Is Anybody Out There?

A date is circled on my calendar, it acts as a glaring reminder as to when my latest manuscript needs to be complete.  Therefore, after posting the piece on writer Gigi Amateau I buckled down and went to work on it.  Great right?  Yeah, well you would think so until a few days turned in to a week then two at which time I remembered that I had some other kind of writing to do.  Writing of the social media kind.  I am on Facebook, I do Twitter and of course I run this blog.  All things that I started doing either for fun or at the urging of others.  Yet in the almost year since I have been doing this I have found that my social media activities are like a toddler who is always screaming for my attention while my unfinished manuscript(s) silently waits like an obstinate teenager to be noticed.  As a new writer in the digital age, I feel that it is important to utilize social media yet by doing so I also run the risk of having it distract me from the one thing that will move me from writing for free to being paid to write -which is the ultimate goal.  Sorry but I am not the starving artist type: )  While the pace of social media is enough to make one shy away from it or want to throw in the towel not knowing if anyone will even care about what you tweet or post is even more daunting.  So why bother?  I often tell people that writing is private.  It is not like when a band composes a song.  When I write, it is just me and my computer or my spiral notebook and I.  And it is just us for months.  Words flowing from me to the blank screen or page.  Moreover, after sometime of this one cannot help but to raise this question: Is anybody out there?  Anybody meaning a potential reader, eyes to move over carefully selected words.  This blog, my Facebook author page and Twitter are like me getting a response to that question.  So while social media can be overwhelming at times, like writing novels, it is something worth partaking in.  For more on this topic click here: A Writer's Guide to Social Networking or here: When (or Why) Social Media Fails to Sell Books

Happy reading, writing or whatever:!)