What the *** is a SEO and why am I supposed to Digg it?

Is anyone other than me completely, utterly, ready-to-throw-in-the-towel-y overwhelmed by the gad-b-zillion bytes of information you have to pile through on this brain-sucking evil called the internet? (That was a little harsh, it's not completely evil.)

A few days ago I just an aspiring writer gathering the courage to give the nice human mailman a 9x11 manilla envelope containing a letter to Ms. Editor, humbly begging her to accepting my idea for an article. Today my head is exploding with terms like social bookmarking, keywords, SEO, CP, affliate links... lawd help me! I'm just a writer!

In order to make it on the web, apparently you have to self-promote. AssociatedContent.com, where I have some things published, gives you a handy-dandy link to all the 12,032 social bookmarking sites out there in order to do this. One little question... WHAT THE HELL IS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING?? Call me dense, call me a dweeb, call me whatever you choose... but I'm too old for this. You really mean to tell me I'm supposed to register my private information at all these sites so that people can "shout" at me or "digg" my stuff (or just spam me to death)?

I don't want to write articles that are highly searchable (well, I do, but I have a feeling no one in the near future will be Googling "Vermont mom writing addict clueless online"). I don't want to be writing "to the keyword" - I want to write what's in my heart.

I'll keep "Digg"ing a little deeper into this new (to me) universe and maybe one day I won't be such a dodo about it all. But for now I'll keep burdening my neighborhood United States Postal Service employee with those manilla envelopes (the ones containing SASE; the only acronym I truly understand at this point), and I'll rely on my yahoo address book and the family and friends who will read my stuff because I'll disown them if they don't.