This, just over here, is a pile of boxes, and, as evidenced by the representative sample, each of those boxes is filled to the brim with copies of Fresh Squeezed, the new Juice Verrone novel by Bonnie Biafore and me. This picture, I’m sure, is causing endless glee to those of you who purchased the Special Package back when it was available, the pre-publication special offer, or who just sent us some money in the mail and expected something in return. Your wait is almost over. The fun is about to begin. Of course, we can still use all the help we can get. Buy the book, tell your friends, and ask your library to get the book in. Facebook us, Twitter us, or stand on a milk crate in the park and read aloud off your Kindle. Anything and everything you do will help make Fresh Squeezed a success.

Nevertheless, an author is never better than his or her next book and for those of you who have been smitten with the Fresh Squeezed bug, fear not. The sequel has been started. Words have been typed. Plot lines have been, well, plotted. When you finish Fresh Squeezed still wondering “Why did that clown have to kick poor Tofu?” your prayers will be answered. The question won’t, but your prayers will. All of your favorite characters, at least those who survived the first book, will return along with a host of new ones. And if you think the bad guys were nasty in Fresh Squeezed, well, buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride.

A couple of weeks ago I told you about my leap into the waters of modern technology with my new smartphone. The purchase was set in motion by my need to function as a writer, publisher, distributer, and bookseller. All at the same time. In the recent past, I was often able to sit and do nothing. Nada. Zip. Now I have to be On all the time. I wax misty when I recall that time when I could just stare out into space letting my mind wander and think about whatever it is my mind thinks about when it’s out wandering. The, ahem, details of which I will not bore you with here. But as I found out, a wandering mind leads to thoughts, thoughts lead to ideas, ideas to concepts, concepts to stories, stories to books, and I find myself in my current predicament.

I figured that to pull this charade of many hats off, I needed to go absolutely Multiple Personality Disorder and take on the schizoid, multi-tasking, always-connected view of the world that is Life in the Future.

Fortunately, I was already half-way there. Stop nodding.

I’ll confess at the outset that the whole Big Brother thing that the internet’s got going on has had me worried since I got my first real email address back in 1988. It was one of the big reasons I abandoned smartphone technology after my early foray. When you put all this information out there, it’s out of your hands and anybody who can get theirs on it, owns it. It’s much worse nowadays. The big fears about government knowing your every move and thought proved unfounded. It turned out that everybody else was who we should have been worried about. Thanks to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Bank of America, and the rest, everything you do online, every purchase you make offline, every move you make, is recorded by something, and that information is sold.

Pooh, pooh. I hear you say. And I agree to an extent. I will allow that the aggregators that take your information, most of them anyway, do not attach a face or name to it. But given the very volume of the information collected, it is very easy to back out your true identity. The anonymous information all points in different directions, but where all those pointers intersect, is you.

It’s easier than you think and you do it every day. I’ll give you three pieces of information and you’ll know exactly what I mean. If I say “desert, lights, chips” you’ll know talking about a completely different place than if I said “alligator, mouse, rides”. And, particularly in the second case, that’s enough to differentiate the place from similar attractions in the area, and far away. If you can figure out those two places that quickly, with just three words to point you in the correct direction, just think how much more exact you could be if you had a thousand, or ten thousand, pointers.

So even if they don’t really know who you are, they can figure it out in the blink of an eye. Or faster.

As a recent example. A couple of weeks ago I paid a visit to the great State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations which is the full name of that tiny parcel of political intrigue and organized crime the rest of us know simply as Rhode Island. While in Rhode Island I happened to use my computer. And keeping with the spirit of the state, did so by breaking into a nearby WiFi connection. The end result of which, vis-à-vis our discussion, is that now, two weeks later and back on the other side of the continent, I am constantly badgered by Rhode Island politicians seeking money and votes, neither of which I can provide. Not only did they know where I was two weeks ago, but they know who and where I am now. They remembered.

Seeing this writing on the wall well over twenty years ago, I took measures to protect myself.

Imagine for a minute that you are a wildebeest trundling across the African savanna with your herd; your group constantly stalked by a pride of ferocious lions intent on turning at least one of you into lunch. Wildebeests, along with other herd animals, have learned through evolution (or were told by God) that the more of you there are in a herd, the less likely it is that any one of you will be on the menu. The loners just didn’t make it. Over time herding became so popular that some herds were large enough to cover the ground from horizon to horizon. Then men with guns came along, but that’s a different story.

I digress.

Now, imagine if you were a high-tech wildebeest and could, while walking with the herd, project a number of images of yourself walking along beside yourself. So that even if the hungry predator got right up to you and took a swing with dagger-sharp claws, it still probably wouldn’t really get you. Because you’re not really there.

This, is how I figured it should be in the online world as well. Despite the predators lurking along the shoulders of the information super-highway, I would be safe driving along hidden by millions of others and by the fact that, out on the road, it’s not actually me.

To maximize my online anonymity I intentionally created an image of myself, a chimera if you will, for each different task I had to do on the web. Personal, shopping, business, finance and banking, all had their own little spaces, safe and separate from each other. And it worked. The inevitable problems that cropped up in one of those eCubbyHoles, never trickled into any of the others.

But now, with the online world tucked away in my pocket and that connection always on, always informing, I can see my carefully constructed walls begin to blur, to vanish. My plan to be anonymous and safe now a victim of the unholy union between high technology and my quest for fame. All of me, tucked into a small blue box, only a swipe on the touch screen away.

And so I find myself come full circle. In what may be the ultimate Zen irony (or Divine Punishment, if you prefer), in my quest to be many I found out that I really can’t be more than just one.

Now, those of you who have been counting will notice that this is blog number 104. That’s right two whole years have gone by and I haven’t missed a week. That’s about to end because I’m going to take a few weeks off for a much needed break. I’m going to dredge a few of my favorites out of the archives and will be back in September with all new stuff and, just maybe, something even a little different.