So, you probably have seen I’ve not been on my author page for Facebook for a while. I could blame a lot of things. Anxiety. Depression. Apathy. Fear. Overwatch. This past year has not been kind – a trend I’m seeing in the years since 2014 came to roost. It’s thrown me off my game, but I am, thankfully, starting to feel something that might be a comeback.

With the echo chamber now taking a backseat (mostly clean of Facebook for a week) in my personal life, I’ll now have some time to turn to its more professional uses. My personal page is going to go dark for a bit (maybe forever, still not sure), but my Author Page (probably how you got here) will be remaining up.

One of the things I loved to use Facebook for was to give me a sense of personal accountability. When I was trying to get my weight down, or my diabetes numbers in order, or my stories written, Facebook gave me people to pledge to who I would, in turn, do my best not to let down. With eyes on me to see if I failed, I felt I had better chances.

Whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s what was done, and I feel it’s time perhaps for a little more accountability. I’m going to list my present projects, both active and back-burnered. I want to see them, and honestly, I want someone else to see them too.

So, here’s what’s going on:

Podcasts

• The Most of the Hour Podcast – A joint project between me and my cousins that has entered a conceptual phase. It would be a podcast that would be no less than thirty minutes and no more than fifty minutes. My cousins would have their own components and stories, while mine would focus on a series I’m calling ‘The  Lighthouses.’

Short Stories

• The Challenge Edits – I’ve been working with some good people in a critique group who have helped me over past months to sharpen my stories a little. Some are ready for publication (such as Hoomins) while others (Blackhand) need either to have more work or to even expand into something bigger.
• New Story-A-Week – I’m not writing a lot of new content save for two recent episodes (in need of heavy formatting) of The Lighthouses

Manuscripts

• The Pirates of the DeeCee Beltway – My NaNoWriMo project started in 2011 that got a completed first draft but has sat in revision hell for some time. I started a little editing over the summer and got through a significant portion, but it languished.
• Parked – A NaNoWriMo from 2012 that becomes more and more irrelevant the more I let it sit. I never finished this one, but it had promise. But, it’s only valuable so long as there’s a political relevance to it and history gets changed every day with more to come ahead.
• The Many Labors of Bob – The longer I let this one get away from me, the more different I feel about it. It’s my first completed manuscript, but I feel like it needs some major changes.

Visual

• I have no visual plans at the moment, but with the acquisition of an iPad Pro with a Pencil peripheral, I’m starting to draw more again. I don’t know what it will produce, but I look forward to finding out.

This is what I have at present. And I need to move. I have some time back now. And I need something to focus it on.

Anyone who knows me could probably tell you this, but… I have a social media problem.

I’m highly (or hyper) active on social media, specifically Facebook. I have both a personal and professional presence there. I have over 500 people in my personal feed. I obviously can’t keep up with all of them, but I post frequently and skim through the feed for things that might be interesting. I hit it when I’m bored. I hit it out of habit. I check in too often when I could best be pointing my focus elsewhere. It’s a constant distraction.

And a constant irritation.

For the past year it’s fed me news about the election. Which, without getting on either side of the political fence, is nerve wracking. The echo chamber got real loud, and so did the comment posts. People on both sides were branding their pitchforks and torches. It was unpleasant. Adding it to a longer list of stressors was making for a difficult situation. Something I started to use as something to connect me to others was showing me sides of personalities that I never wanted to know. I think different about some of the folks after hearing them go off on their own soapboxes. I did my best to stay out of these frays, though sometimes I got sucked in. Sometimes it wasn’t about politics either. There was negativity on everything.

So, I have opted to pull out the plug on my Facebook account for a while. At least on the personal side. I’ll still need it for my writing stuff. I’ll also need LinkedIn and Twitter for work, but I so very rarely find that Twitter is an everyday thing, and LinkedIn is mostly used for research.

The results of the pull back in the past thirty-odd hours (almost a week at time of update) has been interesting. I’ve found that the things I’ve been sharing are generally unimportant. I’ll see something happen and my first instinct is to post about it. When I go to my phone to do it and the icon for Facebook is gone… there’s this jarring sensation and I realize: I have reclaimed a minute of my life. I’m not tapping at the facepane of the phone, I’m going about my day.

How much time have I lost?

Another thing though I note is how much of it is just habitual. My basal ganglia tells me whenever I have a good thought that the next step is to broadcast it. It’s incredibly hard to slap that down. And even as I have the thought of not posting, the next thought that comes up is that I should post about not posting. Let that sink in.

My brain is a jerk.

The best thing though that I think I ever did was taking the app off my phone. I still go to access it, again, as an entrenched behavior. Already, I’ve had a dozen times where I reflexively open the folder on my iPhone and click the space where it used to be (which is now Twitter, tied to my work profile).  Twitter usually feels like Facebook Lite, so I feel almost no draw to use it apart from promoting work. I think that the more I get away from just having it at a moment’s notice, the more of my life I’ll get back.

Of course, I’m saying this as I send out a blog post. So, who knows.