A Few Writing- Related Thoughts to End the Year

Offered for serious or not-so-serious debate:(1) Nothing on the internet is as important as anything in the physical world.(2) Every book has two lives: that heat-signature descent from thought to publication and reaction, like a meteor encountering atmosphere, and a second life after the dust has settled from the impact. A wise writer will remember this, take the long view, and not sink into despair if at first their book plinks to the ground with all the raging force of a penny dropped from a torn pocket.(3) No book written on a computer is old enough to be judged a classic. (Corollary: No writer who claims s/he cannot write without a computer is to be trusted...)(4) A short attention span is the reader's disability, not the writer's.(5) Books are one potent antidote to modern fragmentation--if you have lost the ability to concentrate on a book, you have lost something more general.(6) Every book writer, no matter what they've written, has probably given up something in their lives to write that book--thus, show respect for that commitment even if you must disparage the book.(7) Fiction writers who review books are like sex columnists who have had all kinds of inventive and unusual sex--they are both corrupted and made innocent by the experience. (Publication not required for orgasm.)(8) A habit is not a process. Just because you have always sacrificed a goat and three hamsters and thereafter completed a novel does not mean there is no better way.(9) Writers are egoists, and this cannot be avoided because otherwise the wounds you pick up in this profession never heal, but divest yourself of all pretension regarding the work itself, including special pens, special times, special paper, and even special hats (unless this is all you are wearing, in which case put the hat to a more practical purpose when company barges in unexpectedly).(10) Remember how to write books in longhand for the days when we no longer have electricity, or publishers.