All my life I’ve known I wanted to write books. But there were other things: a child, a husband, a house to buy, work to attend to, dirty dishes, even. Also, I’m shy, and even though I was a feminist, a journalist, and later a professor teaching writing, tooting my horn for my own needs came hard.

And then we moved to a boat. While there was plenty to repair, I wasn’t handy or good at it. Other family members took on these tasks. Living aboard a boat changed my perception of what a home meant: In a galley a quarter the size of the usual cubicle, there wasn’t much opportunity to do gourmet cooking. Dusting became easy in a salon living space of less than a hundred square feet. I couldn’t, even if I desired, shuffle the furniture around. Almost everything was built in. With only three plates and a handful of cups, there was little temptation to squander my days washing dishes. I walked the dog out on the wetlands paths, and while my son was at school, I wrote.

And eventually there was a book. I was working. It took time to finish and edit up the book. Time to format it for publication, time to learn web design skills for promotion, time to find an editor, a community, and the encouragement to proceed, time to learn about eBooks and how the opportunity for online publication might streamline the process. I had been waiting all my life for permission to write. Now, I decided to give myself permission to publish, too. And on November 6, 2010, Floating Point was born as an eBook.

UPDATE: Floating Point was published in paperback on August 16, 2011. See this link for an excerpt.

READERS: What are your dreams? What are you doing to get there?

Ironically, I first signed up for Twitter some years back because I had heard a tale about a journalist who was arrested in Egypt. The story was that he managed to use Twitter to alert his editor and others outside the country. They then helped him get released. Was that story true, back then? It sure is credible now.

The process has attracted some powerful voices. Scanning Twitter feeds in the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered Twitter had emerged from an early stage I’ll call: “I’m cleaning the catbox right now,” to the major tool for democracy I hoped it might become.

The prompt for Twitter’s 140-character post now reads: “What’s happening?” And a lot is. I’ve read dispatches from Mother Jones Magazine, tweeting updates from the streets of Cairo, and later, from Wisconsin. I’ve found a a link to a YouTube video of Margaret Atwood’s keynote at the Tools of Change conference in New York, speaking about the future of publishing – a hot topic as Borders bookstores enter bankruptcy. I’ve found a link to a photo of Steve Jobs and other high tech titans at dinner with President Obama. I’ve studied up on book design on a linked page showing last year’s most favored font faces and even found a tweeter covering Wikileaks releases.

In short, Twitter is providing, in almost real time, the service editors and publishers – those who decided what was news or publishable – used to be fond of calling curation. But the curation’s in more hands now: It’s in the hands of the tweeters as they describe open cities and the shifting stakes ordinary people hold in the planet’s future. (And by ordinary people, I mean artists, writers, civil servants, laborers, bazaar vendors, bloggers and those who aren’t rich, people who read cereal boxes, news junkies and lovers of books).

Curation’s also in the hands of familiar magazines like Publisher’s Weekly, Salon, Granta, the New York Review of Books; think tanks like the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and the writers’ organization, PEN. These have ventured to establish feeds among the flock of less traditional tweeters.

The curation’s in my hands, too, as I make cautious decisions about what to skip and whom to follow.

Twitter’s potential to unify a global or a local village was always there. In 2010, our local fire departments began tweeting announcements about which roads were closed – a real service in a storm-prone rural area, where trees smash down in the winter wind. This week, I spotted an icon for tweets covering emergencies in the San Francisco Bay Area and another for San Francisco local news. I saw a picture of the Bay Bridge repairs which will be rerouting traffic and a newsfeed piping up from Berkeley. I saw a photo of a protesting teacher singing outside Wisconsin’s state capital.

This is not your grandma’s 2008 Twitter. Or even your offspring’s. A technical novelty with a lot of promise has hatched into an vibrant, inclusive infrastructure.

In her brilliant keynote speech to the Tools of Change Conference, novelist Margaret Atwood explained the changing economic relationship between authors and publishers. Using her own hand-drawn image of a bulging publishing pie, she traced the writer’s shifting share from the days of illuminated manuscripts onwards.

This metaphor suggests to me an equally ancient pie image – the one from the nursery rhyme. In this, our Twitter era, the pie before the king has been pried open; the crust has split away. The birds are emerging, fluttering. They are spreading their wings. They are singing out. And what a sight it is!
© Shelley Buck, 2011. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point: Endlessly Rocking off Silicon Valley, a memoir of living on a boat at the heart of the technical R & D world. You can find her on Twitter.

In the past, I have honored relatives at Christmas by making gifts of tree seedlings, rabbits, and a even a flock of chicks. I ordered these donations online through a charity that does on-the-ground work, helping village people around the world leverage the fecundity of the animals or trees provided to them into gifts for others and greater prosperity for their communities. It’s a wonderful program.

There are lots of animals to choose from…sheep, goats, camels. I’m tempted to get a camel this year, but at $850, the camel is way too much of a stretch. Geese are more affordable. Although I can get a share in something else for $10, that flock of geese I have my eye on starts at $20.

This year, as I noted, things are a little tight. I still intend to give, but I have decided to employ a Wall Street strategy. I will donate for one flock of geese, then carve it up (only on paper, of course).

