The Don’ts and Do’s

I titled this blog post what I did today because I fully intended to do a quickie prosy type write up on all the things I do and don’t miss about Boston after being in Arizona for a couple weeks now, but as I sit and look at the windows I have open at the bottom status bar of my monitor I feel the title is appropriate for a completely different ranting babble instead.

And that babble is: what the fuck is with all of the options for joining and why in the hell do I need or want to join them?

This of course comes as a direct result of being inundated of late by whisperings of the newest social media site Google+. Apparently it’s hot, so hot in fact that you have to get an invite from someone who’s already a member in order to join. Well whoopee doo.

At least that was my first reaction. Now I’m not so sure.

Am I special enough to have been sent an invitation to beta test this site? No, not so much. Probably because I don’t have a Gmail account. Which is also why, after inquiring of one of my teammates as to getting an invite, I still haven’t sent her anything. Because, just like joining yet another social networking site (read: portal of time suckage) I really honestly do not need yet another email to monitor too.

I have a plethora of emails already -- 2 company related, 1 personal and 1 strictly for my writing life -- not to mention that there’s Facebook mail too. If I have to add another email account, another social networking site (read: portal of time suckage) to learn and explore, is it likely that I’ll ever actually do anything else with my life?

The short answer of course is no.

The long answer isn’t as simple as a two letter word.

Social media, as everyone knows these days, is the place to be if you want to gain any exposure to any kind of market for anything. Attorneys have their own twitter following, you can ‘Like’ anything from coffee to celebrities on Facebook and let’s not discount the fact that I never would have known that July 15th had been ‘National bitch slap an idiot day’ had I not gotten the notification of the mass invite on that very same site.

I have a company page on FB and twitter. I have personal accounts on both as well. I have 3 blogs. I belong to countless other silly portals of stupidity all over the internet (I’m looking at you HUBPages and eZine). Hell, I think my MySpace page is even still floating around out there. But I think this whole idea of Google+ was literally just the straw that broke my keyboard’s back this morning.

If I don’t join early, like I did with Facebook, I won’t get the super shiny user name that I want and then 2 years from now when FB fades away like MySpace did I’ll be on the tail end of the new technology wave. I’ll be the equivalent of the virtual dinosaur.

“What do you mean you don’t have a Google+ account? I mean, how is that even possible? Don’t you write books and try to sell them? How are you still only promoting yourself with these archaic means like twitter when you could be on Google+?!!!?”

And then the second I join that it will be ‘Join the newest social media site Strawberry Fields! Everybody’s doing it!’ And so on, and so on until eventually I’m the only one streaking naked through the quad up to the gymnasium.

So where or when does it end? Again, the short answer is, it doesn’t. And that’s what makes me question the validity of joining this new social media site (read: portal of time suckage) in the first place.

But again that also forces me to repeat the question -- when then will I have time to do something with my life? The something that forces me to join all the “networking” sites in the first place? If I never actually find the time to write anything to sell it to someone, then what good is knowing all the someone’s going to do? No matter how many times I post status updates that I’m working on the book, trying to find an editor or rewriting my query all that does is take time away from dong the things I just said I was doing.

Catch-22 much?

You have to join to keep in front of the public but the public can suck so much of your time that you have nothing to publicize.

It stinks.

So for now I guess I’m going to keep my profile off of Google+ and simply keep on keeping on in the manner I’ve been going. I’m pretty sure that someday when I get a publisher / agent / editor who enforces a deadline they will thank me for it.