October 2015.
October. 2015.
That's not really a blog. More like a biannual update.
I've been doing some deep thinking lately. Trying to figure out how to balance life, writing, reading, parenting, other work (like editing). And the thing is, if I want to devote my life to writing--and I do--then there's only so much distraction I can handle. The Internet is Distraction #1. (By the way, YA novelist Nova Ren Suma has a fantastic blog called Distraction No. 99. I highly recommend it.) It's not just that posting things to a blog or Tumblr or Instagram takes time; I probably have the requisite little blocks of time. It's more a matter of focus.
Ours might be called the Age of the Short Attention Span. I've been watching mine erode over the last few years to an alarming degree, and really, if you want to write, you can't have a short attention span. You've got to stick in it for the long haul. Not to mention the fact that I feel physically unsettled, anxious, even kind of nauseous if I don't devote myself to long periods of what writer Cal Newport calls Deep Work--that kind of long, sustained focus on a project that used to be the norm for me. Which is why I used to get a lot more done.
I'm not going to shut this blog down, exactly. But I won't be here often. I'll run a giveaway if it occurs to me, but frankly, that takes a lot of time and scattered mindplay as well, so I won't do one every month as I was doing last year. Mostly, what I'll be doing is writing. If I have something to say about that, I may tune in here. But for all you half a dozen followers, I don't think it's going to change your life much.
And for everyone else, not at all.
If you're a writer, consider this path: the path of working, not networking. I'm thinking it will take a lot of stress off me and put more words on the page. Just an idea.
