To answer that question, I first need to answer a few built-in objections:

Objection 1: Isn’t Twitter just a bunch of people telling other people about the baloney sandwich they are eating?

Answer 1: Twitter is sometimes a bunch of people telling other people about the baloney sandwich they are eating. At other times, Twitter is a South African writer phenom telling about the murder of her charr lady’s daughter and inspiring a global network of friends (including me) to help pay for the funeral.

Objection 2: You can’t say anything worthwhile in 140 characters.

Answer 2: Ever hear of haiku? Ever hear of veni, vidi, vici? Ever hear “that we here highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  Those all could have been tweets. In fact, the best writers can say what they want to in very few words. Consider Hemingway’s six-word novel: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Objection 3: Isn’t Twitter all about misspelling things and using crippled English?

Answer 3: No.

But enough of answering objections. Let me tell you why I tweet:

Reason 1: My boss made me. I work for a company that develops texts that teach writing and communication in schools and businesses. My boss, who is younger than I and more visionary, said, “This is the way people are writing and communicating now. You have to figure it out.” He was right, and I have.

Reason 2: My editors said I had to. The amazing Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris and Phil Athans all basically said that if I didn’t begin engaging in social media, I couldn’t hope to stay relevant. They were, of course, right, and I have engaged.

Reason 3: It works. I am not an early adopter. I’m a person who insists that new technology be cheap, powerful, and intuitive before I will jump in. Twitter–filtered through Hootsuite–is all those things for me.

Reason 4: It’s the party I’ve always wanted to attend. Since I learned of the Algonquin Round Table–where luminaries such as Dorothy Parker and James Thurber and Alex Woolcott and Harpo Marx met and quipped and drank–I have longed to be invited to such a meeting of the minds. In fact, after reading about the Inklings–the author’s group formed by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and their Oxford croneys–I established my own group of writers–the Alliterates. Google us. There are dozens of Alliterates scattered across the U.S., meeting once a month to share a few beers and many stories about our lives with writing.

And Twitter is the next evolution of that model. I’m already connected to some of the coolest writers on the planet, from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, South Africa, and Australia. And every day, I follow new minds. and they follow me. And I am in conversation with some of the greatest new talents rising up the ranks as I did twenty years ago.

That’s why I tweet. It’s the Algonquin Round Table and the Inklings and the Alliterates all digitized. I can listen to other brilliant minds, can cheer their successes, can commiserate their challenges, can aid them in time of great need–and can show them pictures of me as Juliet on stage.

Yeah, Twitter is talking about baloney sandwiches. But it’s also talking about life, the universe, and everything. It’s about friendship with some of the coolest people on the planet.

And, follow me on Twitter @jrobertking.com.

Also follow my company @UpWritePress @cerickson @LesterSmith @Tims2cents

And follow the Alliterates @brucecordell @frabjousdave @jamie1km @jrobertking @LesterSmith @monkeyking @mforbeck @MonteJCook @sdsullivan @stannex @TSRThomas

And follow these Angry Robot authors and editors @MarcGascoigne @LeeAHarris @MauriceBroaddus @mforbeck @Shevdon @mforbeck @jrobertking @KaaronWarren @laurenbeukes @AndyRemic @ColinHarvey @AlietteDB @GuyAdams @lavietidhar

And follow other cool folks @DavesFandSFW @ghostfinder @HarryMarkov @NextRead @Steve_Ince @ScottvHarrison @CraigWFSmith @Paulskemp @BennyBoo @Hagelrat @ALRutter @LizUK @WombatSam @CharlieHuman @stevemosby @pauljessup @mightymur @crystaljigsaw @historyinanhour @e_cunningham @darylwriterguy @selfavowedgeek @stacylwhitman @JoanDeLaHaye @jimchines @DFReview @YetiStomper @pbdp @LilyOak

Aw, heck, there are too many great people to follow. Just start tweeting and join my party and throw a party of your own.

Image courtesy of BUBBLEARMY at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bubblefriends/3658969795/

My answer is simple: “What was it like before you were born?” This response invariably leads to quizzical looks, so I press on with another question. “When were you born?” 

“In 1966.”

“What was it like in 1965?”

“I don’t know,” the person replies. “I wasn’t born yet!”

“Imagine that you died in 2066. What will it be like in 2067?” I ask, and when the person throws out his or her hands in frustration, I say, “It’ll be just like 1965.”

The simple fact is that each of us is a consciousness. We weren’t conscious until we had a body to create our consciousness. We weren’t even  conscious for the first two or so years of life, which is why we don’t remember them at all. We were little bodies, little beings, but we weren’t conscious.

