What was I saying?

I had a discussion over tea with a friend/mentor (friendtor?) at The Corporation today. He's the publisher, actually. Has been working there for about 20 years now. Before that, he was at Presse Porc-Epic, which split, as publishing houses are wont to do, into a couple other incarnations. He wasn't too happy at that prickly old publishing house anyway, so he made the move over to The Corporation, and hasn't done too badly there. He puts out some nice stuff. Books on rabbits and ship china and dragonflies and man-eating carnivores and even his own very cool book last year.

Come to think of it, GT is a big part of why I am where I am today. He's one of a very few people who responded to a cold-call letter I sent him a few years back. Okay, he's the only one who responded. I was looking for editing work. I had almost no formal experience – just a conviction that I had a good grip on the language. And the balls to go around telling people so.

Well. Thank god GT lives life on the edge and hires people who are bold and egotistical. He opened the door, inviting me in to write articles for The Corporation's magazine. I guess I did OK at that, because a few years later, when The Corporation was looking for a new contract writer, he put my name forward. A couple conversations with People Who Had The Power to Hire Me ensued. And behold: a corporate writer was born.

(GT's a modest guy, too. He squirmed when I bought him a bottle of rum to say thanks for basically changing the entire direction of my life.)

But. Love him though I do, this post isn't about him. It's about...

... what was I going to write about, again?

Oh yeah. GT and I got to talking about kids' books. And somehow that led to a conversation about attention spans. How nowadays, kids' attention spans have shrunk to the point where they can't, don't or won't really read books like they used to. How, in the adult world, the length of magazine articles has shrunk by several hundred words so that busy people can chew through an item in a single sitting. How the leads for those same articles have become the most important part of the whole piece: if you can't grab people's interest right off the top, there's no way they're going to read the whole thing. (And although this didn't make it into today's conversation: how blog posts should be kept short and to the point, too. Note to self: shut up and say something.)

We also lamented how – even as professional writers – our own attention spans have dwindled. We work for a few minutes, check our email, make a phone call, read over our to-do list, get back to work and then decide to break for lunch. So anyway, I um... I was thinking that...

... are you still reading this?

... yeah, I was thinking that maybe we... maybe I should...

Maybe I should check my email.