083 - Eddie Griffin

I think that Eddie Griffin is hilarious. He stars in one of my favorite (and most underrated) movies of all time, The New Guy, so any time I see his name associated with something I'll usually check it out. Well now he's got a reality show on VH1: Going for Broke. I'm hooked... hooked. First episode I saw had him going to a new age healer who started sucking on his chest and exhaling the air over an altar, and later, after his Bentley was repossessed and he felt like he needed a deeper karmac cleansing, she suggested that he drink his own urine for 30 days (who would have thought that would have come up in my blogs twice now). I know all that isn't necessarily funny, at least not the way I tell it, but when Eddie Griffin tells it... man oh man I was laughing the whole time.

Great blog by The Intern concerning author websites. I know there are quite a few of us in various stages of writing a book, so I thought I'd pass it along. I read quite a few blogs that say marketing starts long before the book is published, but as a writer with an (as yet) unagented, unpublished book, it's hard to know what to do... I blog almost every day, but I don't always blog about writing. In fact, I rarely blog about writing. I don't think people are interested in every nuance of my pain, and since there's nothing to actually read (other than the writing samples on my website, see sidebar) I can't pimp my book, or tell you where I'll be to promote my book, or things of that nature. All I can do is try to be interesting and hope that people like what I have to say.

I'm probably going to hell for saying this, but frankly I find most author websites a little dull and unimaginative. I want to connect with a person, I don't just want a sales pitch. If I'm looking at your website, I probably already own your book. I'm looking for what inspired you, or something extra like the query you wrote or an excerpt that wasn't published. Some websites are so damn cluttered that you can't find anything. For example, I love Harry Potter, but I hated that website. I think it was supposed to be fun, but it was aggravating and there wasn't much of a payoff for clicking on the clutter.

I tried to make my website a little different... diverse, but simple to navigate. I wanted to look at my book in a different way, to connect it to other things people might find interesting so that even if someone wasn't interested in my book, maybe they would take a look at my website anyway. If they liked what they saw, maybe they'd give me a chance. I created a page about Scotland, because that's where my book is set. I have a page of recipes for foods that were mentioned in the book. I have a page of music that each of the main characters might listen to. I have other things, too. My 'random stuff' page has all kinds of neat things I've run across over the years. And, of course, a page dedicated to writing. I found that as I searched the internet there was no one place to find all the answers, so I used it to keep track of the information I found to be most valuable. It's a work in progress. All in all, I know my website is not perfect, but at least it's different. And I update it whenever I have something worthwhile to add.

Today at work someone asked me if I knew who drove a green Honda. I said no, but my curiosity was piqued... I asked why he wanted to know. "Oh, someone saw it speeding and they want to find out who it is." I asked him if security wanted to know, or just some random person off the street. "Nope," he says, "security can't do anything about it because they didn't see it." So... just some random vigilante then. Yipee. That's where it should have ended.

So now I know that if I speed, I not only have security watching me, but other drivers who might go to great lengths to hunt me down... and then what? What are they going to do when they find out who drives that car? Make a citizen's arrest? They can't do shit. They shouldn't do shit. I think we walk a fine line when we start allowing people to become glorified hall monitors and moral police. It's not objective anymore, now it's personal. It starts to feel like Big Brother isn't just a fictional entity anymore, and I don't like it. What scares me is how wide the net was cast, and how many people were putting effort into locating this person. It's, once again, a case of reacting with a jerk of the knee... relying on one person's side of the story and completely overreacting... for all we know, this person was only going two miles over... it's technically still speeding, but it's vastly different than going twenty miles over.

And yeah. They tracked the person down. Goody for them. It'll probably be on the news later.