Escaping the Internet

Tags

Happiness, Internet, social media

There were times, during my ill-fated attempts to promote my books, when I felt my whole life was being run to suit the demands of the internet. It was a hard taskmaster. Everything I could think of was swallowed up in the greedy maw of social media. More, it demanded, better. Not good enough. Out of date. Insufficiently liked. Not enough engagement. There was always something wanting. And there was always something new to be grasped, too; why are you not appearing live on Facebook, making book trailers, creating podcasts, using the right hashtags, gathering more followers? Keep up or you’ll never succeed. Out-shout everybody else if you can. Sink or swim. I can’t tell you how much I disliked it. I felt enslaved by the whole unholy, unforgiving thing.

When my health began to suffer I said enough, that’s enough. Surely, the internet is here to serve me? Surely I am not here to provide it with ‘content’, am I? I could weep, now, at the thought of the hours I frittered and fruitlessly wasted trying to please social media. It wasn’t all bad, of course – but oh, there were so many better things I could have been doing with my time.

I am at an age now where I care about time. I’m reluctant to waste it on anything that isn’t useful or beautiful (to hijack the words of William Morris) – or truly enjoyable.  I refuse to be a slave to the internet any longer. In practice this quite often involves simply switching the damn thing off.  It’s quite refreshing to escape the constant intrusion. I get more writing done, too. I highly recommend it.

It seems we have all forgotten how to inhabit our own little worlds, written them off as ‘limited’, and decided that only constantly engaging with the outside world in all its confusing variety is good enough. We have forgotten to live our own lives in the race to compare them with everyone else’s. Pity. The internet is not real life – it’s a distorted reflection of it. And we don’t have to constantly feed it.

Anyway, now I’m looking for ways to make the internet work for me instead of the other way round. It’s a wonderful medium for putting my writing and artwork ‘out there’, and I’ll use it, but I’m not going to let it tell me what to do, and I certainly won’t let its incessant demands run my life ever again. Here’s to escape!

Gilding the Lily?

Tags

flowers, illustration, publishing, writing

I couldn’t help noticing, when I published one of my attempts at artwork, how immediate the response from people was. No surprise, really – you can take in a picture at a single glance, decide what you think of it and move on quickly.

Compare that, then, with the difficulty of getting a response to a piece of writing. Or a whole book. The problem is, of course, that in persuading someone to stop and read you must also persuade them that it’s worth investing their time to do it – potentially quite a lot of time. And how much more difficult if you need to persuade them to pay for the privilege! No wonder selling books is so tough.

I’m very glad to be largely out of that particular loop, and no longer struggling to get people to buy my fiction in a heavily crowded market. The reaction to my (very amateur) artwork was interesting, though. I don’t anticipate printing or selling the finished book, but I would still like people to read it and will share it freely when the time comes. Maybe using some of my drawings to promote the piece will have positive results, since people seem to respond to them.

I have now begun to print out some of the pages to see the overall effect, and the urge to decorate them further is intense. I think I might experiment with it. Children’s books aside, you don’t often see decorated pages in modern fiction. Gilding the lily? Maybe. But I’ll enjoy it. Perhaps I’ll start a trend!

Meanwhile I’ve included here another picture from The Herbarium just to get your attention.  It represents the wood anemone, or windflower, and it goes with a story from the collection called Blown Away. I hope you like it.

Discovering the Off Button

Tags

social media

I did something very unusual the other day: I blocked the posts of someone on Facebook. Why was that, you ask? In short: repeated, nasty, foul-mouthed rants. I appreciate this person may have difficulties in their life, and I’m not unsympathetic, but I really don’t need either the negativity or the swearing in my own life. So I made the unprecedented (for me) move of blocking the posts.

Now I believe social media has the capacity to do a lot of good in the world. I can’t begin to count the number of supportive messages, helpful comments and kind thoughts that have passed before my eyes. I have both gladly given and gratefully received them myself. Sadly, some people prefer to take the opportunity to air personal grievances or indulge in political rants. I defend their right to do so, but dash it all, I don’t have to read that stuff.

An attempt on Twitter recently to get people to be a bit nicer to each other was doomed to failure for me when the first tweet I read was from somebody asking (in appalling language) if we expected her to stop telling everyone how terrible her life was. Well, yes, I think that was the general idea, if only for one day. I switched off.

Many other people, I note, are equally fed up with all this – or of being unpleasantly attacked for what they considered an innocent remark – and are switching off, too.

I’m still on Facebook and, more rarely, on Twitter. I try to keep my own posts positive and helpful. I think carefully about what I say. I don’t share anything without checking it out (to avoid spreading fake or dubious ‘news’). I don’t swear. I certainly don’t attack people I disagree with. But now I’ve discovered the Off Button, I confess I might be tempted to use it more often on people who don’t extend the same courtesies to me.

Social media provides us with the tools to filter out much of the unpleasant stuff: perhaps we should all use them more often. I have realised I can make my own rules about what I see online, and I shall be applying them from now on. Sometimes you just need to switch it off. I certainly shall.