Stephen King has no plans for a digital edition of his new book, Joyland, hoping to get more people to shop for it in a physical bookstore.
I’m not sure this is actually productive. It seems like a ploy to stir up controversy and sell more books. But I post it because it is relevant to the discussion and… oh hey, one of my local book stores!
“Paul Ingram, the buyer for the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, … lamented that browsing for books in stores has given way to people purchasing from computers and mobile devices.”
Because part of my inspiration for starting a blog was my love, I gave it a title that came from a dream he had. We often wake up in the mornings and tell each other about our dreams. I don’t remember all the details of this particular one he had but it had something to do with an inception-like operation. As I recall the characters from his book were infiltrating some authoritarian network by hacking a virtual space. The operation was going well until someone’s hair lay across the light of the virtual moon which revealed the falseness of that reality. Obviously dreams are terrible for revealing the detailed mechanics of the world in which they operate because it’s all in your head and at the time it makes perfect sense.
I like the imagery of a strand of hair obscuring the light of the moon. The more I think about it the more I think of the symbolism from that dream as well. The beauty of the imagery reveals a secret, it reveals truth, it dismantles an imaginary world. I want my creative output to reveal the truth of my world. The world we live in is deceptive and misleading but the truth is revealed in simple beauty.
So, I’ve been here on tumblr for a while exploring this blog and that and trying to figure out the point. Wondering why I joined besides curiosity (though this is a perfectly legitimate reason). I’ve spent a lot of my life observing and absorbing so that’s how I began here. Recently I’ve been inspired to question my own motives, primarily by my incredible new love who is as curious as I am but is far more creative. He made me question why I have only ever create for myself and never present my ideas to the world. I always assumed a kind of humility truly believing I didn’t have anything important to give. I’m beginning to think that modesty and humility, while still valuable traits, have been excuses for timidity and fear of criticism. My ideas and creations are fluid and I don’t want to be misunderstood so rather than facing the reality of disagreement or insult I’ve hidden myself from the world and focused on becoming more informed and open-minded so my ideas would be the best and most thoroughly formed they could be. But how can I truly expand my mind if I don’t expose it to the world and allow for contradiction and a free exchange of information. Observation is one thing, participation is another. And after seeing the beauty of thought and exchange that people are capable of I see that participation is really a path toward greater knowledge and understanding.
