Well, partly about Facebook. I know it's been around for a while but it seems like for some reason it's just taken off in a big way in my area, judging by the number of references to it I've been hearing lately, both in the local media and randomly among people whose conversations I've overheard. So I accept that I'm behind the curve in real technological-uptake terms, but not so much in technological-uptake-in-the-Maritimes terms.

in the past couple of weeks I've noted a couple of entries on my friends-list from people who are updating their LJs after long absences, and remarking that "since I got started on Facebook, I don't blog much anymore."

I certainly don't think this is the end of the blog, but I'm sure there are people who used blogs as a way of keeping in touch with their friends, and now they have Facebook which does that much more efficiently. Those of us who are addicted to writing as an activity in and of itself are blogging as much as ever, but other folks have other options.



Something else that's occurred to me, especially after reading Past Mortem is that I like Facebook much better than Classmates.com, which I once signed up to on a whim and then never really did much about. The book includes a whole subplot on a Classmates.com-esque site, and as a result the main character thinks a lot about nostalgia and being remembered by people from school, and whether it's all a good thing or a creepy thing.

I didn't get interested in Classmates.com because really, I'm not that nostalgic about school. I don't think about it much one way or the other. I was a pretty blank entity as a kid and I sometimes regret that (I remember myself as a bit of a pod person, really), but school itself was neither very painful nor especially rewarding, just something I had to do. Period. I have no interest in revisiting that period of my life and certainly don't consider it "the good old days." School reunions? Not my thing. (I also notice that when I write really young characters now, I make them... well, interested in something, you know? Definitely there, in a way I generally wasn't, with one exception I'll get into in a minute. And certainly more adventurous about developing people skills, which is another thing I started trying to learn much later in life than strikes me as developmentally normal.)

The thing is, though, since I joined Facebook I've been added by a number of people I went to school with. And although I wasn't at all interested in joining a site where the focus was the good old school days, I find myself really pleased to touch base with these people as adults. I liked them when we were kids, and I like getting little to see a little bit of how they've turned out. I like Facebook because it focuses on who we are now. (Which, if you knew me as a teenager, you'd understand why I appreciate that. I'm just saying.)

The exception to my fairly uniform blankness as a kid was my participation in the gliding program with the air cadets. I sort of stumbled into cadets, following my sister because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And frankly, the first couple of years were awful--I was bored at the squadron, and I absolutely hated camp. (It was pretty regimented. I am me. Come on.) But I eventually got sort of shoved toward the gliding scholarship, and because I was the sort of kid who did what I was told, I went.

And for five years, that was pretty much my identity. I loved the Regional Gliding School. After the first couple of years people hardly even brought up my big sister, who preceded me as a student but didn't stick around as staff, so I actually had a place where I had an individual identity as me instead of as a relative of someone more interesting. I was a student one year, a staff cadet (ground crew) for two years, and then spent another two years as an instructor. (Yeah, as an undergraduate I taught other people's teenage children how to fly. And I was pretty good at it. Plus, that was the one time and place in my life where I was actually sort of cool, since even the least-cool instructor at a flying school is still pretty cool to the students.)

Things fell apart pretty badly in the last year--I recently found my diary from that summer and it's not just that I'm remembering it as bad, it was actually much worse than I remember--but four of those five years were golden. So when my first old glider cohort (who I think may be married to another old glider cohort) popped up and said howdy, I was surprised at how delighted I was. And every time I find another one, I'm delighted again. So apparently I am capable of nostalgia.

Also, one of the members of my writing group keeps telling me the Kowalski mystery would work best as YA. And maybe it would, but if I really went off the deep end and decided to write a YA mystery on purpose, I would definitely set it at the Regional Gliding School of my memory. I would be hindered by my own firm aversion to killing kids, my increasingly-generous definition of what constitutes a kid, and the fact virtually every character in the story would be under twenty-five, but I'm sure it could be done. Hey, the victims in the Kowalski story are all under twenty-five, come to think of it.

Anyway, despite the stalker feelings, the Facebook thing is definitely a win for me. And though I try to avoid the sort of right-now cultural references that will date your story in five minutes, I have this temptation to include a passage like,

Jordy hadn't been so weirded out since the day he discovered his grandmother was on Facebook. (The rest of Kowalski didn't seem to share his reaction, since the next time he checked they'd all added her as a friend.)

(If I ever write a story with Kowalski at home, I'll have to accept the fact the characters are probably plugged-in, but at the moment in the tent, it's not such an issue.)

In the meantime I can actually smell airfield dust and sunscreen. Ah, those were the days.