Becoming uplugged from the rat race is so hard to do

There are days when the "Zen" and the "Create Your Own Reality" of my fiction seems a lot more like fiction than I normally believe. If one can remain relaxed and placid and depend on the magic of apparent coincidences, then s/he will be in the flow without having to twist, turn and fret about making positive serendipity happen. My peaceful life would be spent in a mountain cabin alongside a peaceful mountain stream.

All it takes (apparently) is a computer problem to prove just how much the PC I would like to ignore has become an indispensable part of my daily life. Since I don't know who else to blame for this problem, I'm blaming whoever came up with the idea that writers need to do their own promotion.

In the old days--as I nostalgically fictionalize this problem--a writer sent his/her stuff to an agent. The agent sent it to the publisher. The publisher sold millions of copies. The author got royalty checks while keeping the beer cold in the bubbling, glacier-fed creek behind the house.

We can't do that any more because, as the new gurus tell us, we need to spend 100 hours promoting our work online for every hour we spend actually writing and editing. Enter, the evil computer with the hundreds of little connections to blogs, authors' bulletin boards and chat rooms, marketing gurus, social networking places, and a thousand other rat race highways where one has to maintain a presence to sell any books.

My primary computer, a two-year-old Dell Inspiron 330, has been down for two days. It won't boot. The hard drive is bad, corrupted, missing...nobody knows. It will probably be cheaper to replace it than to fix it. Meanwhile, the disruption is worse than the problem itself.

With the computer, I'm stuck in the very rat race my friend Nancy Reiter described in her book Unplugged: How to Disconnect from the Rat Race, Have an Existential Crisis, and Find Meaning and Fulfillment. Without the computer, I'm out of the rat race and out of touch.

I don't have an answer to this. It's just that as a preacher of an unplugged lifestyle, I feel like I'm an Elmer Gantry con man. Perhaps my books should come with a disclaimer: "Don't do as I do. Do as my characters do."

I like the idea of moving away and finding that mountain stream, but so far the biggest drawback is going to be that the stream doesn't have WiFi.

--Malcolm