Electric Parade: Note From The Author

We Need More Peace in Author Photos...

Sunday morning and it’s a kinda-gray day. The wife to be is working overtime, Rover’s asleep in the bed and the incense smoke wafts from the bookcase. From the iMac, Kayne’s Devil In A New Dress thumps and sets the tone with its haunting soul sample. I’m feeling reflective; a muted re-run of Six Feet Under switches frames behind me; I’m in that “let’s look back” attitude as I mush the deadline’s gun away from my temple.

Four months since I sat in the dentist’s office, frazzled by the shock of yet another bad tooth, and the tweet flashed past my screen. Like that, I got the go-ahead to join the PANK contributor camp with thoughts of grafting microchips to prosaic flesh—Electric Parade ain’t quite the android I imagined when I pitched the column. The hype and pleasantry of writing: you never know where the groove takes you.

Electric Parade—the idea of it—started a year ago when I opened a blog called Electric Sanctuary; I remember thinking that painters and photographers, for example, have so many new-age media techniques to capture the new era. I wondered if the same existed for writers. We need help. We’re visual artists utilizing a one-dimensional medium; our typeset requires readers to bring up the rear.

With Electric Sanctuary,   I wanted to bring writers into the 21st Century with articles on programs such as my favorite Mac writing program, or how to use Google to generate ideas for our personal opuses. The blog dovetailed into other arenas, the altruistic nature of its intent made a left turn and spiraled to the earth with solipsistic rants. The price of freedom, I guess. I don”â„¢t have that luxury with PANK. With Electric Parade, I stayed close to the theme, hugged the road as it twisted, turned, threatened to overturn my articles.

I wanted to quit PANK a few months ago. I thought I was a failure. The space between the column in my head and the actual pieces I wrote widened with each week floating by. I intended to write how-to guides and reviews on programs and tools to aid the writer in navigating the smartphone/tablet/personal computer maelstrom.

Instead, my columns were essays—personal narratives—and I waited for Dr. Gay (congrats) to give me the boot. “No memoir, black man,” is what I expected to find in my inbox every week. No doubt, I’ve written about technology in impersonal terms: best apps for Android or the iPad (the iPhone write-up is coming, I promise). But I couldn’t help it. I sat in front of my monitor, fingers hovered over keys, and I ended up delving into my past, my family, my self.

Essays on my cousin’s iPhone on Christmas Eve, the first time I wrote a story on my father’s word processor, battling my writing space to attain the right flow, increasing or scaling down the gadgets in my life: what the hell does this have to do with tech and creative writing? What’s the basis? No one cares. I mean, I’m supposed to do tech reviews and write-ups.

Electric Parade is something else and it’s all my fault. If you’re a writer, you know how futile it is to wrestle the crest of narrative. Either it drags you along or you ride it slow, one-handed, like a villain cowboy strolling into town. And look, let’s engage in a bit of real talk for a second: this is the blog of a literary magazine (a fine one, too) and I’m a kinda-sorta-so-so lit writer with a penchant for em dashes and rap lingo. If you wanted to read tech reviews, you’d go to the Boy Genius or Engadget.

What can I say? I’m not a journalist in the traditional sense, I’m too flighty to give you review after review every week. As an essayist, I need room to saunter through the subject matter, to be subjective and, even with the clearest prose, to come off a bit muddled. Besides, this is the Internet; there’s no shortage of commenters available to boo me off the stage. People are reading (I think) and, even if they don’t comment, they aren’t running me out of town via pitch forks and torches. My sole goal is to find a connection between writing and technology. Where it takes me—and you—is all part of the joy of writing and reading.

That said, consider this a word of thanks to PANK, to Dr. Gay, to Kirsty Logan (first book review is coming soon), for affording me the opportunity to share my words here and, equally important, for not pulling the plug on Electric Parade. It took almost five months for me to settle in, to answer the question, “What’s it all about?”

It’s about being a creative human under constant assault by social networks, new smartphones turned obsolete in thirty days or less, and reams upon reams of digitized information. It’s trying to listen to the voice in my head while a chorus of ghosts bellows from the ether. As I’ve said, it’s the new era, a time in which quietude is antiquated. Hell, I got Tweetdeck running while I’m writing this; all hail the electric parade that threatens to sweep writers away from much-needed silence. I’m more documentarian than beat reporter. My bad–

@thomasdemary. @altruistic bullsh*t.