Then I plan to honor each of my farflung relatives with a derivative of this gift.

Wait a minute! How are the unsuspecting recipients supposed to know I have really made the donation of the underlying geese? Will they examine the paperwork, or what? Will they want to know which end of which goose their fractional shares are from?

A goose is a pretty non-toxic asset, but I guess they’ll just have to trust me on that.
© Shelley Buck, 2010. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point: Endlessly Rocking off Silicon Valley, available at Smashwords, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and (via Apple’s iBook app) on the iPad.

I haven’t heard much from the relative lately. I suspect there are more frequent communications on her Facebook page. But I haven’t looked. Suppose I “friend” her? Will the writers’ organization I belong to then be treated to discussions of our extended family’s baby pictures?

Can I count on Facebook to keep these currents flowing separately?

Facebook pages are free and they are available worldwide. At a convention, I met Pakistani journalists, also using Facebook. It’s great to have international colleagues, but I suspect we have very different feelings about a woman’s role in society. Should I share my history as a feminist editor-a history well-known to my friends? Or should I seek out some professional common ground without giving out quite so much information?

Facebook has privacy standards, but they are still evolving. And so am I. I am still pondering which way to face in a world where all our faces are increasingly public ones. And as Facebook and other social media continue to grow, I am wondering whether that choice will even continue to be mine.

A friend tells this second-hand tale of a student seeking an internship: The organization the student applied to requested to see her Facebook page, then instructed her which entries to delete. Is some boundary being crossed here? Should it be?

As a woman writer, will I pay an extra price when work and family mingle in public? Do I want family pictures, with children’s names and personal information, available on the Internet? What do I do about the college students I taught, who now want to “friend” me? Would they enjoy a funny snapshot of my dog Porschy fleeing the buzzing vacuum cleaner? Would the Pakistani colleagues?

The “whole world” may have been watching at sixties anti-war demonstrations, but back then it was usually possible to go home afterwards. Which face do I face the world with nowadays, when the scrutiny can be 24/7?

Meanwhile, my high school held a reunion. And yes, I got more Facebook requests.

Perhaps I should grow a separate set of names to greet the faces that I meet. Maybe avatars are the solution. I feel a twinge of atavism. I wonder if Currer, Acton, and Ellis are pseudonyms that can be taken.

While I’m still deciding, I’ve tweaked my privacy settings again. Don’t look for me on Facebook. If you do, you won’t find me …um … I hope.

We can do better for ourselves and the planet. And we need to do it now.

Many of us who after 30 “got serious,” raised our children, bought a house, and worked at jobs we may not always have loved to try to hang onto it, get another chance. Those of us who at 18 or 20 roamed the world but later stopped because we were busy being  “grown up,” get another chance at roving. Those of us who wrote plays or poetry,  get another chance at creating. Those of us who sat in, or perhaps campaigned for women’s rights or peace,  get another chance at seeking justice.

People are living longer now. We made history as kids, and we still have a dream or two. So it’s time to make some new life’s resolutions. Right now. Here are some suggested ones:

Finish that book. If some corporate New York publisher won’t run with it, publish  independently, using the nifty new online tools.

Share. We are about to get a break on medical bills. Insist that our younger sisters and brothers, our neighbors, and our children get one too.

Travel, but stay in a village. Do something about what you learn there.

Add to the list. Make some resolutions of your own.

We are not used up; we are pent up. And we’re back!

Firefighters, you did great. California’s Lockheed Fire, which extended over more than 12 square miles,  is 100% contained.  It took the labor of thousands of you to battle back the blaze before it spread to homes, injured people, and destroyed farms. Although outbuildings and some seasonal cabins burned, nobody lost a home.

I was nearly in tears when I saw small trucks from tiny fire districts as far away as Ebbetts Pass and Murphys, which had come to join our local and state firefighters. I heard the big planes pass overhead bearing retardant to drop on the blaze. I watched the fire perimeters grow and stabilize on a private company’s fire viewer based on data from federal satellites operated by NASA and the Department of the Interior.

I was nearly in tears days later from the smoke drifting into our neighborhood. How much tougher it must have been for all of you who fought it yard by yard, road by road, tree by tree.

And nobody, as you doused nearly 8,000 burning acres at the Lockheed Fire, called you socialists. They called you heroes.

Yet you are the public option.

You did not ask any resident for a means test before dropping water or fire retardant, picking up a shovel, or lighting a backfire. Without you, our neighbors-and possibly ourselves next time-might be injured, homeless, deprived of a livelihood. We are grateful.

Now let’s think a little more about health care. We need a public option there, too. Guaranteeing health is also a big job. We know how to do it. And it’s about time.

We are living in some smoke today, but safe. The big Santa Cruz County wildfire you have probably seen on the news remains  miles off and over the ridge.  I know, because I can see it on the Internet.

I found this  link to a satellite  fire map via Twitter (posted under #lockheedfire).

http://wv.enplan.com/

The map, produced by an environmental planning company, shows the fire perimeters. Each of  the little flame icons marks a place where heat has been detected by satellites.

