I’m bad at social media.
I quit Facebook about two months ago. I don’t post often on Twitter (and when I do, it’s usually to push an article I read somewhere. Blogging? For a while, you’d see stories about how blogging is dead, even though some are claiming it’s making a comeback.
My problem is a combination of time and bandwidth.
Time: there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Which is to say, there aren’t enough minutes in the day in between the stuff I need to do. My job — my day job — has a kind of routine that’ll make you want to claw your eyes out. It’s a sine curve of activity that shifts between rushing to get stuff out and waving my hands at the screen, urging people to respond to the stuff I got out.
Bandwidth: I should be writing right now. Technically, of course, I am, but what I mean is, I should be working on my book right now. And — hey — I was, earlier. I finished off a chapter! It went really well! But now I need to start the next chapter, and I figured I’d give myself a scoop of mental sorbet to bridge the gap.
There aren’t a lot of gaps in my day. And when I’m writing, I want to be, you know, writing. Books don’t write themselves, you know?
Still, I used to be better at this. Is there a trick to it? Discipline? Planning out the week’s posts, the month’s posts, in advance?
Maybe.
Time was, I had an actual blogging schedule. Hell, time was, I’d blog every single night when I finished writing. That was nice, posting my word count. It kept me honest. Don’t feel like writing? Well, you’ve got to post that word count, so get to it.
But the thing is, when I stopped blogging, I kept writing. This isn’t much of a revelation, as far as revelations go, but there you have it.
I don’t think I’ll bother with word counts here. Not yet, at least. I probably won’t write much about what I’m writing — part of the reason I stopped doing this in the first place was because it felt repetitive. Like, the chapter I finished tonight surprised the hell out of me. Two of the characters went to a place that felt really natural, and really powerful.
But writing about that . . . it’s sort of dull. I mean, you don’t want to spoil the story, right? And without the spoilers, it’s just me telling you about pretend people you don’t know, doing stuff you have no context for. So maybe none of that.
What will this be about, then?
Well, whatever. I’m going to start soliciting agents, soon (for a different book). Depending on how that goes, it could be worth sharing. And, if that moves on to the next step, and the next step, well, I figure I’ve got plenty to learn, and some of that’ll be worth sharing, too. There are plenty of
So, let’s see where it goes. First post down. More to come.