And that’s the whole point. We in the Western world are used to thinking of ourselves as immortal souls that existed before our bodies and will exist after our bodies.

Why, then, do we have no memories before we were born? Why, then, do we not even have memories from the first two years after we were born? It’s because we weren’t conscious yet.

When most of us talk about a soul, what we mean is ourselves–our identities, our personalities, our unique experiences. But each of these is just our consciousness–something created by our developing bodies.

The consciousness is really who we are, but it comes into and goes out of existence every day. When we go to sleep, our consciousness ceases, and when we awaken, it returns.

So when people ask what it will be like to die, I say, “It’ll be like going to sleep and never waking up.”

Our consciousnesses are products of our bodies and brains–our biology.  When we get drunk or high, our consciousnesses are altered. When we are starved or dehydrated, our consciousnesses are altered. When our bodies die, our consciousnesses cease to be created by them.

It’s such a simple realization, and yet it is so fraught with terror for most Westerners. But, to them, I ask, “Was it so terrible the year before you were born?”

Does this mean that an individual human life has no worth? Of course not! Every consciousness is unique. Every mind will exist exactly one time in the universe and will not recur.

Our very culture spends thirteen years voluntarily educating every consciousness. At $4,000 per student per year, that’s $62,000 per person that we invest in consciousnesses. Then, for a college education, parents shell out another $100,000. That, plus the cost of feeding and clothing that person for 22 years means that we, as a society, place at least half a million dollars on every consciousness.

But it doesn’t come down to dollars. We all have lost some irreplacable someone. It feels like half the universe has vanished. Why? Because, for one consciousness, there is nothing as precious as another consciousness. These are two miracles. Here are two impossibilities of nature communing.

My view may be deeply unsettling for many people, but it lets us be who we are–miraculous consciousnesses–without being what we are not–immortal beings that do not need a body.

It is a lie. And if you think it is not a destructive lie, think of your typical suicide bomber.

Instead of getting annoyed, I invented a new set of words to describe my experience. If you have found yourself in such a position (you know you have), please start using these terms:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lissyl/3794988327/ Lissy Elle from Flickr

dwidow (noun–from digital widow) A woman whose significant other ignores her to talk to people who aren’t there (through social media). verb (transitive) dwidows, dwidowed. Example: “Whenever Henry goes on Facebook, I’m a dwidow.

dwidower (noun–from digital widower) A man whose significant other ignores him to talk to people who aren’t there (through social media). verb (transitive) dwidowers, dwidowered. Example: “I became a dwidower during our 23rd anniversary breakfast.”

dorphan (noun–from digital orphan) A child whose caregiver ignores him or her to talk to people who aren’t there (through social media). verb (transitive) dorphans, dorphaned. Example: “His parents were so connected that she was constantly dorphaned.”

insignificant other (noun–backformation from significant other) Any once-important person made unimportant through social media. Example: “Contrary to his overblown sense of self, Rob routinely became an insignificant other.”

Sarcasticalious from Flickr

It’s not because they have found Camelot or have dug up a mythic sword in  Glastonbury. It’s because there must have been someone like an Arthur who could stand in the power vacuum between Rome’s collapse and the Anglo-Saxon’s invasion. Someone must have fought hard enough that the Pagan raiders settled down to become Christian farmers.

So, Arthur was real.

But no historian believes that King Arthur was actually a king, or that he ruled a group of knights on horseback, or that he had a stone castle called Camelot, or that he knew anyone named Merlin or Guinevere. These were Medieval extrapolations on a Dark Ages man. When those stories were told, society had regained its equilibrium and had made Arthur its mascot.

But he was never anyone’s mascot. The true Arthur lived at a time when society had utterly broken down. He fought on, nonetheless.

And I’m suggesting, at least as far as publishing is concerned, that we have Camelot Now.

It’s not that we have white walls and purple banners, shining knights and chivalry–no. Those all are the inventions of civilization. Instead, we have Arthur, or a number of them–pragmatic, gritty, hardworking people who are standing up to imagine a new way out of this present Dark Age.

That’s where publishing is right now. The great empires are crumbling around us. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Harper Collins, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times–who would have thought that such august empires could collapse in the space of a decade? But that’s what’s happening.

In the time of empires, the collective means everything and the individual means nothing. How many times have you dealt with a juggernaut corporation staffed by clueless nebbishes? Somehow, the worthlessness of the individuals did not impact the power of the whole–much as the worthlessness of a given Roman soldier had no impact on the might of the Roman Empire.

