For NaNoWriMo I passed the halfway mark of 25,000 words this past week, just at around 31,000 as of tonight, on the way to 50,000 by months end. I fully expect that I'll still be working on it with the laptop at the folks' house on Thanksgiving.
I had a few other challenges this week, one chapter had a bar fight in it, and I've never really been in a fight, eight years of taekwondo doesn't really count, so I had to imagine quite a bit there. Also challenging was a chapter that involved seduction, and probably too much information for you here, but it's been several years since I could draw from my own life for that, so once again to my fevered imagination. Also challenging since it was from a woman's perspective.
Since I needed to spend every spare moment writing, I've withdrawn from the almighty Facebook for a bit, but truth be told, I was hitting a wall with it as it is. The signal to noise ratio was definitely more noise, and I was getting tired of reading things that I couldn't unsee. I obviously had a lot more time to work without it, and I'd like to see if I can keep that going as much as possible after the writing's done. But it's a sad reality that most people primarily communicate this way, so who knows what I've missed since they don't tell you in person much anymore, and I wonder if my absence was even noticed by many.
I definitely often suffer from the Fear Of Missing Out, and Facebork takes advantage of that. But if I don't see it, then I won't know what I'm missing. I also won't see people showing me how much better their lives are than mine. Oh, there must be a happy medium here. But it's frightening how much power we've allowed social media to have over our lives.
I think our expectations of frequency/quantity of social communication have expanded to huge proportion. Like, i think back to the days of Usenet and local mailing lists being the primary forms of social media, and high traffic days were like, 50 messages/posts. You knew something had blown up if a thread suddenly had like 100 responses. But my FB feed will show 100 statuses (and spam) in an hour or so. If there wasn't anybody hanging out in an IRC channel or whatev, there was nothing happening online.
ReplyDeleteWe (or at least, I) spent more socializing time in public spaces and the serendipitous interactions there--sitting in a popular coffee shop, killing time sitting around in the Pit, etc. And i think that's also part of why people (by which again i mostly mean, me) would go out five nights a week to clubs and bars. Like, ok, yeah, i was in my 20s, but i also think it had to do with my own expectations of connection, that i needed to actively seek it IRL if i wanted it. Now, i have caught myself actually thinking "Well, i'm going to pour a glass of wine and hang out on twitter tonight," and i take a step back and i'm like, WTF. It's not that i don't think those are real conversations, but they feel a whole fuck of a lot more solitary than the exact same conversation screamed over the music at Ceremony or what have you.
Also, right on with the word count! I noticed you missing on FB, but i knew you were writing. :)