Tweet This

I was emailing an old friend, Craig Moodie, whose new children's book, Into the Trap just was released today, and I told him that I tweeted the news, "for what it's worth." Then I commented that I can't believe I lived to see the day that the word, "tweet" is a verb.

First, Craig's book can be found here. And here's his blog. (If you think I'm a crusty old writer, get a load of his mug.)

I wrote about Craig's work sometime ago, too. He and I met way back in the corporate world--many lives ago for me. He's still hanging in there, has a beautiful wife, two kids, and home.

But tweeting. One of my professors, a dramaturg, kept saying that the old model of the theater is gone--where you send in a script and if they like it it's produced--and that now to succeed now in the theater you have to be "part of the conversation." That does make sense; that people who know you and who know your work are more likely to produce it. But that means you have to follow God knows how many Twitter accounts, blogs, Web sites, and I don't know what all. To be honest, it's comes across like a full-time job, and I think for dramaturgs and artistic directors it's a great thing to do. But if I'm tweeting and blogging and Facebooking and surfing, I'm not writing. And now there are new social networking sites coming out, like Google +, that's making me choose what to call people: friends, family, acquaintances, people who I barely know and can't figure out why they're still on my Christmas card list I guess it's simply laziness or something else deep-rooted that I'm too tired or scared to figure out. 

So if I'm part of this conversation I'm not part of the real conversation, the conversations that my characters are having. It's enough to make this writer want to spit. 

It all kind of seems as ridiculous to me as that section in Huckleberry Finn where Jim is being held in that shed in the back of Tom Sawyer's uncle's house, and Tom has him writing on tin pans and carving things and throwing them all out the back window because that's what the romantic, swash-buckling heroes did that Tom read about. I feel Tweets and root-a-toot toots are just as silly sometimes, as I try to write something witty and pithy in 140 characters or less.

But then, I do wonder if I'm not a Willy Loman, left behind by the world and on my own, just trying to get by on a smile and a shoeshine. (BTW, I know no one would ever say that, but I love that line.) I know I'm not exactly like Willy. I believe in hard work and talent more than charm and a handshake, but I will admit I do it all with an underlying feeling of desperation that I'm still swimming against a tide that will still sweep me into oblivion.

The wharf rat writes

These are the selected writings of Craig Moodie, a.k.a. the wharf rat. He writes about sailing, the kind I like to read about. I'm not interested in the scene in Newport. I'm more interested in gunk-holing and the desire to see what's just over the horizon, and then just keep going.

He has a new book out--Seaborn.

He has a bunch of other books, all about the sea. You can learn about them here.


And here's the old wharf rat, himself. Craig and I worked together a long time ago. Many lives ago. Something that always struck me about him was how growing up on Cape Cod and working for a while on the few rusty fishing boats that still go out of the Cape affected him. It's a place he's never really left, but in a way that it seems as if he's still looking for something there. Like a ghost continues to haunt. Unsettled. Troubled. Disturbed, as in, his sleep was disturbed.

I remember one night we drove down to the Cape from our homes in MetroWest to fish the canal, which is a really dreadful thing to do, but we had dreadful jobs at the time and so standing in all that bilge water didn't seem to matter much. We ended up not catching a thing, probably not even getting a nibble, the only shivers on our poles came from dragging our lures across the bottom. It must have been Scusset Beach where we ended up driving to finish the beer we had. And the reason I remember that night was because Craig skipped a rock across the lapping oily water at the earth's edge and the sea's beginning, and it hit green, and green, and green again. I'd never seen the fluorescence before. I'm sure I stood there slack-jawed for a while. You can't forget seeing something like that for the first time.