Perhaps it would be best to start back up gradually, with this selection from the September issue of Harper’s magazine (still—along with Geist, of course—one of the most reliable magazines on the newsstand):

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Heidi Julavits imagines a future in which the publishing industry has achieved its “streamlined apotheosis—a single, worldwide, ExxonMobil-owned literary empire offering a list of seven books twice a year”

Suddenly, there will be no new books. Shockingly, this will sadden people and make them yearn for a golden literary era none of them experienced. The actual writers, those few still kicking around, will alight from their surprisingly swank hovels (not writing will have served them well). At first, these writers—mostly buffed, androgynous sorts—will be spotted at farmers’-market stalls, selling clipped sheaves of laser printouts beside the cider-doughnut lady. They will shake your hands, these writers. They will promise that their literary wares are the product of a single, careful mind, unmutated by mass-production and untainted by viral collaboration, and since these writers are plain-looking people, even downright unattractive and badly dressed, they will seem instantly more believable and less evil than the glossy actor-authors of recent memory. Soon a slogan will attach itself to this phenomenon—READ LOCALLY—and the new AgriCultural movement will emerge. Writers will begin to form allegiances with small farmers, and every small farm soon will have its own writer. The farmer and the writer will decide that mutual dependency and market diversification are the keys to survival. When one writer produces a less than stellar product, he will be buttressed by egg sales; when the farmer has a poor strawberry yield, he will be buttressed by the writer’s pure and homey creative output.

Of course the success of this system will lead farms to merge, and writers will begin to work in greater numbers on larger farms, and eventually people from afar will want to read the works of writers whose hands they cannot personally shake, and so the inevitable human impulse to slake all desires and improve efficiency (and thus profit) will mean that by the dawn of the next millennium, we’ll be right back where we are today. But for a few decades ar least—just before the seas rise above the writers’ silos and drown us—oh, what a golden age of literature there will be.