Last week on our blog, New York Times-bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler wrote about her relationship with our constantly changing technology.

April 2, 2009:
Wit's End

I had many things on my mind when I was writing Wit's End. I was thinking about the colorful city of Santa Cruz. I was thinking about the genre of the mystery story, which I love in spite of my uncomfortableness with murder as the vehicle for light entertainment. I was indulging in one of my favorite research topics: bizarre and improbable religious cults. I was wondering if it was even possible to write the book I was writing — a comic novel whose main character spends much of her time paralyzed by grief.

But front and center through it all, I was thinking about the Web. Since this was a contemporary book, I wanted to include my own daily realities of email, YouTube, blogs, and Wikipedia, which is tricky, because these things can be quite boring on an actual book page. Since one of my characters is a popular writer, a woman much more successful than I can even quite imagine, I also wanted to think about the impact of the internet on the life of a public figure.

A lot of my novel is focused on privacy, and what that means in the age of the internet. This includes things like the creation of the author persona, the mediated fake intimacy of the Net, and a new kind of accessibility of writer to reader. But the main metaphor I had in my mind was the diary. When I was a girl (back before you were born, dear), diaries came with little keys. The things you wrote in them were secret things — you locked the diary after and you hid it in a drawer, under your clothes just to be really safe. How strange to watch the secret diary morph into the public performance of personal blogs and Facebook....

Bear argued otherwise. "Lazy?" Ten feet away in the shade, Bagheera might have been asleep; when had he last opened his eyes? "Busy, more like," Bear continued, "soaking up vital D vitamins while we recharge for the big day tomorrow."

A pair of crows bickered across the canopy of the shade-making elm. Oreo lurked in its low branches, scrunched into a nook by the main trunk, waiting. He wanted to ask, What makes tomorrow a big day? He needed reminding but didn't want to spook the crows.

A man pushed an overstuffed shopping cart along the adjacent path, bringing a relative commotion of labored breath and squeaky wheels. Several blocks away, a driver used his horn. The elm's leaves hung perfectly still.