Today, October 15, is Blog Action Day, when thousands of bloggers will burn thousands of tons of coal to blog about the environment. Apparently it doesn’t matter whether you’re for or against it.
Personally, I’m for the environment. From my loungeroom window I can see a huge pile of it. I really feel for the plight of New York publishing professionals, who on a clear day can see New Jersey, and have to take a cab twenty-four blocks just to buy a picture of the environment.
Writers are a scourge on the environment, consuming incalculable resources that could be better used building a monorail around the Tropic of Cancer. But maybe I can convince you to make a difference, just for one day. How?
- Don’t print anything. Do you really need to print out an entire draft, just to jot down notes to yourself like “great scene!”, “love that transition”, “what a powerful theme” and “I could fall in love with this character” in your beta reader’s handwriting?
- Don’t mail anything. Save paper, save postage, reduce the postal system’s transport costs, and spare the slush reader at the other end the matches and lighter fluid.
- Don’t go to your critique group. All that smoke you’re blowing up each other’s asses is sucking the oxygen out of the Amazon, not to mention giving you ass cancer.
- Don’t blog anything. All those packets of data whizzing back and forth around the world, just so you can share your me-too’s on the latest pointless “this calls for immediate discussion” meme (it’s a unit of information, a wave and a particle, a floor wax and a dessert topping). It’s all liberals back-slapping other liberals on how enviro-literate they are — because conservatives would rather lock puppies in a garage with a running Hummer than read your opinions on recycling toner cartridges.
- Just switch off your computer. Go outside and read a book. You can blog about it tomorrow.
![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
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Oh, this brings me back to my old zine days, with the twits arguing about the best way to save the earth…by writing zines about that importance. Besides the futility of the act itself, in that “we’re going to have a dance competition to stop the Cold War!” sort of delusion, there’s nothing quite like a Portland ecoweenie arguing in print about the importance of conserving our resources NOW to “save the earth” on nonrecycled paper. As a Factsheet Five essayist once brought up, do these characters think that toner is sustainably harvested and that copiers are holistically constructed?
Yeah, well, I don’t really care about this Bloggers Unite crap, especially since it was yesterday, but I feel compelled to mention to you that I’d assumed you’d just finally stopped writing, as I wasn’t seeing any more posts pop up in my little bloglines widget on my desktop.
I finally decided to see what the hell was going on and lo and behold, you’ve gone and gotten yourself your own domain. And a store. Ha!
Viki, I wasn’t exactly secretive about it.
Get used to it, Sean. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Interwebs, it’s that people are even less likely to notice major changes than with standard print media. After I shut down my old Web site, I was getting “Hey, what happened to the site?” letters two years later.
Speaking of updates, I trust that the new submission was up to your standards?
Woe is us! Perhaps Writers are the real Inconvenient Truth of the world and we should be done away with immediately before we destroy the planet with our wasteful wastefulness. Nobody thinks: to print up the bazillion copies of that new Global Warming Book for all the masses reading the bestsellers, they’ve probably cut down another rain forest just for the paper it’s printed on to warn us.