Getting out more?

Since my last newsletter, I have been trying to get out more.  It's part of my New Year's resolution.  Seems I got stuck in a rut, settling for the same old activities, while my business clients moved away one by one, and writing started to feel like a pointless routine.

So I found a good local writing group.   Very nice people, very supportive, and within 10 miles.  Also a screenwriting group that is meeting next tuesday (Jan 20).  I found both on meetup.com, and was pleasantly surprised to see a website actually produce results.  I guess I've gotten used to sites that promise a lot but nothing ever happens.  I tried a business meetup, too, which turned out to be about 50 people getting together for 4-minute one-on-one quick interviews ... every 4 minutes the guy in charge would blow a whistle and we'd move to the next chair down and meet someone new.

These experiences of meeting people face-to-face really impressed me in an odd way, by showing how weak the internet really is.  In person, you can get 90% of a person's attention, really hear them, and see their reactions to you.  Online, you can get maybe 5% of the attention of millions of people ... but they all have other places to be, and can get there in an instant.

I keep hearing the same rehashed advice for writers about promoting our work online, but I keep trying things and checking my page stats and seeing no results, a flat line.  Then again, the same thing happened in person, after all those public readings and conventions and open mike nights ... so I'm not sure how to get people interested in my work.  I'm painfully aware that, whatever I do, people can get vast quantities of more or less the same thing, somewhere online, for free.  All I can promise is that my work is the most "me" you can get.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #34, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

New Year, Same Year

Happy New Year!

New Year's Day is my favorite holiday.  There's no religion or politics involved.  We're not expected to buy anything, send dopey cards, wave a flag, or cook big meals.  It's just a new year.  Simple.  The Earth is a year older (not that it cares), or the human race has survived another trip around the sun ... there's something relaxing and simple about crowds gathering to watch a number change.  And if the old year was rotten we can say goodbye to it and "start fresh."

I'm not impressed with the "get puking drunk" mode of celebrating things.  I've actually heard people planning ahead about how sick they're going to be, or justifying it saying that mass consumption is good for the economy.  Luckily, we can avoid the crowds and deal with it in our own ways, or find quiet people and watch the mob do their thing on TV.

The underlying reality, that we're alive and driven by numbers at some deep level, remains.  A few days later (right about now) we find that everything feels the same and it's all and illusion.

My kind of holiday.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #33, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.