Laugh, you who have heard me go on ad nauseam about the fruitlessness of social networking. Why, I'd query to anyone who would listen, could anyone who was obsessed with time take up so much of it in virtual communication with their friends? I should have realized, shouldn't I, that it is those who rant the loudest who will inevitably succumb. So, with that I-told-you-so reaction as you read this, you may wonder what it is that's brought me to my knees, why, in the end, I've decided to join you here on Facebook.
The best reason I can give you is that I like to talk, well, not so much to talk as write. Those of you whom I see frequently will know that I spend an inordinate amount of time doing this as a novelist. For me, fiction is a way to capture and condense reality, to address aspects of life that most of us might require years to perceive on our own. Pretentious? Perhaps, but truly good novelists, in my view, accomplish this.
To create and live much of one's life in fictitious worlds, however revealing exploration of such worlds may be, can be confining. I, and surely other novelists like me, do think outside the box of imagined people and events. There are times when I want to write a few paragraphs on how we might best safeguard refugees in a country seemingly bent on keeping them away, to write about what I believe true friendship is, to talk about love outside the framework of a novel.
Now you ask yourselves, is that why he's here, egocentrically expecting us to read this stuff? Guilty as self-charged. I have found that expressing my thoughts in writing is the best way to clarify and unclutter them. When you see me on your news feeds from time to time — I promise this won't be too often — I may be raising a problem I'm having with one of my characters in my current book, or, closer to home, I may say a word or two about advantages and disadvantages, as I see them, with virtual versus real contact with one's friends. If you'd like to respond to my occasional soliloquies, please go to my author's website at www.geraldneufeld.com and click on Comments and Feedback or just write to me at [email protected] or, even easier, just post on my timeline. I may not see your comment right away since I check Facebook about once a week. For those of you interested in my books and what I'm currently working on, you can find me, at least I think you can, on my fan page.
P.S. Please excuse me if this post appears several times. I write from my website, the text immediately thereafter exported to Facebook. Once we have debugged the procedures for doing this, duplication should not occur.