October 2, 2009

What lonely planet?

It’s a chilly Thursday morning, and you’re hard at work enjoying the idea of a quiet, call/deadline/meeting-free day ahead. In no hurry, you get coffee and breakfast ready and sit down to catch up on all those issues of the Reno News Review (RNR), your hyper-local alt weekly, that have been piling up on the coffee table over several busy weeks.

Right around the third issue, about the same time you realize your coffee cup is empty, something catches your eye. A familiar name.

Mike in RNR

What a coincidence, you say. *I* know a Mike Sowden, too! It couldn’t be the same Mike Sowden, because your Mike Sowden, the one you’ve known and exchanged elk suit jokes with since you were like, TWENTY-FIVE, lives all the way over there in York, England, in the northeast country not far from Nottingham, actually, the place where one side of your own family comes from, but no matter, all the same you’re here in dusty Nevada reading a local Reno rag and he’s over there, 5,000 miles from the RNR offices in foggy York probably whining about being cold or something.

And so you keep moving until you’ve gone two words later to see Eco-Salon, where you know your Mike Sowden has done a little writing from time to time. And you think, wow, two Mike Sowdens who also write for Eco-Salon! And then you see the part about the solar-charged bikini and there is no longer any question: it’s your Mike Sowden.

And here’s where you know you make your living from writing, because your first thought is not an excited and amazed, OMG how cool (and completely unlikely!) is that? It’s: hmmm, I wonder if they got reprint permissions?

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2 Comments

  1. Elk Man on October 2nd, 2009
    1

    Funny old world. Filled with funnier people.

    This “Mike Sowden” sounds like a lunatic.

    A *British* lunatic too – the worst kind.

    ;)

  2. What lonely planet? | Fevered Mutterings on October 3rd, 2009
    2

    [...] What a coincidence, you say. *I* know a Mike Sowden, too! It couldn’t be the same Mike Sowden as yourself, because you live all the way over here in York, in the northeast, a stretch of England imagineably labelled “habited”. And there is some blog-addicted mischief-making crazywoman, there in dusty Nevada reading a local Reno rag and you’re over here, 5,000 miles from the RNR offices, in hurricane-force York, all while she’s whining about how Mike Sowden is always whining about something. [...]

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