Back from Southern Italy. We did day trips to ancient cities and had a live-in cook, a wonderful friend of the family named Peter, and cut loose from all responsibility I rediscovered the ability to read short stories for pleasure. I turned off the over-active Workshop Module that picks at every word and shuts off the narrative dream.

So I got to most of the stories I’d missed in my published magazine issues (Asimov’s and F&SF) for the last few years and send off some nice notes to the authors in my tables of contents. I have more notes to write. I love writing them. I love writing to an author and talking about why their story is awesome for me.

What I haven’t done is force myself to read stuff when I wasn’t feeling it. And something about being in short story writing mode seriously impairs my ability to look at short fiction as fun

But a week with almost no internet, with almost no writing, hitting me unexpectedly, changed some setting in my mind (We assumed we’d have connectivity because MJs brother who was getting married is a big CISCO guy and we thought he’d have a hovering robot node floating above the Trulis or something.)

We’ll see how hard it is to start writing again today. Hopefully not horrible. Because I’d like to do this, a few times a year, I think, stop writing enough, and hacking out the net, so that reading becomes natural again.

I’ve wanted to be sixteen again, lying in bed reading entire books, lost in other worlds, for decades. I get there so infrequently, and only for a few hours. I wanna lose whole days again to the dream.

Like when I was seventeen and I read all of Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels lying in a hammock on vacation in the temperate mountains of North Carolina, book after book, the warrior king of that mighty falling planet. The rope hammock like some crash couch from an SF book, perfectly supporting me, the breezes blowing, my brandmother interupting me periodically with wonderful food; grits and sausage and eggs and deep fried jalapeno cornbread and red beans and rice, with smoked ham and Tabasco. My parents and grandparents playing bridge and drinking scotch and roaring with pleasure and outrage at every hand. the breeze through the tall trees.

Barsoom spread out at my feet, those dead sea bottoms filled with rust and ochre lichen. Every book, I’d make a new warrior friend, and start a new revolution, and lead another oppressed martian race to freedom, under the glorious banner of Helium, and yes, I was politically young enough not to be too bothered by any of this. ERBs books are all about race. From the POV of a white southerner. The people from whom I am descended.

Some books can only be read at some times in your life.

Now it is time to be in this time, this moment, to completely and totally absorb this zeitgeist and find it within me, to write for this moment and whatever moments ahead that the world might allow, but never mind the future, there’s only now; SF is like cheese, not marble or canvas; some kinds are good for a few years. Most is best served very fresh.

There is no dishonor in being a cheesemaker; if your cheese is delicious.

As for the world, who knows what comes next. Whether my career will be interrupted by events; whether I will be forced by events to take some stand which interrupts fiction, which changes me back into a half-assed activist and columnist; I can only write fiction under the american center, as represented by the likes of Clinton and Obama; when the far vampire-right takes power I just scream bloody murder 24/7.

I don’t enjoy it. Dear God I hope I can keep writing fiction.

Fascism may interrupt that.

So to everyone who feels like their creative work is futile, pointless because few will see it, and it won’t make enough money to put food on the table, for everyone saddened by the stories that won’t sell and the novels that you can’t even pitch, and the ones that nobody wants to see the whole manuscript and the ones where they pass on the whole manuscript, and the ones that are self-published and do nothing, that sell two copies, to all of you, know that I’m one of you.

I feel this keenly most of the time. I try to be as positive as I can in this space. But I struggle to find positivity.

I always wanted to make a living as a ‘creative.’ This term we invented in the last tech bubble, when I got to be one, for a time, and got paid like a grown-up and everything. I wore a suit and they flew me around the country and it ended in a choking cloud of dust and death on 911. I felt like a fraud the whole time, because hey, I was one. So it’s OK that’s over.

My life has been defined by this sense of failure, this sense of not living up to my potential. It hangs over me, it runs through me, sometimes I think it is me.

The horrible thing I have learned how to do, which I don’t recommend, is to just push through it and do the work anyway. It’s my only positive character trait.

What I recommend is what Michael Swanwick called ‘protecting your head.’ Don’t let the voices in, don’t let them own you, don’t let them define you, don’t be that person.

