A Word on Social Media

In short, I'm taking a break.

In September 2019, I stumbled off all social media. It wasn't a planned act. I just stopped visiting any of my social media sites and stopped playing online/mobile games. Instead, I started writing. It was amazing how much time freed up when I stopped looking at or trying to post on social media.

In about February of 2020, I went back on - to find beta readers. In August 2020, I started up pages dedicated to my author account because we supposedly need social media following to get published.

It had been a glorious 5-6 months off of social media.

Last month, after trying to extract myself from Facebook since 2019 and always having something that was keeping me there, I deactivated my account. My author page may still be sitting there. I have no idea. I can't post to it and I'm not trying to be on there. I tried briefly to be on Instagram and, it's too much. I used it and then had some life stuff happen that makes IG nearly unbearable for me to use. 

I'm disappointed Twitter has not died completely yet. I did all the things to remove myself back in November and have been mostly using Buffer to post. However, publishing, both short and novel-length fiction, still operatores significantly on Twitter. The first week of April or so, I spent almost all my personal Twitter bandwidth participating in Moodpitch events.

​As I write this, I'm debating even bothering continuing to post daily short story recs. Tweets linking off of Twitter are basically hidden by the algorithm at this point. So while it used to be helpful to short story markets and authors to post on Twitter, it isn't currently helpful. 

I also barely get any interest in my daily short story posts on Mastodon or Tumblr. I was thinking I might finish out April, but those posts are probably dead in the water as of last weekend.

I will probably finish the April #WritingWonders prompts and #Writephant on Mastodon. I am having fun with those.

Radio Silence

Unless something happens that requires my attention or to be on a specific social media account, I think I'll be mostly off socials in May. I have a lot of personal stuff I need to do in May. I also need to refocus on writing. Not having distractions will help. Of course, what I need may change in the next few weeks, but this is the plan for now.

We'll see what happens with TikTok. Videos are fun for me. I've been doing videos since high school (no, cell phones weren't a thing when I was in high school - only rich adults had car phones when I was in high school.)  I might make some videos and post them because it is fun for me to do so.

So you'll see that what's fun and entertaining has a lot to do with what I'll keep. And the things that suck up my attention and energy need to be dropped for a bit so that I can refill my energy and well for writing.

Discord

Discord is also an exception. It doesn't feel like social media. If you want to chat with me even from today, I highly recommend finding a Writing Discord group that I'm also in. Send me a message through my contact form or email and I'm happy to direct you to some of them.

Discord is where my main writing community and friends are. Even so, I will likely pull back and mute a bunch of servers to narrow my distractions.