someone like you

I spent Saturday at the Red Pencil in the Woods Conference nerding out with a a bunch of people who wanted to talk about the future of e-books as I much I do. I was there with Lam, one of my fabulous new colleagues from Girl Friday to lead a discussion group about our group business model. Chatting with all those lonely freelancers made me appreciate anew my good luck at finding the Girls Friday.

A couple of years ago, I worked with the fabulous Pulitzer Prize Winning music critic and writer Tim Page on his memoir Parallel Play about growing up with Asperger's Syndrom. He spoke in an interview about how people sometimes assumed that you could put two Aspies (his term) together and they would be on the same wave length but that this could easily misfire because if you had one person who was obsessed with say, silent films and another who was obsessed with automobile engines they would be speaking completely different languages.

I think nerds are this way too. We need people we can go off on tangents with without worrying we're boring them and while a book nerd can surely befriend a computer nerd, sometimes you just need to be with your own kind. I think that book people can find this especially difficult given what solitary tasks writing and editing are.

How do you find your people?