In the impressionable days of my long past youth, I believed that the life of a writer was the best of all possible worlds. It seemed to me that the ideal thing would be to sit for hours at a desk pecking away at a typewriter, balling up papers, and tossing them at trash cans.

Such luxury! Today, typewriters are antiques. Tossing paper is so politically incorrect that it is morally equivalent to holding a hostage at gunpoint, and trash cans? Can’t we all just recycle? Truthfully, I don’t think that this was ever what writing was all about. It was just the glamorized version we saw in the movies, or flowing from the pen of Michener (“The Fires of Spring”) or Dickens (“David Copperfield”). Writing is really about expressing ideas clearly and then promoting them with all your heart and soul.

It is really the promotion that counts. Any monkey with a little bit of organized time can produce a 50,000 word novel. I know, I have produced a few myself, some of which I now cringe to read. With a good editor and a good publicist, nearly anything could be considered a “modern classic”.

The truth is, any idea that can be expressed in a novel can be condensed into about 47 words. “War and Peace” – It is the aggregate will of the participants that determines historic events. Leaders are mere puppets of history. Pierre is an idealist. Andre an elitist. Natasha vivacious. Sonya under-appreciate. Nikolai instinctive. Maria soulful. Altogether they make up the vital force of the Russian nation. One of the great huge tomes of literature summarized (with three words to spare unless you count the title).

All of the plot exposition and character studies are really the beginnings of the marketing campaign for the idea embedded in the work. Then comes the promotion. Getting others to even read the book is a chore. Reading anything takes a commitment of that precious resource, time. This is where the real promotion comes into play. Today, it is done on the internet with everyone crying out for attention. There are blogs, and forums. There is email. There are directories, search engines, lenses, hubs, youtube, google, yahoo, stumble, technorati, digg, lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my.

Weaving through this mass of social media is where the action is. And so the promotion of an idea begins with a tiny blog entry in a massive sea of other blog entries craving, vying, whining for attention.