Day in the Life of an Idiot

If I ever want to sabotage myself, all I have to do is hit "stats" on any number of my websites. What happens when I do that is that I look at whatever the numbers are there and start either comparing myself to a more successful version of myself, or, worse, to someone else. And it can pretty much be anyone. I don't even have to torture myself with the current "it" crowd in SF. In point of fact, I've been known to send myself into a tailspin by noticing that another Tumblr-er has six comments on his/her post about their fan work going live on AO3, and look over at the pathetic one or two reblog/likes I got and think, "OH FINE, F*CK EVERYTHING. I QUIT."

Which is, of course silly, (if only for the reason that, of all the things I do, my fan work consistently gets the most love.)

This, however, is why I could never do a kickstarter/Indigogo kind of crowd funding thing for any project/potential project/life crisis of mine. I would probably be apoplectic with envy within five minutes of the thing going live. Even if I did respectably well, I'd think, "Well, you-know-who went viral in five seconds SO SINCE I DIDN'T I MUST SUCK SO MANY ROCKS--ARGH, I QUIT LIFE. BYE."

I don't know what to do about it, besides stay the [bleep] away from the dreaded 'statistics' buttons. I'm much happier just whistling on the crowded avenue, as it were. This, by the way, is my metaphor for a lot of social media. I sometimes feel every time I blog or tweet or post, I'm shouting into an extremely crowded hallway, where hundreds, even thousands, of people are passing by at any given moment. Attracting even one person's attention is really difficult. And, often, I can stress myself by looking over at other people standing in this metaphorical crowded hall and seeing the crowd they've managed to gather around them.

I was just talking about the whole social media phenomenon to a friend. The New and Improved SFWA Bulletin had a 'how to win at Social Media' type article and one of the bullet point type bits of advice was "be interesting." Yeah, see, that's not really helpful. I doubt anyone sat down to the social media of their choice and said, "My plan! BE BORING! That's sure to get retweeted!" And, similarly, there's really no quantifying 'interesting.' One person's interesting is another person's dull.

But, I'm probably boring you with that. See, that was my plan. I bet I'll get six new LJ friends now.

If I don't, I'll be sitting over here in the corner sobbing and feeling unpopular.

Speaking of articles that I'd love to read, it'd be interesting to know if anyone has done research on the correlation between depression and social media. I feel like maybe I've read somewhere that the internet (or the interwebs, as I hear you kids call it,) makes people more anxious, because they're always expected to be available, are constantly barraged by info, etc. But, I wonder if anyone has tracked this kind of comparing yourself unfavorably to others problem--or if that's just a problem of mine.

:-)

In other news Shawn had a lovely birthday on Tuesday. We went out to both breakfast and dinner which are my favorite things to do and one of my biggest presents to her was that we went shoe shopping and fabric shopping and I DIDN'T COMPLAIN, NOT EVEN ONCE, ABOUT HOW BORED I WAS. I'm such a good partner, aren't I? I bought her some actual gifts, too, but Shawn is easy in that she likes pretty shiny things like a magpie, so Mason and I went to the Tibet store and spend some bauble on some baubles.

And then I worked at Maplewood Library both Wednesday and Thursday, so it's been a busy week for me.

The day after your birthday is such a rip-off. I mean, yesterday, it was AWESOME that I was turning another year older. Now I'm just old.

But, one of the fun things we did to celebrate yesterday was go to HPB. Shawn and I often argue a bit about my book buying habits. Thing is, I have a tendency to want more books than I read. I know that we all do that to some extent, but, for me, some books that I buy NEVER get read. I've been trying to be better about only buying things that I'll actually read (and trying out books that I might not get into from the library.) But, Shawn will often remind me of this when I have a pile of books in my hand, and I end up very glummly putting them back. (*Especially* glum, because I know she's right.) At any rate, I got to get what I wanted for my birthday. I didn't end up buying any books, though. I bought a bunch of comic books.

In fact, I still had a list of comic books I should try to find in my pocket from a visit with another writers' group several weeks ago, and I managed to find a few. I picked up JMS's Thor (1-8) and Secret Warriors (Hickman) collection, and while I was thumbing through the comic books for other titles I almost lost my lunch because I saw an artist with the last name Braithwaite working for Marvel. I actually had to surrepticiously open up the mylar to see if this Braithwaite was my cousin, Laun. My cousin was the one who first introduced me to his (and his father's) comic book collection and the two of us used to draw and write our own comics ever since we were knee high to a grasshopper. Laun, in point of fact, drew in a more than passable Jack Kirby style and so it wasn't completely impossible that Laun could have gotten a gig as an illustrator/artist. He was also the sort (and probably still is, though we haven't spoken for decades) who could name a comic book's writer, artist, illustrator, and letterer. However, last I'd heard, Laun was busy being a dad and a rock star in LaCrosse. Alas, this Braithwaite was some dude named Doug Braithwaite, a Brit. But, man, what are the odds?

Today my big plans are to go home and take care of all the various animal needs. I have fish tanks to change, gerbils who need fresh bedding, and cats who could stand to have fresh litter (srsly!).

The glamorous life of a published author, I'm telling you!

And, I'm going to try to avoid reading too many Harry Potter Part 1 reviews. I seriously considered dragging my family to a midnight showing last night, but Mason is still awfully young for a film like that. It's a funny thing, but books are different. You can close them. You can take a breath and talk to people about how you feel about the scary or sad stuff as it happens. In a film, everything happens so fast. It looks SO real. It's so BIG. Mason has had trouble with this in the past, when he went to a double feature as part of a school field trip. At any rate, I didn't want to see the film without him, so Shawn and I have decided to wait until it comes out on DVD. I can hardly wait, though. Last night at Wyrdsmiths we talked a lot about our opinions of DEATHLY HALLOW, and... well, now I think I may have some fanfic to read. naomikritzer said that someone's done Neville Longbottom's year at Hogwarts and I think that might have made a more compelling first part of DEATHLY HALLOWS.

At any rate, I hope you all are well.