Well, I was no longer working there when it happened, so I didn't take it as hard or as seriously as some of my colleagues did, but I can understand their initial dismay.
All your life you've been associating giveaway newsprint with crap like the local Penny Shopper and the high-school newspaper, and then suddenly your own work is tainted with the very same odor. But it seems as if everybody's happily made the adjustment, as well they might.
The emergence of serious Web journals like Salon and Feed and Nerve is getting folks more and more accustomed to the idea of writing for "free" outlets. And even if we didn't have these newfangled points of comparison, we'd still have the oldfangled ones -- Edward R. Murrow worked for a "giveaway" medium too, after all, and it's not like his stock is hurting for it.
I suppose it'd do more for my head if I wasn't one of two ex-Voicers slipped suspiciously into their round-up of "Writers on the Verge," but believe me, I'm not complaining.
Like most writers', my ego is a pretty high-maintenance machine, and every little drop of lube helps. (Note the narrow aversion of a dangling participle through judicious application of the apostrophe [not for nothing do I cling to my day job as a copyeditor].)
Nor would I ever turn my nose up at an opportunity for advance promotion of my book, MY TINY LIFE, an "engrossing,"* "classic,"** "brilliant"*** glimpse into the tempestuous life and times of an online society called LambdaMOO, due out from Henry Holt in January 1999 but available now for preorder from Amazon at the low, low price of $11.96.
How would I know?
I quit my job for three years to write an arcane piece of nonfiction, and I am still paying off the debt I racked up doing it. I would love to have a journalist who quit her job for a year to write a novel set me straight on where I went wrong. What I do know is no one would have complained if I'd taken one year less and written 50 to 100 pages fewer.
MUDs haven't changed a bit, as far as I can tell. What's changed is the medium that surrounds them -- the Net.
Back in 1993, command-line textual interfaces, as all MUDs essentially are, could still pass for cutting-edge Internet technology. The great pointing, clicking, graphical wave of the Web swept onto the scene not long thereafter, and pretty soon the world of MUDs had been relegated to a quaint and faintly historical corner of it all.
Which isn't to say the MUDs scene has faded or even shrunk. There are more MUDs than ever now, to the best of my knowledge, and people are just as deeply and weirdly invested in the lives they live on them.
But the world-historical importance that was attached to them once upon a time, when the media first discovered them, has pretty much dissolved. Nobody's trying to build serious, Net-wide interfaces based on them anymore, which I think is fine. And nobody's saying they point the way to the future of cyberspace anymore, which I think is not necessarily so fine.
MUDs do, I think, point the way to the future of cyberspace, in
the same way they point to its present -- they illuminate the
rich and complex relationship we humans have with words, and the
ways that that relationship gets even richer and more complex
in the context of computer networks.
It would have to be the day I swam with the piranhas. Picture it: I had spent the night alone on a houseboat in the heart of a vast everglade near the Bolivian border.
I spent the morning fishing from the dirt-brown water off the edge of the boat, catching one hungry piranha after another, in quick succession. I fried them up for lunch, and though I found the eating bony, I must say I have never tasted a sweeter fishmeat.
And then, as it seemed only fair to give the poor razor-toothed bastards a chance to even the score, and moreover as the tropical sun was growing oppressively hot, and furthermore as it occurred to me that one day somebody might ask me to name the most unforgettable thing that happened to me while I was living in Brazil and I would otherwise be forced to mumble some vague cliche about the general unforgettability of the place, I decided I would take a swim.
So I stripped down to my jockeys, lowered myself slowly into the
dirt-brown water, let go of the houseboat's solid edge -- and
suddenly had a thought for the peculiar vulnerability of my procreative
organs. I was back on the boat almost instantly. The whole experience
couldn't have lasted more than 17 seconds, but it's not the kind
of thing you forget.
If I knew, Tom, I would bottle it and set up an e-commerce storefront
on the Newsies site to sell it at high volume and an obscene mark-up.
As it is, though, I am obliged to work for a living, returning regularly to the offices of various well-known magazines to suffer, now and then, the unbridled scorn of writers who could not tell a dangling participle from a dingleberry.
My only advice to those who find themselves in a similar position is to weather the bulk of the abuse with stoicism and even, if you can manage it, grace. But when you catch them in an unambiguous howler, ride it for all it's worth.
The blow to the writer's fragile ego -- and I speak here as one
who has felt the blow himself -- is in such cases often so devastating
that they will submit cravenly to even the most withering sarcasm.
Enjoy their humility for the few days, tops, that it will last.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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