Gone

Recently, during a session of blog and website housecleaning, where I was looking for dead links, a trend emerged. Some of my fellow authors, especially the younger ones, have deleted their blogs. Christina Barber's "The Writer's Crypt" seems to be history. Susan Grant ended her "Come Fly with Me" blog in favor of a news section on her website. A particularly good one, "Faster Than Kudzu"has also moved. Other blogs are on hiatus. No doubt more blogs will go away, because the online audience is moving toward different web addresses. For a time, My Space was popular, but no more. Right now, Facebook is the most important medium for many who want an online presence, but I suspect that it, too, will be supplanted by another form of communication.

Groups, such as the ones on Yahoo and Google, were big news a decade ago. While I am still connected to some of these "list/serve" sites, I've left a number of the groups I where I was once a member, and for most of the others, the "daily digest" is no longer in my inbox. Online forums are also fading away, albeit more slowly. I was once fairly active on the SFReader boards, but if I spend a lot of time doing online promotion and/or writing, I don't do any real writing, and that is a problem. Other authors have mentioned that online promotion, although cheap, is expensive in terms of time.

My goal, at the beginning of"Pam's Pages," was to promote my writing, to connect with people as a "real person" with ideas and opinions beyond what I express in my fiction writing, and to have a place to float concepts before I put a great deal of time into writing more formally about them. In 2005, when I began this blog, publicity experts were touting frequent updates, perhaps daily, to keep a blog at the top of search results on Google. While I didn't think daily would ever be realistic, I thought could manage once a week, and I have averaged that. But once a week, or even once a day, can't compete with Twitter.

Lately, due to time constraints and social constraints, "Pam's Pages" has leaned more toward book reviews, which is fairly easy for me, since would be unusual for my reading to amount to less than a book a week.

How ironic; thus, this blog an out-of-date means of communicating about an out-of-date hobby, reading.

After the Boom

One of my favorite collections of stories, from my youth, is entitled The Heart of a Dog. Albert Payson Terhune authored the collection, first published in 1924, along with many other works, some of which are still in print. I read those dog stories, written by a dog lover extraordinaire, and reread them, along with other classics, at an impressionable time, so some of the author’s ideas are integrated into my perspective on life. The story, “Youth Will Be Served” is about the old champion dog, being evaluated by a veteran dog show judge, as he stands against the finest dog of the new generation. The judge, once confident that the long-standing champion could never be surpassed, examines the champ, admiring the perfection of his lines. As a judge, he must be fair, so he compares him to the young dog, seeing that the youngster has a broader chest, a finer coat, and so forth. Although his heart is with the old champion, in despair, he awards the blue ribbon to the younger dog, uttering the title phrase, “Youth will be served.”

As it is with the dog and the dog show judge, so it is with all generations. I was born in the midst of the “baby boom” and my outlook has been shaped by that. The boomer generation took on the world in the sixties, questioning accepted morals and mores. In the seventies, they grew up, put their educations to work, and had two and a half children, on average. Their parents had come from larger families, but the boomers wanted to give more and yet have more, so they begat fewer children, albeit giving them much more stuff. In the eighties and nineties, these boomers matured, driving BMWs or Hondas instead of Caddies or Chevies, working, spending, saving less than earlier generations, but investing those savings with unbridled confidence, all while caring for aging parents and sending the next generation to college.

Now those boomers are beginning to retire, and the ones still at work are facing changing circumstances. Oh, some boomers adapt, texting and twittering, and socializing via facebook, sans capital letters and conventional spelling, but others are the new dinosaurs. Accepted standards pass away, a new generation takes charge, and those who are 45+ face the challenges of layoffs, a crippled financial system, and a bursting-bubble housing market, making their investments worth far less than they cost. Boomers out of work is the subject of a recent New York Times article, which reveals that these experienced, talented workers, once laid off, are passed over in favor of younger folks. "Youth will be served," as Terhune observed some 85 years ago, and our society will surely be changed after the boom fades away.