Time Supply

I love the “new world,” this place where everyone is connected all the time, this thing that the internet has gradually morphed into that allows such close and constant contact. It’s a glorious place.

But it’s also a major time sink. And given that time sink, it’s also a major worry. that worry being this: if I’m not participating, I’m not succeeding.

As you can tell, I’ve been away from the keyboard often recently. The day job has been monstrously huge for the past six weeks or more, and there have been vacations and events and travel both within the US and international. I barely have enough time to write a little, better yet read, and better yet keep up with the blog and my fledgling attempts to absorb what Twitter can do for me. And that’s the order of priority–family & work, then writing, then fitness, then reading, then socializing, then anything else.

I admit that I’ve gotten a bit worn down the past couple weeks, and allowed the “anything else” to step in front of socializing–just because it’s easier to sit like a lump on the couch than to actually think.

Regardless of any particular order of priority, I wanted to take a moment to say that one of the things I don’t like about this new and wonderful world is the aspect of competition that seems to be inherent in this social element of the game now. By that, I mean that by stepping out of the blog for a week or two, I find myself feeling that I’m losing ground to everyone else–that going silent is akin to not swimming in the tides required for success as a writer in today’s new world. The intellectual side of my brain says that writing a good story is still the main element of success in this field–that if you write as well as you can write, the rest will take care of itself. But that’s not what the emotional side of my brain says (and I’m apparently one of those weird people who is not dominated by one side of my brain or the other, instead they just bicker back and forth until settling on some compromise).

The intellectual side of my mind says this world of writing fiction is not a competition, but my emotional brain looks at the intellect and semi-calmly calls bullshit.

This is my current little paranoia as I settle back down into something that almost resembles a normal cycle of life and working. I’m sure I’ll recover just fine, and be back to it around here in no time flat.

In the meantime, I suppose I should not that I’ve been progressing moderately well with my efforts on the latest novel. I have one issue that needs to get resolved before I can say I actually know the full story, but these things have their ways of working out.

So fear not, those few of you out there still wandering around here, my silence does not mean that progress has stopped. Only that time is in short supply.