I attended a Webinar, which apparently is a word now, on using Facebook and Twitter. I wrote down the word “hashtags” but forgot to write down what it meant. It occurred to me that lots of people have to sit through meetings every day, and I said a prayer for them as you would for those lost at sea. I dutifully created a Facebook page, where I now Like things and am Liked in return, am sometimes Poked and wonder what being Poked signifies, and share important news with my Friends like “Sorry I haven’t posted in so long.” I joined Goodreads, where I was instantly befriended by the other guy who’s read “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” But I secretly drew a line in the sand at Twitter. Most prostitutes have their boundaries, and for me tweeting was the one act so degrading I had to quietly take it off the table. Despite all my efforts to make myself Liked, I still have only 700-some friends on Facebook, which makes me the Internet equivalent of what in the ancient Indian caste system was called a “dog eater.”

The sympathetic audience for complaints about the terrible problems associated with having your book published turns out to be small. So I will just say that this is not a part of the process that most kids who sat at typewriters dreaming of growing up to be Authors ever fantasized about. Most writers are closet exhibitionists, shameless only on paper, and having to perform and promote themselves is a kind of mild custom-designed torture, like forcing the theoretical mathematics faculty to come up with something for skit night.2 But in any vocation there will unavoidably be a certain percentage of your job that is soul-wearying tedium — paperwork, meetings, office politics — and you should probably count yourself lucky if it’s under 50 percent.

I now find myself, to my surprise, looking back wistfully at the two years I spent writing my book. I am a lazy person who will write only when deprived of any alternative and never would’ve believed I would miss the work itself, which I thought of only as a means to an end. But in those two years I began going to a quiet, Internetless public place every day that I appropriated as my office; I liked commuting, feeling like just another person in the world with a job to do; I belatedly learned to separate work from the rest of my life and not only got more done but enjoyed goofing off less guiltily. I learned the meaning of the German word “sitzfleisch” — literally, the ability to sit, to spend serious time at something, devote your sustained attention to a single subject for four, six or eight hours, and resist the impulse to get up and take a break or check e-mail when you get fidgety or bored. I became a more disciplined person than I’d ever imagined I could be.