Nobody told ME!

I'm trying to figure out why the wildfire-spread of the wish list has left me feeling rather dazed and blank.  

Don't get me wrong: I'm happy. Way past happy. Thrilled. It's pretty amazing to have complete and total strangers write to tell you that something you wrote is just the finest of the fine in their modest opinion. Maybe I'm too new at this kind of thing to be talking like I know anything about it, but so far as I'm concerned, that can never happen too often and it's never going to get old.

It's also kind of weird, though. It's almost as if I posted a picture of my son on my blog, and found out the next morning that everyone on the entire Internet had voted him The Cutest Baby Ever. You always think the stuff you come up with is fantastic, but deep in your secret heart of hearts you don't expect huge numbers of other people to agree.

At yesterday's park day, one of the moms asked me if I'd expected anything like the response the wish list has garnered so far. I didn't realize the word "no" could have seven syllables until I heard myself answer her.

The list almost didn't even get posted. I wanted to have a couple of articles from the current magazine up for people to read for free, because nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke and that was the closest I could get to letting people leaf through the thing before they decided to buy it. I wanted to put the Santa Monica College article up because it had been difficult to write; I was proud of it, and I thought that its double message of we-can-do-it and but-first-we-have-to-be-a-we was a good and necessary one.

It's a long article, though, and fairly serious. So I thought having something short and humorous up with it would be a nice balance.

Both the articles being written by me bugged me a bit, because it seemed like such an ego trip. But I didn't have electronic rights to anybody else's work. I compromised by initially not putting my name on the list.

That right there should give you some idea of how little stir I expected it to create. I have a very ancient-Greeks attitude about immortality. Not being at all convinced that my spirit has any chance of carrying on once my body decides to quit all this fidgeting, I have a selfish wish to keep my name aboveground when I take that six-foot dive. If I'd had an inkling that lots and lots and LOTS of total strangers would be reading that piece, I would have signed it right off the bat.

Another reason that I didn't expect any huge response was that I'd mentioned the list to a Yahoo group I belong to. It's a non-religious homeschooling loop that has known about SHM since it was nothing but a gleam in my eye. In an effort to drum up some interest in a magazine that didn't yet exist, I mentioned that as well as serious articles, there would be some humor in it as well, since as secular homeschoolers, we all need a laugh. I mentioned the name of the list and a couple of the bitter wishes.

Nobody said boo. Nobody even posted an LOL, let alone demanded my autograph.

Well, why should they? They didn't know me in person. They didn't know I'm an obsessive redhead who lives in abject fear of being bored to death if I don't have five major projects going on at any given time. For all they knew, this endeavor would fold before it ever really started.

And it's one thing to have the list right in front of you. It's another to see a couple of snippets from the middle. It just doesn't have the same impact.

Still. I put the idea out there and got pretty much no reaction. How was I supposed to know what the difference would be between a test drive and the real thing?

I think the main reason I feel so weird about the whole thing is that I'm still having a hard time believing that it happened. Total strangers quite literally all over the world are reading and passing around my words. And I have to take Google's word for it, because you know what? I'm on easily a dozen homeschooling loops, and not one of them has mentioned the list. If I hadn't written the danged thing, I'd never know it was out there.

Everybody else's group is apparently talking about the list. True tale of terror: one of my best friends in my local homeschooling group is a minister's wife. She's sharp and funny and loves the Brontes -- well, Charlotte and Anne, anyway -- as much as I do. There are certain topics that we have a silent agreement not to discuss. She's not going to change my mind about religion and I'm not going to change hers, so we just don't talk about it. She sort of kind of knows that I must be some kind of unredeemed heathen, especially now that I'm editing a magazine with a name like SHM, but I don't do a lot of talking about the mag or its title with her. Nothing wrong with that. Hey, I've got plenty of friends, on- and offline, who are willing to chat about the trials and tribulations of writing and editing; but how many of my buds have read something by Charlotte Bronte that isn't Jane Eyre?

Anyway. A few days after the list took off, my friend and I ran into each other at a field trip our group had organized. I don't know how it came up, but she mentioned, eyes lowered and eyebrows raised heavenward, that she'd seen the list. A homeschooling loop she was on had passed it around.

I belong to some big loops. Statewide, nationwide, worldwide. My friend belongs to as few loops as she can get away with, because she has three sons and being a minister's wife is pretty much a job description all by itself and she needs to keep her computer time down to a bare minimum. And she heard about the list.

Which I guess should convince me that word has indeed gotten around, in spite of the eerie prevailing silence on the subject on all my own loops.

Instead, I can't help wondering how famous I can really be if I've never even heard of me.