Thankfully, we are way to the east. With a bit of scrolling around, you might even see our house—but it’s way far off the screen with the fire.  Amazing technology.

During last year’s fire season, I had to scramble for fire information,  often searching the comments to news updates on the local paper’s website.  I still do that, but I also follow the fire on a handheld, using WIFI and the Twitter postings of our neighbors closer to the scene.

Thus I can tell friends and family with certainty that the fire is a long way off.  It’s about time!

This fall, America’s entering college students will attempt to convince computers and academic gatekeepers of their proficiency in English by creating product of ample length and erudite grammar in response to standardized prompts. Meanwhile, in their personal lives-pupal forms of the adult lives they will lead until the next technological breakthrough extinguishes the need for character counting–they are harking back to the one-liner. Compelled by the constraints of texting, the young are developing, new, telescoped language, as did Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and other writers of the telegraph age who became champions of the bon and not-so-bon mot.

Like their 19th century forbears who had to pay by the word for communicating over the new found marvel of the telegraph, the young today are developing dexterity and brevity as they thumb their ways through instant messages. Like their ancestors, constrained by a new technology’s limitations, they are creating new language as they compact the flow of prose with spelling shortcuts and creative abbreviations, much as did the users of the telegraph.

Today’s texters may instantly recognize such abbreviations as wtf, lol, and g2g. Would-be texters must write short, or potentially pay more for SMS. This constraint has resulted not only in new language, but also in squeezed literary forms which at their best can come to resemble poetry at its most austere: high-tech haiku in the form of microblogs, instant messages, and even tiny tweets.

Since Morse code had to be keyed in, and telegrams were charged by length, yesterday’s telegraphers were also urged to write short–to use @ instead of at, strip away articles, dispense with lengthy honorifics, and acknowledge receipt of a message with ii (for “aye-aye”).

Writers like Dickens, whose career began earlier, may have grown wordy under the nurturance of the pay-by-the-word magazine publishers. However, writers more firmly of the telegraph age, like Ambrose Bierce, learned to adapt the compressed telegraph style into missile-like prose sallies–fast, caustic and often terminally explosive.

Can we prove that Bierce, knight-exemplar of the devastating one-liner, the cynical aphorism, and the zinger, actually based his style on the telegram? No, but it’s probable. A Union civil war veteran gone west, Bierce arrived in San Francisco in the same decade as the transcontinental telegraph. A newspaper columnist, before long he was peppering his readership with savage and often hilarious criticisms. Later the nation, too, came in for a barrage of Bierce’s micro-lacerations–often delivered with the vigor of  tiny stiletto thrusts–with the publication of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary in 1906.

No friend to technology, this man, who struggled with learning to type as late as 1902 and defined the phonograph as an “irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.” The telephone, to Bierce, was an “invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.” Yet his work remains at times more modern than the wordiest Gonzo journalist’s. Bierce’s dictionary contains pungent listings for “Wall Street,” “Un-American” and even “W.” “War” was defined as a “by-product of the arts of peace.” “Peace,” Bierce noted, was “a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”

We might not have liked his views much. He attacked entrepreneurs, punctured poets, and spat on feminist ambition. An enemy of traditional wedlock, he defined “Marriage” as follows: “n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” Yet, even in his creepy and disturbing recollections of traumatic war experiences, Bierce is somehow a man for our time.

Bierce dropped from sight in Mexico in 1913 in a mystery which has never been solved, after writing cryptically, “To be a gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia.” Media-savvy even in his tabloid-style exit, Bierce managed to package his own presumed demise into an evergreen story to be dredged up on nearly a century’s worth of slow news days–no mean accomplishment in the newsroom then or now!

Will texting drive literature as vigorously? It’s too soon to tell. We have not yet finished adjusting to Bierce. We don’t know what to make of him or how to memorialize him, except briefly: “Bierce lost in Mexico. OMG, stop.”

Note to readers: Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for a download of the Devil’s Dictionary at the usual wonderful Project Gutenberg price–free. Also thanks to Wikipedia for thoroughly documented information on the telegraph age. For additional information on the language of telegrams, see www.telegraph-office.com.

Twitter is software which allows a registered member to send out very brief messages to others, either from twitter.com’s website or from a cell phone. Recipients can get the messages either on the web or on their cell phones or other mobile devices.  Members can “follow” others’ messages or allow others to follow their own. One can thus send messages like, “I’m doing the dishes,” or “I’m saving the economy” to friends, family, colleagues, and nearly total strangers who have signed up to receive them.

The service is free, except for the instant messaging charges the cell phone carriers may impose.

It’s a neat idea and its time may have come in a way many media watchers not have foreseen. Here’s why: With mounting middle class layoffs, lots more people will have the leisure to try out new technologies, particularly low cost and free ones. Using their new and copious spare time, they will learn how to – as the users of this new communication system put it – “tweet.”

This week, a buckdata.com writer received a solicitation to follow her to date rather scanty Twitter postings. Checking out the profile of the would-be follower, she discovered a discreet link which connected to the sender’s resume.

It is not likely to be the last such.

Readers, brace yourselves for the sight of the new-new media being used the old-fashioned way. The great Twitter job hunt is on!