But if they do get in, and you are that person, somehow detach from yourself, the story of yourself and your failure and work on a different story. 

Walking away from it all doesn’t help. Because as Buckaroo Bonzai taught us, “No matter where you go…. there you are.”

So write your stories. They’re yours. Nobody can take them away from you.

I have a big project to finish now that no one will ever see but me, and I suppose the ghost of J.D Salinger. I imagine him now in the shed in the back yard building that towering pile of manuscript none of us will ever read. Like PKDs graphomania, the Exegesis.

Maybe there are better things one could do with ones life. But there are far, far worse things too.

Consider Donald Trump.

Go write.

 

 

So after a few days off traveling with my family—I tried and failed to write crammed in a hotel room with three other people, two of whom I’d helped manufacture—I finally got my ass back in the chair, at my glorious Cafe Mariposa and banged out five thousand words.

They came out sketchy and runny so I pumped them out as audio and listened to them and keyed back into them as I did so, smoothing and straightening and fixing. Five hours whistled away into infinity, gone forever, leaving behind a trail of prose.

Five K is a crazy awesome day, if you’re Ernest Hemingway, and it’s even a good day, if you’re a Indy Pulp writing hack. Could you do that each and every day, you’d write close to two million words words a year, or three short novels a month; or nine big thick novels a year.

Truth be told I’d been thinking up and saving scenes for this thing for awhile, so it was mostly a matter of getting stuff down on pixels that was floating around in my head.

I did a tiny bit of production work for FSI, working on a video for their GLBTQIA Takeover issue, a few loads of laundry and made dinner for the family, and walked a few miles in the freezing fucking cold.

There’s a lot I should talk about. Being off Facebook gives my brain other things to chew on. But I’m wiped out. Maybe tomorrow. But only if I finish my 1800 word minimum.

I’m still behind. I still have 200 and 300 word days. The question is, will I make myself stop having them?

Writing fiction is beginning to feel as deeply wired a habit as, well…

Facebook was. For years and years.

It takes months, to create new habits. I know I’m nowhere near that; this is just a blip on the radar.

But I’m beginning to think that maybe, maybe some sort of success is possible.

 

So you know about my Facebook addiction and my Facebook fast, and if you don’t, well, yeah…

Think years of hours-a-day commitment to Building My Brand Online and Creating Reader and Fan Engagement in My Self-Employed Professional Career of… of…

Writing the occasional short story!

While doing this I kept thinking (and dear god I see the meme of that cat behind the newspaper) I should really be blogging, because at least, then, I own that relationship and maybe it is, ah, worth something.

Well. I should really be writing fiction (or non-fiction) that I can sell, right? Well, if you see this, and you know my NO BLOG BEFORE FROG rule you know I wrote my 1800 words today, so I’m indulging myself with conversational typing.

So part of this indulgence is making sure this bullshit I’m typing now actually get’s read. My blog, after publishing professional fiction presented to maybe, total, a million people over the last few decades, gets one to five hits a day. Mostly, people are interested in my post about The Stranger from the Depths, a scholastic YA SF novel from the late sixties.

Because that’s what google is for. Finding out about that stuff.

So, irony of ironies, I decided to use Facebook ads to advertise in Facebook about my Facebook addiction and withdrawal. I popped into my author page (which, in my rules, isn’t cheating, I’m allowed to be there and engage with both of my fans.) and plugged 3 bucks into my Facebook ad account.

I’m also looking for new Indy Author clients, so, you know, soft-sell. Get them over here. See if they want that service and click on that link, there, that one, in the previous sentence, he says, slyly.

Which gets us to the point of this post. Seen in the graph below:

Putting 3 dollars in, two days in a row, more than doubled my traffic from FB; I replaced my 2-4 hours a day of liking, writing, sharing, commenting with 3 bucks, the price of a cup of coffee, and doubled the amount of monetizable movement from FB to something I’m kinda trying to monetize.

So.

Four hours a day of Facebook is worth a dollar fifty, to my brand, to my little frozen banana stand.

So, again, remember, at Facebook, you are the product served. You are the customer for the product you make. You make your friends on FB, you give them your content through the application–and Facebook sells them back to you.

