Finitude

Okay. I have been told that a blog is necessary for an author to build what is known now as a platform and that the construction of this platform should be done well in advance of the book launch.

I’m forty-nine. I’ve never owned a cell phone. And I’m pretty certain that I’ve read somewhere that blogging was becoming antiquated years ago. But who doesn’t want a solid platform?

I did what people do these days. I searched. I typed in something such as “what should a literary author blog about” and I perused.

Jane Friedman at www.janefriedman.com has a blog post entitled “What Should Authors Blog About?” Perfect.

Jane conveniently divides things up: The Literary Citizenship Model; The How-To Model; The Behind the Scenes Model; The Personal Essay or Daily Life Model.

It was all too much.

I closed up my computer, stretched out on the couch, and read a little deeper into David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Somewhere in the middle of B.I. #48, I remembered something seemingly random from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I remembered a character, whose name was lost to me, and that character believed that the excitation organ had a finite number of excitations. And so he did not treat them lightly. He conserved them. Respected them.

Why did I remember this?

The power of analogy then struck me upside my big head.

It struck me that perhaps I had a finite number of words, a finite number of story ideas, a finite number of poems, and so on, and it further struck me that perhaps it was the height of irresponsibility to waste what words were presently available to me on blog posts.

Who would care if I ran out?

I would. Probably.

I closed the book.

My poor platform.