(Un) Social Media

I am a highly suspect person. Not only do I write under a pen name, I keep a very limited social media presence. According to recent political administrations, this makes me suspect. “Normal” people apparently have large social media footprints and to opt out makes you suspicious. (Right. And how many killers and weirdos turn out to have huge online presences and regularly post manifestos? But that’s not suspicious at all.)

How times change. Keeping your thoughts to yourself used to be valued. Now it marks you as an oddball of the worst kind. If you’re not on social media, it is assumed that you’re hiding something. It is not assumed that you just don’t want to talk about what you ate for breakfast, or that you simply judged the thoughts in your head to be best kept for private consumption. (Or simply too stupid to repeat to the world.)

Since this presumption of oddness is the default, I’m taking the time to explain my lack of engagement on social media. I have two platforms: Instagram and Bluesky. The only things I post there are notices when new work is available on this site. (And that’s only if I remember. I refuse to be a slave to this stuff.) I probably won’t reply to comments, and I don’t chase followers or automatically follow back.

(I also crosspost on Substack and maybe write a few extra articles or stories to post there, just to mix it up a bit, but that’s far more about the writing than the social part.)

Why so limited? Why so odd? Why do I look like some sort of criminal? Why defy the norm that says any writer who wants success must post endlessly on social media? In a nutshell: Been there, done that, hated every bloody second of it.

When I was working as a traditionally published author, social media consumed most of my writing time. I didn’t have the money to farm it out to some hip intern, so it fell to me to keep up with it. My publisher wanted me on every platform, preferably with unique content for each. (And oh, how I came to hate the word content!) I had to track engagement and followers and hashtags and trends and… One day I woke up and simply said, “No more.”

My life was vanishing before my eyes. All the stories I could have written were going unwritten because all my time was spent feeding an algorithm. All the hours I could have spent on hobbies, with friends or family, gone because I had to keep posting in order to stay relevant. My posts, clicks and valuable time were enriching Zuckerberg and Musk, not me. That isn’t how I wanted to live. I didn’t want to look back on a life spent chasing followers and likes.

(And let’s not get started on all the hate, lies, and garbage that, try as I might, I simply could not avoid because the nature of the beast is to push that crap to the top of your feed.)

I’d rather have just one live person who really loves me than a million followers I don’t know. I’d rather surround myself with positivity and love than hate and divisiveness. It’s that simple. So, I made it a priority to put my time into what I want to see on my deathbed. That’s family, friends, pets, good works, a body of work I’m proud of. I don’t want to see an endless scroll of nonsense.

So in this new iteration, I don’t care about any of it. I’m simply writing for my own enjoyment now. If others find it interesting or valuable, I’m happy about that. But if not, I no longer care. You can look to my social media for notices about new work, but honestly you’re just better off coming here and checking for yourself.