(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Blogging Toward the Singularity

Tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing the face of writ­ing almost every day.  Some changes are mon­u­men­tal in scope,  and alter for­ev­er the land­scape of what it means to be a writer, like not hav­ing to phys­i­cal­ly rewrite some­thing in order to revise it.  (A change that is not always for the bet­ter.)  Oth­ers are minor:  hav­ing the old writer advice of “save news clip­pings of every­thing inter­est­ing you ever find in a file fold­er next to your desk,” that so many old-school writ­ers absolute­ly swear by, has become more of a file of book­marks online.  Some are absolute­ly triv­ial: being able to car­ry around an iPod Touch with a voice record­ing app instead of a lit­tle pad of paper and a pen­cil or a tiny tape recorder.  Some aren’t quite here yet, but are so close that we can taste them: voice recog­ni­tion soft­ware that will mean a writer may no longer be on a count­down to arthri­tis.  But all are chang­ing the ways in which a writer can inter­act with the world around them.

And many of them are scary to the old guard.

Per­haps the biggest change of all is hap­pen­ing right beneath our feet even as we strug­gle to string words togeth­er and dream of scratch­ing out a liv­ing.  Com­put­ers are alter­ing how a writer can mon­e­tize their efforts—and not just a lit­tle bit.  No longer must they face a gaunt­let of gate­keep­ers to make mon­ey or even to achieve fame, and self-pub­li­ca­tion is now a tech savvy move that need not car­ry the stig­ma of van­i­ty press.  The pub­lish­ing indus­try has­n’t altered so much since the Guten­berg print­ing press and the cur­mud­geons who think this is a flash in the pan are fool­ing them­selves.  Every­thing is start­ing to defy hun­dreds of years of tra­di­tion… right now.

Con­trol What Peo­ple See When they Google You  (Part of my Mis­sion State­ment, but good advice.)
There’s Gold in Them Thar E‑Readers
The Choice No One Made Ever (E‑readers vs. Books)
Three Bits of Insight from Mark Lawrence’s Red­dit Inter­view
Tra­di­tion­al vs Dig­i­tal Pub­lish­ing

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

If you’re enjoy­ing this blog, and would like to see more arti­cles like this one, the writer is a guy with rent and insur­ance to pay who would love to spend more time writ­ing. Please con­sid­er con­tribut­ing to my Patre­on. As lit­tle as $3/month (less-than-a-lat­te a month) will get you in on backchan­nel con­ver­sa­tions, patron-only polls, and my spe­cial ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.

Or if a one-time dona­tion (or some type of non-mon­e­tary dona­tion) is more your speed, I have a Tip Jar with all the ways to help.