning week after week -- top prize: free time on GEnie -- that everyone had a ton of fun in. (Eventually they put me on staff so I'd get lots of free time and someone else could win the damn contest.)
I first got interested in screenwriting as a result of the people I met and things I learned on GEnie, as a matter of fact. You could post stuff and get reviews, people helped one another, and quite a few of the people I met there have achieved or are on their way to achieving big Hollywood success.
GEnie was such a great resource and General Electric just kept fucking with it. Raising rates, changing rate schedules, reducing services -- at one point they wanted to charge for e-mail. GEnie had a horrible text-based interface that couldn't compete with AOL's flashy graphic interface, and no one put the effort in to upgrade the interface. GE finally sold what was rapidly becoming a dying husk to another company who screwed with it even more, until eventually this wonderful hub of people said, "To hell with it," and went elsewhere.
I really miss it. And in today's megaplex web, there's not going to be a confluence of that kind of environment again.
Nostalgia sucks.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com