STATUS: Ready for the weekend—although I think I’ll be working some.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? NEW YORK’S NOT MY HOME by Jim Croce
Today, I’m very sad. One of my favorite bloggers has decided to call it quits. I’m already going through withdrawals.
So join me in saying goodbye to POD Girl and the POD-DY MOUTH blog.
Whereas I mostly feel like I’m stumbling through my blogs and writing them in 20 minutes or less, I found POD Girl’s posts on POD and the industry incredibly well-written, funny, acerbic, and always insightful.
I’m going to miss that. I imagine a lot of PODers are going to miss her as well. In a short time, she became a force to be reckoned with and a real resource for the POD gems that are obviously out there (although her statistics to find those gems boggles the mind).
Now if she would just out herself so I can buy every one of her mid-list books…
I might then be willing to let her go.
Wow…500 emails a day! No wonder she retired. Can you say exhaustion? I hope her archives will be available for a long long time…
Kristin, your blogs are awesome too, don’t you dare retire for many years…please…
Yes, please don’t! You’re far too helpful. I would comment more often but I need to work on my books!
Off topic, have you seen the big brouhaha over at the Guardian book blog on chick lit? (Admittedly, I’ve been spending too much time commenting over there.)
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/03/in_defence_of_chick_lit.html
This topic seems to be popping up on blogs and forums all over the place… do we as writers waste too much time online? I can understand why this person would ditch her blog, if she was spending that much time on it. When would she have time to write?
I’ve noticed forumites on some writers’ websites performing stage bows and making for the exits, citing that participating in internet discussion boards was eating up too much time and energy. As one, who had become something of an invisible friend over the last two years, took his leave of a sci-fi website, I was forced to ask myself, “Do I spend too much time on the web?”
Just checking up on my favorite blogs (this one included) and forums, I discovered that I was spending AT LEAST an hour and a half online every day. An hour and a half I could have used for writing, an hour and a half that sucked away a lot of my creative energy (why it does that I don’t know- I just never seem inspired after tripping the forums).
Say nothing of the days when an interesting topic is circulating the ether, and I become very verbal. Those days, the web can eat up three or four hours.
Sad, this is. Considering how hard it is to free up writing time while performing other tasks, how can we blame someone for going cold turkey? I really think I’m going to have to do it myself, and limit my time online to checking e-mail.
s:
This is sort of off topic, but when I found myself spending better than an hour on line per day (excluding my research days, because that is actually work), I did start limiting myself. One hour per day was all I would allow. It’s worked well for me. I don’t consider the hour a waste, either, because I think the information I gain browsing agent blogs and etc. is priceless. But the internet can definitely be consuming if I don’t watch what I’m doing.
I think spending time sharing information and interacting within the blog world is no different for writers than joining a writer’s group that meets once a month. And it involves much less money than going to a conference.
The daily availability could be problematic, but that is easily resolved by choosing your own meeting times. My sister only checks her personal email a few times per week. She doesn’t have time for anything else. That might sound ludicrous, but my sister has put her own limit on her non-writing time and it works.
If writers who like to blog but don’t want to take away their writing time simply schedule out their blog visits, they can have their cake and eat it, too.
S said: An hour and a half I could have used for writing, an hour and a half that sucked away a lot of my creative energy (why it does that I don’t know- I just never seem inspired after tripping the forums).
Me, either. I think it shifts the thinking functions over into the wrong part of the brain or something. Emotion plays a role as well–I read things that make me excited, angry, sad…and because I experience (and maybe vent) these emotions online, they aren’t there when I sit down to write. The energy has been dissipated.
Also, writing is so solitary by comparison. The page doesn’t talk back to me, nor does it flip to a new screen with pretty graphics every few minutes. My brain gets trained to want that constant stimulation, I think. Years of surfing the net and interacting online have wreaked havoc with my ability to concentrate.
So for myself, I had to quit my longtime, writers-forum stomping ground cold turkey. Result? The motivation and emotional energy needed to write have been slowing returning. But I have to watch myself, because the tendency is to fill the void with other online activities, such as posting on blogs…
Yanno, Kristen, I think being listed on your Blog under “Cool Blogs and Stuff” is bad luck. Look at your top three entries.
Pod-dy Mouth, Jason Pinter, and Anna Genoesse.
Please don’t put me on that list.;)
(Really, I just thought it was too ironic to let pass.:))
Maprilynne
It’s the end of an era! (a short one, I know, but one all the same!)
I haven’t checked her blog in a while and was a bit stunned to come across your post. Since she doesn’t allow comments on her own site, I’ll just say here that she’s an amazing person and I love what she did for those authors.
Most who would rather spend time blogging about the internet are usually those who make lackluster writers. It is either/or. You are a blogger, content to spill your guts to the world wide web, or you are a writer, willing to take your soul and put it into your work. Doing both is contrary, as there is only so much in each of us that needs to be said. Folks who advertise on the web need this, and so they pour their everything into making you all ‘need’ this, too.
Your time is better spent unplugged from the web, writing on your computer or your typewriter, with your door closed keeping you from outside influences. That’s all the internet is, no matter what those who depend on its business uses will swear; a distraction. An open door, an open window through which excess noise can float in and distract you.
This isn’t a tool, this thing called the internet, it is an anchor. Spending more than fifteen minutes a day on it is slavery. Free yourselves and fly.