Red Room Where the Writers Are

I'm joining all of the Red Room community in writing a short blog post on this week's topic: "What are your obsessions? Your passions? Your fixations?" This topic comes to us from Red Room Author Joyce Maynard; it's an exercise she does before writing a new book, in order to see what it's really about.

I've had a hard time with figuring out how to express my obsessions. I have lots of pop-culture stuff that I spend a lot of time fiddling with: Doctor Who, Star Trek, 1980s and '90s "alternative-lite" music (e.g., the B-52s yes; the Misfits, no), watching Food Network but rarely cooking anything, etc. I'm also interested in more "serious" things like politics, history, literature, etc., and choose to obsess about each through specific channels (everything Gore Vidal ever wrote, for example).

My obsessive interest in the lists of the rulers of Great Britain and the United States straddles the line between high and low culture. Same with Greek mythology.

However, I don't think that's what we want to know about here. I think I want to talk about how I interact with the internet, and Red Room specifically. It's a good thing it's my job, because I really, really want every bit of content on redroom.com to look right. I want every link to work, I don't want anyone's content to have HTML gobbledygook, I want photos to be cropped flatteringly, I want every book to have a Biblio-maniac buy box so that our authors can sell their books. Everyone at Red Room spends a lot of time each day thinking about ways to make this easier for you; however, when I can't cure the disease (yet), I go in and cure the symptoms.

We work every day to improve Red Room so that your content here will look even better, and serve to help you connect with writers and book-lovers. I love to get emailcontaining ideas about how we can do that. But until they're implemented, don't be surprised if you see a hyperlink inserted where it didn't exist just a second before, or a cleaned up paragraph break. It might very well have been me.