On Being Social & Editing

(Image by Russian cartoonist Sergei Yolkin)

First,let's start with a writerly update: For The Desk of Buster Heywood is complete!  I finished it in late October, and took a break from it to start the next novel of Aviario, In The Cards, for National Novel Writing Month.  Then, of course, the dreaded holiday season was upon us, and now I have been away from poor Buster and his perils long enough to edit with fresh eyes.  I am almost through my first round of editing, and hope to have the ebook version available soon!  To thank you for your patience, I have two shiny new excerpts up on the Writing page.

Now: let me talk just a little bit about social media.  As those of you who've been with me thus far know, I am primarily a Twitter and Tumblr person, and have stayed away from Facebook for a few years now.  I know I have addictive tendencies when it comes to the more social functions of the internet, and Facebook has all the hallmarks of being something I could easily lose hours to.  

Unfortunately, it's become the norm for authors to have and rigorously promote their own Facebook pages, and use these as one of their primary sources to find and court their readers.  I would prefer to do that via this very blog, since it seems more intimate and personal to me... but the world of self-publishing is what it is, and over the last couple of months, I have been grappling with the concept of a necessary evil.

I also realized that re-establishing myself on Facebook would be a fantastic opportunity to do something I've been horrible at recently: keeping in touch with friends, both old and new.  While in an ideal world, I'd spend hours on the phone or write them lengthy letters to catch up, my current job doesn't afford me much free time.  So small sound bytes of social media will have to do.  I was self-conscious about this, until I realized that most friends, in the true sense of the word, will not care if you only have a few seconds to say hello: only that you still do.  

So, I'm pulling myself up by my digital bootstraps and wading back into the tides of social media: but for the moment, I'm only going in up to my knees.  I have a novel to finish editing, after all.