New York Skydiving

Making Fiction Out of Facebook Addiction

I was lucky enough to attend a high school that required its students to have majors. My sister, who is six years older than me, attended the same high school and majored in computer science, so we had a computer in the house since I was ten-years old. I remember getting a book, which contained countless programs written in BASICA. In order to play the games, I had to copy the programs and execute them in the computer. It seemed like an easy typing exercise, but turned out to be a total nightmare. Essentially if one word or character is off the program wouldn't run. The first application that I attempted to run was a ping pong game. That was an early lesson in debugging code.

Although, that episode mentally scarred me as a child, I continued with Computer Science throughout high school and college. As a hobby, I also did some creative writing when I was younger. Fast forward about 10 years, Computer Science turned into a career and Creative Writing turned into two books ("Ice Cream Melts" and "A Souvenir For My Mom").

We are now in 2009 and Social Networking has become an Addiction with Facebook leading the way as the drug of choice. I thought it would be a cool idea to combine fiction and social networking so I recently completed a book called "Facebook Addiction: The Life and Times of Social Networking Addicts." The book shows parallelisms with chemical addiction and social networking addiction. I did two things to make it mirror reality:

1. I made myself an actual character in the book who starts a group called Social Networking Anonymous or S.N.A mimicked from Alcoholics Anonymous or A.A.
2. Collaborated with the New York Daily News and used real life articles.

Here is where the Information Technology background helps. We created an interactive blog, which allows everyone to write about their Social Networking/Facebook Addiction stories. Actually, all books that I write have an interactive blog component, which can be found at http://www.IceCreamMelts.com/blogs The next step in our "EVIL" plans is to give all Authors the ability to create interactive book-based blogs on our IceCreamMelts.com platform. At the time of this writing I have my pinky in my mouth and my neighbors can hear the echoes of a sinister laugh.