My currency is creativity, ideas, and innovation. For me as a writer/artist, the process of writing a book is the process of creating a work of art. Given the upheaval in the publishing industry and the cross-platform promotion of content—in a world that is becoming increasingly impermanent—I can foresee a time when the concept of a book, as we know it, takes on the form of a treasured gift or an evocative work of art that is forever kept and enjoyed around the world as an heirloom or legacy.

After I wrote Strange Tango, an epistolary novella, I felt I had achieved the goal I set for myself as a literary writer and that there were no books left for me to write. In fact, the manuscript has been called a “masterpiece.” But in 2007, I wrote Millennium Muse, which was inspired by the ideas, essays, musings, and memoirs that flowed in and out of my in-box. The top international literary agency in Boston reviewed my manuscript for publication consideration and suggested I place my writing online. I was an unpublished author and, despite my extensive personal, educational, and professional networks (two years later, I would add more than 2,000 Facebook friends in five months), I had no personal contacts that were literary agents and publishers who would facilitate the path to publication for me. 

I took the literary agency’s advice to take my productivity online. However, I do not believe that conventional publishing conceived of how far we would take the traditional concept of a book and give it multiple layers of dimensionality: in essence, we created StrangeTango.com: Life as Art—the first literary and conceptual art installation in cyberspace. The personal website was submitted for a Webby Award and was featured in a university honors business program’s presentation on leadership, creativity, and innovation.

As many as twenty personal friends—including six creative collaborators across the country in the fields of filmmaking, photography, music composition, website design, high tech, and writing—worked with me to bring StrangeTango.com from concept to reality. The people behind the personal website/blog include a Pulitzer Prize finalist/George Polk Award winner, an Emmy Award-winning tv arts and culture producer-reporter, a film director who worked on Batman Begins, a Ph.D. in English literature, a composer-electronic musician whose band was featured at SxSW, a multimedia artist and developer, a Greenhills Award winner from Harvard Business School, and a former Cornell University Trustee-Harvard Administrative Fellow. Continue reading Social Anthropology / Portrait of ~A. as an Adolescent