You work for pennies an hour, playing in your feed. Which is fine, as long as you realize, it’s just for fun. It isn’t a professional activity; it isn’t building your personal brand. It’s a waste of time. You build your brand by creating great work that your fans love.

Facebook sells your friends back to you. Thats all it does, until you start plunking big money in. Which I may someday do. But I won’t be splashing around in the feed anytime soon, unless something happens to change my mind. The more I think about it, the more information I gather, the greater my horror is, at having spent so much time there.

My time is worth more than pennies an hour.

So do your work, and skip FB. If you ever want traffic, from your painstakingly built friends list at FB, you’ll have to pay for it anyway.

The Story So Far

I wrote 1000 words of fiction after billing 4 hours, so, I’m letting myself blog. I ate two half-frogs. Google ‘eating the frog’ if that makes no sense.

To recap: I’m in week six of a social media hiatus as prescribed by Cal Newport—famously efficient efficiency expert on writing efficiency novels efficiently while being a tenured MIT computer-science professor and having two young kids who he plays with every night for hours.

Yeah, Cal is a better person than you are. Get over it. Move on! I’m trying to.

Still, I’m using his slightly infuriating and smug assertions from Deep Work to work on my writing, which means working on process, which means working on habits, which means working on behavior, which means working on my brain. My self. The core of my identity.

So. No pressure.

I have related in this series of pieces the horrific withdrawal pains I’ve experienced. Let’s do a bullet list recap:

• Insomnia
• Full-body itching
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Word pressure

Let’s drill into word pressure; it’s a term generally used to describe schizophrenics. (I’m not, by the way.) What this means is that every conversation I have had for weeks, with everyone, I press to its maximum allowable length, and then, a bit more.

I’m exhausting to be around. I piss people off. To my writing-workshop friends and family. I’m sorry. This is still a work in progress.

I had a 2-4 hour-per-day social-media monkey on my back, and I’m hurling those lumps of excess mental monkey-chatter at everyone around me like an outraged poo-flinging orangoutang.

How did I get so sick?

I let myself believe that my social network had value; that those relationships were somehow, monetizable. Even though, at this date, my only monetized relationships grow out of a SF convention in the 90s and my real-world, meat-space writing workshops.

Maybe I’m bad at social media. Maybe I’m better in person. At any rate, the hundreds of days spent in social networks over the last five years have done nothing for me financially. I make one tenth of what I did in the 90s, when I worked in the tech bubble… overselling the internet… and the value of social networks…

Irony!

Here’s the thing about monetizing social networks; you need hundreds of thousands of people for them to be worth more than pocket-change, in the mass-market sense. While a few dozen or hundred people, in the right field, can get you a great job, it takes hundreds of thousands of citizens to generate enough money for you to live on.

Most people playing the social media game get to a few hundred people and get stuck. Now, here’s the horrible horrible thing; a few hundred social media friends feels like you’re doing something. And you are. You’re making fifty cents a day for Facebook. Or twitter. Or Instagram.

So they want you to keep at it.

But to clarify, you are doing nothing, nothing that will ever help you. Unless, as I said, you’re looking for a job, and then, really, use LinkedIn. The only way your social media will help you is if you become, wait for it, another nod to Cal who is better than me, So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Social media is like kindling. If you have a spark, it can help that spark catch fire and go viral. No amount of kindling by itself ever ignites. So, look it’s ok to connect and share with friends and family and colleagues and your two fans on FB or twitter, that’s great, if you’re not an addict. Enjoy. You have my blessings.

But until you get good at The Thing Itself, social media isn’t going to help you; and if social media eats 90% of your free time, you’re never going to make it. Your 10,000 hours will be spread out over decades.

Mine were. Learn from me. Learn from Cal, really, but from me, if you find him insufferable.

Do your work; head down; joyfully, in the knowledge that your 10,000 hours will one day create a steel so hard that  you will be able to repeatedly strike a spark.

You’ll be able to gather kindling, when you need it. Keep the little pile you have, but don’t sacrifice more than an hour or two a week to do so.

The thing itself. Your music. Your art. Your writing. Tend to the thing itself. Don’t be a social media addict. Just say no.

I can’t believe I said that.

But just say no.