The Online Luddite (teaser)

(source)

For today’s post, I’d like readers to head on over to David Abrams’ The Quivering Pen blog, where I’m happy to be the guest blogger on tap. David has a great book about the Iraq war (FOBBIT), and he manages to be funny and realistic about a very hard subject. It’s quite impressive. Meantime, his free blog subscription includes all kinds of writing from authors around the globe. Here’s how my guest post begins, on being a luddite teaching an online class:

“I’ve been giddy all month, but as someone who is labeled “a Luddite” by family and friends, I’m hesitant to talk about why. In a few weeks, my online flash fiction class for 49 Alaska Writing Center goes live. Working quietly from home, I’ve been creating the syllabus for this class, which will pop up for the month of March like a circus—dreamy, full of wonder, with a lot of good one-liners—then move on to make way for other classes.

My relationship with technology has been strained since I was a grunge-fuelled teenager. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest during the height of Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I saw Everclear perform for a cover charge of one can of beans (donated to the local homeless shelter). That was my kind of technology—person-to-person, pay it forward, experiential. By the time I moved out to go to college, I’d become one of those people with a “Kill Your TV” bumper sticker and have opted to live without television ever since. Smartphones? Suffice it to say, I made Verizon deactivate email capabilities on my phone and requested “the dumbest smartphone you can find” when signing my latest contract.

So what does being a Luddite have to do with flash fiction (and an online course, at that)?”

…Read the post in full, including craft tips about flash fiction writing, right here.

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