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This week, I'm very excited to introduce my book, Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook. It's just as it sounds-a giant mash-up of classic literature and social networking. Everyone is here: Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Dante and the Brontës and George Orwell and Edgar Allan Poe, all representing their finest work: from Beowulf to Lolita, The Odyssey to Ulysses. And just as we all do in social media, they update their statuses, post awkward photos, make strange comments, play time-sucking games and take an inordinate amount of quizzes. (Though, being "classic," what they do is a whole lot more interesting.)

But why let me do all of the explaining? Here's an abridged version of the book's introduction, where Shakespeare himself lays out the rules of this "network," while inviting these classics into his "Admirable, Righteous, Singular and Incomparable Booke Club Group."

TO MY MOST NOBLE, HONORABLE, PRAISEWORTHY AND ATTRACTIVE PURCHASERS. I MEAN BRETHEREN. HERIN SHALL WE RESIDE A SPELL AMONG THE COMPANY OF SUCH GREAT MINDS AS TO

Oh, that's exhausting. Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together.

I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every hawk and gillyflower . . . oh, I don't even know what I'm talking about half the time. I just run with it, creating some of the SEMINAL TOURS DE FORCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. You're welcome.

To be (or not to be, ha!)...no, really, to be in this group, a few rules:

• You must mention my TREMENDOUS AND FATHOMLESS WORKS in some way. There are good ways and bad ways to go about this. For example, Holden Caulfield said about my play Romeo and Juliet, "I liked it a lot. There were a few things I didn't like about it, but it was quite moving, on the whole." This is not unequivocal praise, yet it will do. But then he went on to say that my main characters "get pretty annoying sometimes" and that he "felt much sorrier when old Mercutio got killed than when Romeo and Juliet did." While I'm glad that he found Mercutio a strong, three-dimensional character, it would kind of ruin the drama if I killed off the most important character midway through the play, wouldn't it? Also, way to give away the ending! Romeo and Juliet get "killed." A spoiler alert would help, Holden. Also, Mercutio wasn't that old.
• You must be either an author or a character of a "classic" work of literature. I'm not sure who decides on this "classic" thing. I believe it means as an author you must have suffered, toiled in obscurity, drank, battered yourself with heavy household items, contracted something on the English moors, done something embarrassing in public, had daddy issues, run off with a friend's wife or your own underage cousin, failed at writing Hollywood screenplays, or gone to your grave believing you were talentless and completely unloved. Of course, as I mentioned, "classic" is also a measure of how often you refer to me.
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• If at all possible, somebody involved in your book had to have suffered a debilitating ailment, preferably a disease centered in the lungs or spread by body lice. Or they just died as many of my own characters did-from sadness, betrayal, grief, guilt, or, my favorite, the crazy.

All of you "classic" members of this group have been divided into networks by the topics you seem to enjoy most (which also not-so-coincidentally happen to be my pet interests): epic grandeur, the true misfortune that is love, our misguided youth, men and their need to fight one another and the cruel world, the horror in our souls, naughty naughtiness, those tragic fools of fortune, and playing around with language just to confuse people.

The following will not be tolerated here: Slurs, libel, slander, dullness, status updates that include the phrase "[Your name here] hates Mondays" or "Thank God it's Friday," emoticons used in an effort to mask one's lack of vocabulary, use of exclamation points that gives us the impression you've OD'd on cocaine and Pixy Stix, and abuse of texting acronyms. Unless you are a six-month-old infant or a little girl in a tickle fight, you are not really rolling on the floor laughing. If you are, you need to get up, go outside, and speak to another human being because there's something wrong with your sense of humor.

The following will be tolerated, in fact, expected: Obscenity, bawdiness, drollness, sly wit, bad puns, jokes about one's manhood, random song lyrics, histrionics, inside jokes, sudden mood swings, and references to things like pirates, cows, jousting, '80s keyboard-centric pop bands, monkeys, any of the later Beatles albums, Colin Firth, Kenny Rogers, house pets . . . I believe you get the idea.

But of course what makes a lot of these books classics is that their authors didn't conform to rules; they tried for something a little different and, in the process, made something great. Again, kind of like me. So feel free to maybe color outside the lines a little bit (spambots, that's not your cue to flood our pages with work-at-home and sexy cougar ads).

Enjoy reading. And always remember THE UNRIVALED, MASTERFUL MIND WHO STARTED IT ALL.

Yours,

William Shakespeare

Sarah Schmelling, Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float, Facebook, classic literature, satire, social networking, books, Penguin Books