But when the Roman Empire fell, there was no overarcing power. Suddenly, the collective meant nothing and the individual–the Arthur–meant everything.

In publishing, we’re living in such a time. The major publishers are imploding, and yet everyone (including yours truly) is writing a blog, as if we are all trying to be the New York Times editorial page. We’re all on social media, promoting ourselves and our works as if marketing departments had never existed.

We rightly understand that the empires can no longer save us. They cannot save themselves. But we also rightly understand that we cannot save ourselves. We need someone bigger, better, stronger.

That’s what Arthur was–a dux bellorum. He was a clear-eyed, hard-edged, pragmatic warlord  who could rally others to his side. At best, Arthur had an earthwork fort and a small band of warriors around him.

No, that’s not true.

At best, Arthur had vision and charisma. In the power vacuum left by the collapse of Rome, in the mini-ice age that settled over Europe, in the time of plague that would claim a third of the population, in the time of the Viking scourge–this Artus imagined a better world and led others to it.

That’s why this is Camelot Now. It’s not a golden age. It’s a dark one. But the best advice for getting to the bright world on the other side is to find someone with vision and pragmatism and charisma and lend your blade.

Sure, you may just be a thug now, but people looking back will think you were a knight in shining armor.

I talked about writing SF and fantasy, with an emphasis on writing for games, such as Magic: The Gathering. We had a great, wide-ranging discussion that ran from building/growing books to killing your darlings, to the place (or lack of it) for potty humor in serious fiction.

As I said, thanks, guys, for the invite, and thanks for such a great discussion!

But there’s another kind of singularity–a cultural change that is so revolutionary that the world will not be the same afterward. The shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural city-state was a singularity. The hunter-gatherers on one side could not possibly understand the city-dwellers on the other.

The Gutenberg printing press was another singularity, taking reading and writing from the province of priests to that of every person.

In the same way, the Civil War marked a singularity in U.S. culture. The south was agrarian, in need of slavery, and the north was industrial, in a post-slavery economy. As much as anything else, the War of Northern Aggression was the war of a new paradigm against an old one.

The point of a singularity is that you have to get through it. If you don’t, you are stuck in the past, and the world will no longer make sense to you.

We are forcing our way through a singularity right now, folks. The kids born into this singularity already live on the other side of it. Those of us born before the Internet, though, have a choice. We can press our way through the bewildering new world of social media and find the future on the other side, or we can reject it all and become artifacts of a previous age.

Way back in the early ’90s, I had a friend who was a computer expert. I asked him how he could possibly stay on top of the ever-evolving world of computers. He said he had to give up his right to incredulity. When someone said that computers could do something, he couldn’t say “No!” He had to simply find out how.

That’s the credo for anyone who wants to get through this current singularity. You have no right to reject new technology. To say you don’t want to learn how it works is to turn down the future. No. You have to say, “How does this work? I want to understand.”

Left to my own devices, I would’ve come up with the wrong answer. I would’ve been left behind.

So, thanks to my two great publishers–Sebranek, Inc., and Angry Robot Books. Both have required that I get through this singularity. Both have insisted that the world beyond is worth seeing, and that I am not worth leaving behind.

So, thanks, Chris and Marco and Lee. Now that I’m on the other side, I have to agree with you.

This morning, my cat Merlin died.

Eleven years ago, a gray tabby kitten followed a 32-year-old man who was taking his three-year-old and one-year-old boys on a walk in their wagon. The kitten walked half a mile behind them, looking them in the eyes and yowling the whole time. This man and his boys had recently lost another wonderful cat, run down in the road because he had followed them across the highway in front of their house. The 32-year-old decided if this little gray creature followed them across the same road, he–the man–would have to adopt him–the kitten.

He–the kitten–did, and he–the man–did.

Merlin arrived while I was writing my novel Mad Merlin.

Merlin was a remarkable creature. He looked humans in the eye. He spoke to them. We had a neighbor that we rarely spoke to but that Merlin often did because he saw the man through the window and struck up a conversation. Merlin even consoled the heart of an eighty-pound border collie who was still mourning her last cat.

And later, when the collie was gone and we adopted another cat, Merlin became a father to the new creature. Three years later, Merlin did the same for a third cat–Sherlock.

Sherlock arrived while I was writing my Sherlockian novel, The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls.

Yes, authors measure their lives in books and cats.

