Facebook is killing what's left of my writing

It just occurred to me that back in the heydays of this blog, I did not have a Facebook account. I got on Facebook about four years ago only because I bought into the writer-hype that said if you're a writer then you MUST be fully engaged in social media. It is absolutely imperative. Just think about how you can leverage all of your Facebook friends when it's time to sell your book!

I thought to myself at the time that I could only imagine ever having 50 or so Facebook friends. I mean, who is out there beyond that?

Welp, today I have over 600 Facebook friends.

How is this possible.

Some of them are people I honestly do not know. I have never met them. Some are people I barely knew in high school thirty years ago. Some are people I have only met online. It's a strange world.

But that whole hype thing...that's fodder for another post about the business of publishing a novel which is very dark and pessimistic. Suffice it to say that having several hundred Facebook friends translated into a sales multiplier of about one one-hundreth.

And I know it was because I didn't play the game the way you're supposed to. I know that. I don't want to talk about it right now.

But today Facebook has become my primary source of news and cultural awareness. I mean, how would I have know about the home-wrecker penguin if I hadn't been on Facebook? How would I have a feel for the angst of my friends on the left and the right post-election? It's hard to imagine not being on Facebook now because I would lose touch!

However, on the negative side, there have been many times when I thought I would write about something—many times—when I saw that seventeen people were already blabbing about that topic, and I decided that even if I thought I had something new to say chances are by the time I hit the "publish" button everyone would already have moved on. My post would seem to them the way so many posts seem to me. "For God's sake. Not another blogger talking about that!" And so I don't write anything.

But this election season (all 36 months of it) has just about made me sick to death of Facebook, enough that that muscle-memory reflex of clicking the button, that automatic impulse-response of thinking "I wonder if anyone has posted anything new" has just about run out of gas.

The answer is 99% of the time, "no. no one has posted anything new, and if they did, it's probably not interesting."

I'm coming back to where I was in 2012 before I was persuaded to create an account.