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Autodidact at the Suite - Page 2

© Sandra Linville

I have also identified a significant change the Internet has made in my writing. Throughout the introduction to this essay, I have had to resist the urge to log on to my favorite search engine to find some web sites dealing with Winston Churchill or autodidact so I might create some hyperlinks to take my readers on a different journey.

Not a very linear way to live, but I’m with Tom Robbins when it comes to linear. As he writes in his latest book, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, “That’s the way the mind works: the human brain is genetically disposed toward organization, yet if not tightly controlled, will link one imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest of pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological sequence.”

Yes, I still read books. I still talk to people. I don’t do all my shopping online. I go out to see movies. I visit bookstores. I do all that, but I also have my very rich virtual world. I have met people I would not have met without the Internet. I may never meet any of my fellow contributing editors at Suite101.com, but I have laughed out loud at their jokes and have been warmed by their concern for each other.

I also have to thank the Internet for the successful resurrection of my writing career. After my daughter was born, I put my career on hold. No regrets, but when the time came to begin again, I was more than a little nervous. Those not-so-small voices telling me it had been a mistake to drop out and I’d never work again intensified. Never good with cold calls, I decided not to pick up the phone. I let my keyboard do the talking.

My daughter’s teacher had already introduced me to a competition in which I surfed from web sites accumulating answers to clues. I was completely infatuated with the medium as I clocked in quite a bit of time a day buzzing from site to site, racking up points. I didn’t win because apparently there were other competitors who stuck with it through 24-hour marathons, but I did receive a nice tee shirt and mouse pad. Anyway, I learned a lot more.

I discovered writers online and sites that needed writers. I also discovered at that time they didn’t seem to pay much money, but the chance to again see my words and byline “in print” beckoned.

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