Two days ago, the eleven-year-old Merlin was avoiding us. One day ago, I held him in my lap as I worked on a novel, and he endured my touch only a couple minutes before leaping away and withdrawing beneath the dresser. This morning, Merlin was having seizures. An hour later, my wife and I stood beside a stainless steel table while a vet shaved Merlin’s arm and found a vein and put in the juice that would kill him.

Merlin died this morning.

This was the kitty who followed me home. This was the one who looked me in the eye and spoke to me. This was a living soul.

Some would balk. They would say the death of this cat shows how nobody really has a soul. Cats and people are just bodies with consciousnesses riding them. When the bodies fail, the consciousnesses are gone. Souls are simply wish fulfillment.

But there’s another thought here. It’s not that animals prove we are nothing but meat. It’s that we prove that animals are more.

Merlin knew how to speak to me. Maybe it was because he was a writer’s cat. He spent so many hours on my lap as I wrote novel after novel. He had no one to talk to except me and my bereaved collie, so he learned to talk to us, both. Merlin proved that he and all cats have a soul–or none of us does. 

Rest in peace, my friend, Merlin. My life was richer that you were in it and is emptier that you aren’t anymore. And when it is my turn to be lying on the towel, gasping, biting my tongue, I will take some comfort to know you have done this before me and found out what awaits us all.

To wrap up these Twelve Days of Greenwood, I thought it would be fun to ask Ed a bunch of rapid-fire questions ala Inside the Actor’s Studio. Here are my questions and his responses:

What is your favorite word?

I haven’t got a favorite word, but I like to slip certain words into most of my novels, just for fun. As well as resurrecting odd or archaic words (not current “jargon,” but words that were once more popular than they are now, like “thus” and “whom” as well as far more exotic words). I love the sounds of language, words that “sound cool.” Stroll through a good thick physical dictionary (Oxford, for choice) for a few pages, to see what words turn up that appeal. I do it all the time.

What is your least favorite word?

Again, I haven’t got one, though I’m close to deeming it to be “basically,” considering all the idiots I hear who use it instead of—or even as well as!—“um.”

What is the best sound in the world?

My wife rolling over and saying happily, “Good morning, lovey.”

What is the worst sound?

Someone sobbing in grief, whom you know you can’t comfort.

If you could change one fact of life, what would it be?

That money, or lack of enough of it, governs so many life choices.

If you had an afternoon to spend with Elminster in the real world, what would the two of you do?

Knowing Elminster, he’d want to spend time browsing my books, eating various ice creams, and sampling all sorts of drinks (mundane, not just alcoholic). Oh, and he’d probably want to see some “handsome lasses,” too.

What does Elminster think of Ed Greenwood?

That Ed Greenwood is a wimp and a gossip, but an essentially nice fellow, who is, as they say, “mostly harmless.” And who’d not last ten breaths in the Realms, without good strong guardianship. He’d probably comment, if asked his opinion of me by me, something along the lines of, “Well, at least ye can read.”

Which of your many accomplishments makes you proudest and why?

My proudest accomplishment is making so many friends because the Realms, or my other writings, gave them pleasure. Plain and simple, that’s it. Putting joy into someone else’s life is the biggest achievement I can think of, and the one I get the most charge out of. It’s not about my greatest book, because I don’t think I’ve done any great books (yet, my pride adds in a tiny voice), or about my favorite, because I don’t have one. Really. It’s about the joy, the diversion, the fun, of touching other minds.

With such a voluminous output—over 30 published novels and 180 published game products—I thought for sure Ed would have a favorite. But Ed is not so much about novels or games, but moments. He enjoys wherever he is and whatever he’s doing. Here’s his response:

I really don’t have a favorite novel. I could be flippant and say “My latest one” or “the one I’m working on” is always my favorite, and I do hope I’m getting better as a writer, story after story. I have some favorite scenes (like the wedding night scene you enjoyed in Elminster: Making of a Mage), and some books that I enjoy more than others because of the topics or how they turned out, but I really don’t have a favorite. Reeeeeally. I have a collection of highlights I especially like, from various of my novels and collaborative novels, but no one favorite.

