Writer Boy was having a less than thrilling realization. As an emerging writer and not a fella who felt he had yet conquered his chosen craft of being a wordsmith, he had been wrestling with the evil passive word demons. Writer Boy hated passive tense because he mostly wrote thrillers, and there just aren’t many passive thrillers. He found it more than a tiny bit ironic that something passive could be so difficult to battle. 

It occurred to him that this very word battle he had fought in his mind, over and over, might be the genesis of the term “Passive Aggressive”. He scratched his thick crop of salt and pepper hair, watched a few silver strands float onto his keyboard and idly noticed his email had an urgent desire for him to read another incredibly important missive from some purveyor of that cyber mixed meat called spam. His word battle all but lost, Writer Boy surrendered to the semi-wanted distraction of email.

It had not been lost on Writer Boy that his computer was significantly smarter or at least had a better memory that he did. His word processor never misspelled, his thesaurus (he had to use the spell checker to make sure that was spelled right) provided him with new options when words escaped him. His handwriting, never a thing of beauty, was no longer relevant and his tendency to misplace things only meant that he had a limited place on his computer hard drive to search. A much better option than dumpster diving and circular-file surfing. Yes, poor Writer Boy was definitely considering a silicon surrender to his silicon savior.

If Writer Boy accepted the superior nature of his own little laptop, how could he not listen to the direction of the emerging cloud computer system that was threatening to take over commerce? How could he possibly argue with the great Amazon Warrior (Jeff Bezos)? How indeed. Amazon had just sent Writer Boy a “recommendation” of the perfect book for him. Amazon had decided that Writer Boy needed The Screenwriter’s Bible, 4th Edition, by David Trottier.

At first Writer Boy was completely drawn in by the binary knowledge of the great Amazon computer system, that was until Writer Boy realized he already had The Screenwriter’s Bible 3rd Edition, and he had purchased that version from Amazon. Say it ain’t so Joe (or in this case Jeff). Amazon was recommending a book he already had, but in a new edition. Amazon might not be thinking in Writer Boy’s best interest or worse, Amazon might have forgotten that Writer Boy already has this book or even worse, Amazon might be just pushing Writer Boy to buy any book. Oh the agony. Writer Boy raced to his book shelf, thumbed through Edition 3 and considered, would it be possible for the new version of the Screenwriter’s Bible to be worth the shelling out of the twenty or so dollars to find out.