So I actually missed noting this by a few days, but I posted my very first blog post 14 years and four days ago.
The topic, btw, was jigsaw puzzles and how much I love my family. “Working a jigsaw puzzle,” I wrote,
is a way for a few people you care about to gather around a table and share something, which isn’t the puzzle but your time. You’re facing each other — unlike when, for instance, people watch television together. You talk about whatever comes up, serious topics or lite topics or just how you’re certain that the particular piece you’re looking for is surely lost. You laugh, a lot. And if you pay attention, you realize how much you love each other and how comfortable you are together.
Coincidentally, I was back east over the holidays and yep. And we did a jigsaw puzzle :)
Meanwhile, however, over the last several weeks, I’ve been doing something else.
Tackling a long-overdue job: website cleanup
I’ve written nearly 1200 posts over the years (!).
And in all that time, I’d never gone back over them to do things like remove broken links or clean up taxonomies.
I had good reason to procrastinate: it was a lot of work. Dozens and dozens of hours’ worth of work.
But as of today, I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve paired the published posts down to around 750 and fixed links. I re-categorized some posts and cross-linked them where needed to better capture updates on specific topics.
The exercise also served as a major explore of the ol’ memory-lane.
That time period — the mid 2000s — was a the golden age of blogging…
I can still remember how incredible it felt to be able to write about anything I wanted to write about, and publish it, without having to navigate any gatekeeper or satisfy anyone but myself. It was so, incredibly freeing. I’d been working as a contract writer for years, I’d co-written Outwitting Dogs, I was working on a novel that I hoped to sell to a publisher. Now, all of a sudden, I could just write.
All of a sudden, I could hit a button and be out there for anyone to read.
I discovered WordPress. I taught myself a little php coding so I could modify its default Kubrick theme (remember Kubrick? Oh, that blue… oh, how thrilled I was when I made my site turn green!)
Comment spamming became a thing. I told them to go away and wrote an ode. I discovered Akismet — phew :)
It’s impossible to understate how life-changing it felt to be able to blog.
And I wasn’t alone. I was part of a blossoming online community of people who appreciated what I published, who would link to me, comment on my blog — and of course I did the same for them. (The right-left divide was there, btw, but it didn’t feel as dire and insurmountable. It wasn’t vicious. We were still trying to understand each other.)
Many of us coalesced around our respective communities. I wrote a lot about Rochester, New York, where I lived at the time, and exchanged links and information with a dozen or so other Rochester-area bloggers, many of whom are gone, now. Mr. Snitch. Zinnian Democracy. For some topics of local interest, like Rochester’s proposed Renaissance Square, my blog could arguably be considered an important contemporaneous record.
Many of the sources I quoted about that project are no longer available online.
And then there were the other aspiring fiction authors.
We linked each others’ posts. We shared ideas and advice and writer resources. This started a year before Amazon launched the Kindle, before the indie author became a thing. One of our favorite subjects was literary agents: how to query them, what they liked, what they hated, which ones to avoid. (Remember Miss Snark?) (Her stuff is all still online btw.)
And then came 2007 and Kindle Direct Publishing — another moment I will never forget. Because, when you think about it, indie authors were to books what bloggers were to online journalism / opinion essays. There was that same sense of loosening and freedom and “now I can write what I want and put it out there and who knows? Someone might actually read it and like it.”
Writers who had focused on courting literary agents suddenly rushed to self-publish their books on Amazon…
I was one of them. I self-pubbed my first novel, ran a giveaway, and watched it climb to the #11 spot on Amazon’s Free Kindle Ebooks store.
Heady times…
Word had been spreading in the lit-o-sphere about National Novel Writing Month and I participated a couple of times (before deciding, ultimately, that the format doesn’t work for me).
And naturally, scammers began to emerge to prey on authors who dreamed of writing fiction for a living…
And Then Came Facebook
Oh, what a temptation it was! So much easier than running your own site, courting readers, vying for eyeballs. You could write a face book post and suddenly everyone you knew would read it and comment.
I fell for it. I essentially abandoned my own blog. Instead of publishing hundreds of posts per year, I’d do maybe a dozen.
Well, you know the quote, right? “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” It’s a concept that has been around for a very long time. And yet, strangely enough, we don’t seem to have fully wakened to the implications.
Products are things. Ergo:
If we let ourselves be turned into products, we can expect to be treated like products — that is, like things.
So why are we surprised to learn that Facebook would sell us out? Why shouldn’t it? We aren’t “people” to Facebook.
By definition — as soon as we agree to the Facebook TOS and start uploading “content” — which includes not only our words, our personal diaries (!), our insights and links and information-sharing but also all that “data” about ourselves, our likes dislikes comings going relationships, which in aggregate is essentially our selves in a very important sense — our virtual avatars — as soon as we enter that transaction, we agree to be treated like objects. Commoditized. Bought and sold.
It’s little wonder that there’s been a backlash against the platform. We’re slowly beginning to grasp what “a Facebook” is and how “a Facebook” is going to treat us.
(It’s no coincidence, either, that as a platform Facebook feeds political divisiveness and vitriol. We don’t treat each other like people on Facebook, either.)
Of course, when you’re a writer, there’s another nuance to this as well.
Writers create content. Content has value. Why should we give it to Facebook?
Of course, writers give our content away all the time. I do it. I run Amazon giveaways. My novel The French Emerald is available to read for free here and on Wattpad (where it recently broke 16K reads!)
But the difference is that in these instances, I am interacting with you, my reader, directly.
So when you find my blog and read a post, our shared experience belongs to you and I. It’s direct. It’s not beingi mediated by a third party.
I have the kind of control that a content-creator should have. If I want to pull The French Emerald off my site, off Wattpad, format it, and sell it instead, I could do that. It wouldn’t be a violation of anybody’s terms of service. It’s crystal clear that I own the copyright to those words and can do whatever I want with them.
I’m still on Facebook. I have a page for promoting my novels. I go on the platform from time to time to catch up with friends and family. But I no longer invest time in posting content.
Instead, I’ve recommitted to my home: this blog. I didn’t publish a single piece here in 2016 or 2017, and only did a handful in 2018. But in the last month of 2019 alone, I put up around 8 posts.
Will anyone see them? Who knows? I lost a lot of traction when I abandoned this site for Facebook four+ years ago.
But I’m good with that. In a way, it’s like it was back in the beginning, in 2006, when I first hit “publish” and put a little piece about doing jigsaw puzzles out there for the world to see. I don’t care if “I’m read.” I’m a writer. I write. That’s what matters.
Happy New Year to anyone who finds this.
And thank you, thank you, thank you for reading.
