I go along mostly feeling as though I’m pretty much keeping up with modern life. Or at least make a passable pretense of it.

After all, I have tweeted. I have visited tumblr. I can (usually) upload and download photos. Recently I’ve learned to work not only my television set but also the DVD player and the VCR without even looking for the manual. I can program the GPS to get me places (although I often argue with it.) I even go on facebook whenever I think of it, which isn’t all that often, but still. Facebook is a well-known time suck. You could go on there and between farmville and what-Jane-Austen-character-are-you and sending and receiving little green plants, you could lose years of your life, and emerge crazier than when you went in.

But today modern life soared out in front in an effort to confuse me. I found out that I’m actually an app. Or rather "What Comes After Crazy" is.

(What Comes After Crazy is my first novel, and I still feel very protective about it, since it took me a ridiculous number of years to write, and so it lived in my head longer than most children live with their parents. And now it’s been out in the world since 2005, but, like any good parent, I still try to keep up with where it hangs out, you know. Part of that keeping track of it means that I have a google alert on it, so that whenever anybody writes anything about it, google tells me about it.)

And google has reported today that it’s an app.

Aren’t apps like when you have an iPhone and you want to know what restaurant to go to, and there’s an app for that? Or you want to check the sports scores, and so there’s an app for that?

So, here’s my question. Are people, you know, going to read a whole novel…on the phone? Is that what this means? Come on now. Do people seriously want to read on screens that are the size of their fingertips? Or does this have something to do with the iPad, which as Bloglily pointed out, may be the worst name of a product ever.

I have no idea. I’m just here, making my way through winter, leading writing workshops and working on a new novel—and every now and then, going out to once again do battle with technology: arguing with my GPS, wondering why tumblr doesn’t have an E in it, and following some tweets.

Is there an app for any of that?