A friend of mine, a mid-list writer struggling to survive in the new world of publishing keeps telling me writing is over, books are dead, literacy has been washed away by blogs, the Internet, Facebook, texting and the world of devices and story streaming. No one can afford to write books for much longer, he says, and no one will have the time or interest to read them. He is miserable in our new world, and I feel badly for him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was doing today. Around noon, I’m turning myself in at Mannix Marketing where Chris and I will have lunch and talk about the blog and Toby and I will meet to figure out how to get my new podcast up and running (I have a digital Mp3 recorder and will record the first podcast on it today, if I can figure out how to get it working). Then at 2 p.m. I will meet with Amberly at Mannix to learn more about Facebook and how to manage it efficiently. She has prepared a report on how to make my Facebook Page better.

This is not what John Updike spent his day doing, I told my daughter this weekend. Yes, she said, but then again, you are not John Updike. True. I sympathize with my writer friend, he is so wretched and I just listen to him. I told him that if whining made one wealthy and successful, I’d be living on a yacht somewhere off the Greek islands. I am broke, I said, but happy and engaged. Our lives are still about words, I said, and they are still about stories. What’s different is the way in which we tell them, the form and style. My podcast in my mind is a story-telling machine, I will tell the stories of my life and my farm and communicate with my readers on it. I think of E.B. White as my inspiration and I admire his wonderful observations from the Maine farm he bought later in his life. He and I share the same sense of revelation about life in the country and life on a farm.

Facebook is like taking your car into get serviced. It is no fun, but you have to keep it running, it is another tool for writers to use to move forward. I will try and figure out today how to reverse Facebook’s dumb new reply system, where all replies are out of order and even more confusing than usual. My readers do not like it. I suppose I could call my friend up and say, “listen, I should be writing today but instead I have to spend the whole &555(((*&&&@** day figuring out my Tascam Digital Recorder and wading through Facebook’s confusing and impenetrable management systems.” He would love it, and he would commiserate. That is just what he thinks of when he thinks about using new technologies.

But I won’t slip into that trap, it’s too easy and it would be fake.  The good people at Mannix have gotten me far and I appreciate them and am lucky to have them. They have held my hand through the growth of this blog for some years now, and they have never failed me, not once. How does one squawk about that?

I e-mailed Kimberly and told her I didn’t want to know all that much about Facebook. I don’t spend a lot of time there, the noise to signal ratio is low, but that is where my readers are and that is where I will be. Hopefully sometime next week you all will be able to hear my first Podcast, warts and all, and watch me slip and flop around and hopefully get it right. Somewhere in the process I will write a book and hopefully it will pay for all of this stuff the new writer is doing. I might even figure out the reply thing.

I will call my friend from the car and urge him once more to get a blog up and running so he can talk to his readers directly. He will give me a dozen good reasons why he can’t do that – he isn’t technical, it’s a waste of time, an invasion of privacy, he loves bookstores and paper books, he’s not going to be on FB all day talking nonsense. Maybe he’s right and I am the sellout, I don’t really know, I’m too close to it. I suspect John Updike would be saying the same thing as my friend. You won’t find Philip Roth on Facebook either or fumbling with his Tascam recorder. As I drive up Kinney Road to Glens Falls I will be thinking about different roads, theirs and mine, about the new writer. Truth is,  I can’t wait to get my Podcast up there. We will have great fun with it, and I will have another way to tell my stories, and a million people will listen every Sunday and I will get to take Maria to Florence.