Excerpts From My Ongoing Novella: Fire At Their Fingertips: Part One

Fire At Their Fingertips: Part One
I have been working on a project near and dear to my heart. It's about the powerful and often dangerous world of social media and eating disorders.  It's a toxic combination. We have gone from the Xanga pro ana girls to social media staples like Instagram and Facebook. Yes, there are positive aspects to this relatively new phenomenon, but dig under the surface and it's open season for impressionable young people who spend far too much time online and gather what I call "cybvver-friends." No replacement for the real world, but to young girls and guys, what's written about them can and does have dire consequences.
It was January 15th 2019.
It had been two years since her daughter, Natalie’s untimely death. Her distraught mother had more than sufficient time to reflect on just when and where everything went so terribly wrong. Susan Platt, a thirty-eight-year-old mother to now deceased daughter, Natalie, had to face the undeniable and ugly truth: She had let her fourteen-year-old run loose into the darkest and most depraved part of the world: The Internet.  She’d willingly and naively pushed opened the gate to hell for her only child. Susan, in her rage and overwhelming pain, found virtually everyone and everything about cyberspace to blame for Natalie Amanda Platt, a grade nine student who dreamed of becoming a high fashion model’s untimely death. But who really was to blame?
“Well, I suppose we have all we need here. What is really required is for you to dig into these social media sites and the kids who take part in them. That will give you much more ammunition than we can here in law enforcement. Besides, we don’t have the manpower to waste any more time on teenage hijinks.”
“What is all this talk about social media? Just how pervasive is it and can it have lethal consequences?”
“I heard about an unbalanced woman who was driven over the edge by a group of stalking bullies back in the early 2000’s, but that all transpired in some isolated message forums. That was just the tip of the iceberg, however. Now with sites like MySpace, Twitter, Live Journal, Facebook, Tumblr and perhaps the most toxic one of all: Instagram, cyberspace has become a veritable tepid wasteland. They’re all pure poison, trust me. Hand in hand with Instagram are these “pro-skinny” boards and that’s where most of the alienated kids with eating disorders congregate to share tips and tricks for losing weight and hiding it from their parents. Ever heard of anything so sick in your life?”

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