She explains on her site (www.sperare.com) that Maggie, her dog, gets a lot of junk e-mail.
• Prose parodies. The online community surrounding the newspaper feature "The Straight Dope" posted a question on its Web site, www.teemings.com/extras/lotr, asking: What if "Lord of the Rings" had been written by someone else? The response was tsunamic. More than 1,000 people weighed in with prose parodies of everyone from Dante to Louisa May Alcott.
Here's a Dr. Seuss entry:
Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!
I can not, will not hold the One. You have a slim chance, but I have none. I will not take it on a boat, I will not take it across a moat. I cannot take it under Moria, that's one thing I can't do for ya. I would not bring it into Mordor, I would not make it to the border.
When you're sitting at a computer and reading Seussian poesy, says neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak, author of "The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind," "you're looking at a visual media. You're using the same part of your brain you use to watch TV."
As a result, you respond differently to the screen than you do to paper. It brings out different aspects of the brain. People writing on the Internet, Restak says, tend to be "laconic, and overly rude."
He adds: "Your critical faculties are in abeyance."
The technology is changing the way we think. And act.
Some of it may be for the better. It is, after all, a complicated world, and perhaps we are discovering new ways to deal with -- and explore -- complex, multi-level media. Middle-school kids who instant-message incessantly while they study either learn to juggle writing tasks or suffer as a result.
Some of the changes may be for the worse. Barraged by bits and bytes, people are being reprogrammed to write and speak in shorter sentences, Restak says. The brain is losing its ability to keep track of complex phrases and clauses.
So even if we want to read -- or write -- more textured, complex prose, we may not be able to. The result is slapdash, small-vocab, shallow, callow writing that seems to be devolving with the technology rather than evolving.
And, because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down.
On one side of the equation, today's engineers have made it eerily easy for writers to write -- certainly more rapidly and, some would say, more creatively and innovatively.
On the other, maybe the easier we make it to write, the worse some of the writing gets.
