Chattering Into the Dark
Like most of us, I imagine, the internet has become one of my top three time-sucks. Between Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, Bldgblog, and more webcomics than I can count, it’s remarkably easy for me to spend upwards of two hours a day marking my etheric territory – and that’s just on the things I consider to be a basic part of the day, not counting the wikipedic rabbit holes that carry me further and further away from real productivity.
Having made the lists of things I need to do, both for others and for myself, it’s more than clear that I’ll need those two hours a day back for a short period of time. It’s a sprint, more than anything; the web-centric version of a short-term cleansing program.
Unfortunately, two of the things I’ve already determined that I need to do for myself are:
- Write 250+ words a day, and
- Spend more time writing on this blog.
Naturally, removing myself from the social sphere at the same time I’m trying to step up the amount of time I spend contributing to said sphere initially seemed pointless at best, callous at worst. If I’m speaking or writing, and people are being good enough to pay attention, think things over, and respond to me, what does it say when I withdraw from the two-way communication that is the theoretical reason for writing in the first place?
Oh, a good deal of this is selfish, or at least self-full. I’m not necessarily writing anything new or groundbreaking, and the main reason I’m doing it is to get more accustomed to what the folks over at Writing Excuses call “making the clackitty sound …” that is, getting my finely toned buttocks in the chair and getting used to putting words in order across the bright and merciless monitor. I’d be doing it right now even if I weren’t posting the pages to the blog, but it’s not as if I don’t keep a private journal as well.
That one, using pen and paper, averages two full pages a day – probably around my 250 mark already. Increasing that by leveraging the blog is a way to try to ensure that I’m both overachieving on my goals without much mental strain, and to make sure that at least some of what I write is about more than my plans for dinner and having the dream about the pickles again.
To that end … by writing in public, I’m working to be sure I have something that someone, somewhere, might actually find useful or entertaining to some degree. Naturally, I can’t know if that’s true or not without talking to and connecting with people – otherwise, it’s chattering into the dark, like the lemures of the Styx.
All of which is a fairly wordy way to say that I appreciate the comments people leave for me, and that if I’m not responding for the next week or so, you can be assured it’s only because I’m working to find more things to talk with you about on my return.