Your question as to “why” something is a favorite is part of the reason for a broad collection rather than one “best” choice; I like various scenes or passages for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s writing that shines more than my other prose, sometimes it’s just because I managed to get closer in the squiggles of ink I put on the page to what I was imagining in my head, and more often it’s because of the content of a scene. Coupled with pulling the scene off vividly and glibly, for once. :}

As to games, I don’t have any clear favorites, either. On some days, I’d point at the “Old Gray Box” initial Forgotten Realms boxed set, which is where the Realms line of game products all began. On other days, I’d plump for FR1/Waterdeep and the North, for the admittedly small slice of that city it managed to present to gamers and writers (from which we got Elaine Cunningham’s superb novel Elfshadow, and its sequels). I’ve always been partial to the Volo’s Guides series, which added local lore and recipes and bitchy restaurant reviews to the mix of Realmslore, showing everyone that world building was more than armies and supervillains and castle-blasting spells. Sometimes I lean towards the Forgotten Realms Adventures tome, with all of its maps and local highlights, plus new spells. On other days, it’s Undermountain, my old and vast “endless dungeon,” with its deliberate atmosphere of litter, mystery, treasure, and bones, all left from those who’ve been down here before you. And so on. With Castlemourn I was able to present my own new setting in one hardcover tome, crammed full of interesting adventure settings (more kingdoms than I ever had the opportunity to get around to detailing with the Realms, where company plans always seemed to stand in the way of detailing Impiltur, Turmish and the cities of the Vilhon, Aglarond, the Wizards’ Reach, and so on, and kept Amn and Rashemen and Var the Golden and many other places in the “covered once over, very lightly” category.

Once again, I can’t pick any one favorite, because so many different facets.

Ed Greenwood is a treasure trove of experience for young, aspiring writers. I asked him to give his advice for what aspiring writers should do—and not do:

Writers should . . .

Read. Read, read, read. Not so you can copy stuff, but so you can experience all sorts of styles of writing, so you can learn what’s popular now, what’s falling out of popularity, and what’s rising into popularity. I never learned much formal grammar, but my writing and spelling are far superior to most of what I encounter in modern writing. And I read so darned many good writers of the past (Kipling, Wodehouse) that I can fall into their styles and cadences if I want to. Reading also shows you, even unconsciously, how writers handle scenes such as funerals or angry confrontations, how they describe places and characters at the reader’s first contact with them, how they cover the passage of time, how they draw the reader in to see and feel and smell a place, and dozens of other elements of storytelling. You can learn a lot about pacing or when and how to use humor without even noticing you’re learning it, if you read enough, and widely enough. You can also learn a lot of useful facts without ever setting foot in a boring classroom, too.

That’s step one. Step two is: write, write, write. Lots, and do not avoid rewriting your own stuff. Don’t think it’s carved in stone because you wrote it, but don’t delete it constantly, either. Keep your prose, even when you wince at it. Rewrite it without destroying earlier versions; try scenes from different viewpoints or at different lengths—play around with words.

Writers write. Only a few of them put on funny jackets and stick pipes in their mouths and give lots of interviews—or lectures, for that matter. Your worst book is the one you never wrote, not anything you have written. Get your backside on a chair and your fingers on a keyboard and write. I went to university and got a journalism degree not to become a journalist, but to train myself to write in noisy conditions of many interruptions and distractions, not when I was alone, in my favorite slippers and in the right chair, with my mind “just so.” And it worked. I wrote most of a chapter of my current book with a pencil and pocket notepad because I was ten minutes early to a restaurant dinner, a week ago—the way I used to write in the old days. I’ve also written three novels, two full-length game books, and a raft of magazine articles and short stories all in the same year (and all of them subsequently got published), because I get on with it. During my most productive years of Realms writing, I was commuting a hundred miles to work six days a week, working an eight-hour day, then driving the same distance home (to an old farmhouse that needed its share of running repairs).

So I tend to reject claims of “Oh, I’d like to be a writer, but I just don’t have the time.” Horse-puckey, to put it politely; it can be done. I’m not advocating an arms race; if it takes you four years to write a good book, take four years, because I like to read good books. If you want to make a living at your writing, though, it’s best if you can write slightly more than one book a year.

Writers should NOT . . .

Stop reading or stop living or fall into routines because life is too busy. The worse the input into your brain, the worse your output. You stand in peril of starting to write dull “same as the last one” books. From cooking something new (or learning to cook!) to looking around a different country (even if only on television), make sure there’s always input in your life. Feel overwhelmed and bombarded by new stuff? Learn how to control what’s coming in, to take time to think. Go visit an old barn and just tramp around smelling and looking (haven’t got one? find a pioneer museum and get away from the guided tours).

If you bog down on what you’re writing, start something else that’s different. Keep multiple things “on the go” all the time, even if you never intend to finish them all and just use them as “breathers” from your main writing work. As the old adage insists, “A change is as good as a rest.”