The Invasion of the Pod people

I’ve become one of the pod people. Dana Mentink here and yes, the truth is far stranger than fiction. I, the woman who can’t figure out the t.v. remote and remains ignorant about the function of various buttons on her cell phone, has managed to record a podcast! This is worthy of note because it shows you just how little one needs to know to dive into the cyber world. Ten years ago, when I started writing professionally, I naively thought the writing biz was accomplished simply with the aid of a word processor and maybe a pencil or two. Ha! The name of the game now is social networking, blogging, webcasting, podcasting, vodcasting and plaidcasting. (I just threw that last one in there to see if you were paying attention. No one has invented plaidcasting that I am aware of.) You’ve got to have friends and fans and create a frenzy of ripples in the vast cyber sea if you’re going to make a go of it. I find it frightening that someone as technologically challenged as I am can actually be responsible for maintaining a website and making recordings that will be zapped out into the world. What if I do something wrong and accidently launch some nuclear weapons or crash the national banking system or something? You laugh, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You saw War Games, didn’t you? I should mention that one year when I climbed up to plug the angel on the top of our Christmas tree I plunged the whole house into darkness. No joke. Me and technology get along like Simon and Garfunkel.
So what’s the podcast about? It’s the recording of a novel I wrote about a woman who lives out in the middle of a desert town called Ferocious, a place where there’s little cell phone reception and the locals would laugh you out of the place if you talked about podcasts. Hmmm. A place where people look at the sunset instead of blogging about it? A place where people network face to face instead of screen to screen? Hmmmmm.