I could have been a novelist instead

I went to the cinema to see the Facebook movie last week, which I wasn't planning to do because I usually go to the cinema to get away from Facebook, but I liked it despite myself. It's a good film — I think the correct term is "zeitgeisty" — if a bit depressing. Is this it, I thought afterwards. The art of our decade: social networking? Sometimes I wish I'd been born in the forties instead. I could have been a novelist or a punk or... or a beat poet! I think I'd have been quite good at going on and on about myself in a café dressed up in a leather waistcoat.

But it's not the fifties and I'm not a beat poet: I just went to see the Facebook movie, and I'm a blogger. On Wednesday I'm going to be part of a "blogging panel" at Fingal Writers' Festival, in which we will introduce an audience of actual writers (who, I assume, write things to be published on paper) to the joys of putting it all over the internet instead.

I feel a bit shifty about this. Surely I should be the one attending a festival in which a panel of actual writers introduce me to the joys of locking myself away in an empty room for five years with no internet access so that I can write a book instead?

I actually started writing my first book when I was nine years old. "What kind of a book is it?" my mother had asked, hovering in the doorway. "It's a novel, for teenagers," I had explained, showing great patience at the interruption. "About death."

"I see," my mother had said, showing equal patience. I then went on to regurgitate the entire first chapter of Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes, only relocating the story to rural North Wales instead.