Before Laura finishes up the Jeopardy! Book Groups Category for good (she had one last night and will include it, and the remaining ones, very soon in her final wrap-up), she has to start a whole new topic: how many “virtual” “friends” she’s made since getting her website and starting to promote Piece of Work last fall.
Laura wants to do this in order — that is, she wants to show how one “virtual” thing led to another and another and another to produce a clear personal trend — so she’s actually made a list of “virtual” “friends” and the order in which she made them. Laura’s not sure if anyone else cares when she made these friends, but Laura cares, and at the end of the day as they say, she’s the only one who matters.
If Laura were going to confine her list to only those friends she made over the Internet, she would have to omit her first new friend (NF), who she “met” for the first time over the phone. But Laura doesn’t want to omit that NF since that NF sort of started Laura down the road of making new friends this past fall and winter. (For those of you who were trying to be friends with Laura before this past fall and winter, Laura wants to be sure you understand that she only accepts NFs during periods of “open enrollment” [Laura’s not sure when the last OE was, but as soon as her “support staff” comes back to work, assuming they ever do, Laura will provide that information]).
One interesting thing about her list of NFs: most of them are writers. Which is strange since Laura usually hates being friends with writers — she’s never liked being friends only with people with whom she shares fundamental samenesses (which explains why she never became wedded to her friends from Hebrew school, assuming she actually had friends from Hebrew school which she can’t confirm or deny at this moment in time [Laura’s “Fact Checker” is at lunch right now and her “Continuity Editor” called in sick]).
Laura’s not sure why she has never been one to seek out the friendship of other writers — she doesn’t think it’s as simple as the old Groucho Marx notion of not wanting to be part of a group that would want her as one of it’s members — but now that she mentions it, maybe it is. Laura has never really considered herself a “serious” writer — which she describes as someone who 1) writes non-funny prose and 2) who knows backwards and forwards the work of a long list of “writers’ writers” including Virginia Woolf and Anton Chekhov, to name only two.
“Serious Writers” also usually have MFAs in creative writing or MAs in English literature, neither of which Laura has (although Laura almost got her MFA in creative writing 18 years ago if you call “almost” completing two whole days of graduate school before dropping out because it just “wasn’t for her”). Having their MA or MFA means that they can and usually do quote verbatim actual sentences and sometimes even paragraphs from other serious writers’ works — including those of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald, to name only three, as well as remember plotlines and character names from plays and novels that they read years ago and which Laura read years ago, too, but which she now has almost no recollection of.
This “total recall” business (or lack thereof) is really embarrassing, especially when Laura is playing Trivial Pursuit (something she does at least once a decade) and people assume she’s going to “ace” the Literature questions since that’s what she studied in college. Laura has never understood why people assume she can remember what she learned in college just because they can and why they feel the need to put such pressure on her at such already-pressure-filled moments, but such are the mysteries of life: they are not for Laura the Occasional Branter, Laura the Non-Serious Writer, Laura the Sociological Philosopher to understand.
The other reason why Laura has avoided being friends with other writers is because when she worked in book publishing for 10 years she was a publicist which meant she worked with tons and tons of authors right when their books were coming out. Working with authors — who of course are writers — was never an easy task (<---nb: gigantic understatement here) and so later in life, when she was free to avoid writers at all costs since she wasn’t being paid to stand in their crosshairs and help them get attention, she did just that: avoid them at all costs. Ironically, of course, Laura herself became an author — which of course is a writer — and is unable to avoid herself, which means she’s had to come to some sort of peace regarding this inner conflict.
The following in a series of brantlettes to give each of Laura’s really interesting really talented NFs their own little paragraph (please check back shortly for this list)….
