Garden Items by Michele Lee

         I’ve been online for at least fourteen years now and in that time it’s gone from something geeks and those hiding from real socializing did to..something else. To believe the hype you can find elsewhere it’s destroying the idea of the real world, giving rise to a sect of people who can no longer function flesh to flesh in real time. It’s easy to find news stories about the city councilman who lost his job because he couldn’t stop playing Farmville, the couple that broke up over World of Warcraft, or something someone posted on their digital wall. Worse, you can find stories about children neglected so that the parents could escape into internet life.

            But I’d like to share a different occurrence, one that’s not newsworthy or spectacular, but that I find magical all the same.

        I met Apex author Sara M. Harvey online after reading her novella, The Convent of the Pure. You can blame Jason Sizemore for the connection because he spent quite a bit of time telling me how awesome she was. He, of course, was talking about her book. But as I started talking to her online our interactions turned to gardens. I love gardening (as you can attest from my blog or my Twitter feed) and so does Sara. So this spring when it was time for me to divide up some of my plants it was she who asked for them.

            I live in Louisville, Kentucky, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee, so this kind of garden transfer isn’t like just catching a neighbor and offering some spare plants. But by luck a friend was going to Hypericon and so was Sara, so the day before the con I sent that collection of plants from my garden to hers by proxy and solely because we’d met on the internet.

            So perhaps my story isn’t very exciting, but the surreality of plants that I bought, planted and cared for now being grown almost two hundred miles away is a reflection of what the internet has become today. Particularly for writers, whose job is a lonely thing, and whose peers are spread all over, therefore most friendship building and communication is done online.

            Fourteen years ago there weren’t online magazines like Apex, Fantasy and Clarkesworld. There weren’t webpages where markets listed their guidelines, or site for tracking your submissions or reporting on agent response times (that I know of anyway). Agents didn’t blog and if you read an awesome book you couldn’t just search for the author on Facebook and send them a squee letter.

            It’s not all good. There’s the aforementioned problems, plus the sheer distractibility of online life. I’ve not been the first of mention that the more sociable you are the less actual writing you’re probably doing. There’s the trolls and the flame wars, and a plethora of people starting mags and presses just because they can, thanks to the tools available on the internet.

            But the simple truth is I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the ‘net. The stories that I’ve seen published have all come about because I found the guidelines on the internet. The great authors I’ve met have almost entirely been internet buddies first. Those who haven’t have certainly seen an expansion of our friendship because of the ease of daily communication and interaction on the ‘net.

            It’s almost as if we’re living two lives as people today, one that can be turned off by clicking that little X in the corner or powering down and the other that’s waiting for some attention too. The natures of business and friendship and the very scope of careers like ours are being changed by the internet, for good and bad. Using the two to complement each other gives you moments like gifts traded from (essentially) pen pals from worlds away. Or you can let your online and real world lives fight each other and risk losing something of yourself in the process.

Michele Lee writes horror, science fiction and fantasy from the relative safety of her haunted house in the oldest section of Louisville, Ky. When she isn’t writing, she reviews books of all genres, spends too much time on Twitter and grows monstrous vegetables. She can be kept track of atwww.michelelee.net

Michele’s zombie novella, “Rot,” can be purchased from Skullvines Press.