Thursday, February 7, 2013

social media slacker

it's been 4 days since my last tweet.
17 days since i've posted on facebook.
21 days since i've blogged.

...one week since you looked at me, cocked your head to the side and said "i'm angry" five days since you laughed at me...
sorry. couldn't resist a little Barenaked Ladies interruption.
and yes, if you know that song, it will now be in your head all day.
you're welcome.

i'm posting my sorry social media stats to illustrate what happens when i'm writing. i'm always tinkering with something, but usually that something gets tossed into the "No!" or "maybe later" files with other partial manuscripts. then it's back to the interwebs!
but this thing happens when i break through the 10,000-word barrier, and suddenly i'm a woman obsessed - tossing aside everything BUT writing.
and that includes social media.

i used to stress about this. i used to worry that if i wasn't being loud online, then no one would hear about my books. i actually put more pressure on myself to tweet than to write.
...until one day i looked up and realized i hadn't reached "The End" on anything new in more than a year. somewhere along the line, my writing time had turned into email-tweet-post-promote time.

i still don't know if any of those things help sell a book, but i know this much: they won't help you write the next one. so i've learned to give myself permission to be a social media slacker every now and then. and if you're like me and find yourself choosing between writing and tweeting, then i give you permission too. a few weeks of internet silence won't kill your career. blank pages just might.

and so ends another post about my love-hate relationship with social media. i will tweet it. i will facebook it. and then i will crawl back inside my writing cave and not worry about it.
...at least for a few days. ;)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

lol I had that song in my head as I read BEFORE I saw your reference. :-D

The writing has to come first ... what would we have to tweet, FB, or blog about otherwise?