Three Months in the Net: Lessons Learned

It’s been about three months now since I wrote my first blog post, “The Blank Page Plunge,” and began learning how to use the internet as an author’s networking tool. Before that I’d really only used it for research and entertainment, and so this was something new entirely.

Now it’s been a quarter of a year, and I find myself looking back and evaluating. It has turned out to be a challenge for me to balance my Author Facebook page and my blog with what I like to refer to as my “real” writing. I.e: the writing of actual books. I call that the “real” writing because, well, it’s kind of the reason I even bother doing all the other stuff!

Particularly over the holidays, though, I found it far too easy to keep my blog and Facebook page updated at the expense of my actual book, which was continually pushed to the back burner. Being on the “net” began to feel uncomfortably like being stuck IN a net. Trapped doing one thing when I really knew deep down I should be spending more time doing something else.

And while that might be excusable during the holidays (and I did excuse it!), I’ve found it disturbingly difficult to recover and get back on track. Even without the holidays, I’m still having trouble. Basically, blogging just seems so much more urgent than book writing. After all, I “have” to get a post up every week, don’t I? And on top of that, it is so much faster and takes so much less concentration to design a Facebook post than it does to really crank out some good chunks of the story!

But wait a minute. That’s backwards! Why go to all the trouble to blog and post about writing a book if I’m not actually spending enough time writing a book? It’s pointless. Absolutely pointless. Right?

Ok then, here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be taking a break from blogging for approximately the next 4 weeks. It’s going to be a busy time anyway for me, and I know if I don’t plan for it I won’t get much writing of any kind accomplished. I will have to have a plan.

So here it is:

Number 1: No blogging

Number 2: Minimal Facebook posting

Number 3: Focus on the REAL book

Hopefully after this break I can return with a better sense of how to balance the many different types of writing I want to do, and can get back to my regular blogging schedule. I certainly hope so! But, at least temporarily, I will have to echo Bilbo Baggins‘ birthday speech:

“I am going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell.

…Goodbye.”