So, you probably didn’t notice, but I took the month of January off from all social media. Yeah, I’d found myself checking my feeds every few minutes and didn’t like to think that I couldn’t get along without social media to distract me, so I put my Facebook account on hold and must ignored my other feeds.

image credit Jeff Swensen—Getty Images

For the most part, it wasn’t a big deal, though I did spend more time checking new sites when the urge to see what the world was doing hit me. A close friend wound up being hospitalized for Covid, and another friend’s mother passed away, which I found out from mutual friends, but there’s something to be said for direct one on one communication anyway.

Although I use social media to keep in touch with family and friends, I also use it to promote my writing, including my Science Fiction to Look For column for Amazing Stories magazine, which I’ve been writing for the last two and a half years. Besides that, there are occasional entries to this blog, and some full-length reviews that appear on Amazing Stories, SFRevu, and Gumshoe Review. Over the last month, I’ve written a few reviews for those publications and a few that just stayed here on the blog. There was a time when I was an actual working tech journalist, but while I like the writing and research, pitching stories to editors took the fun out of it, so now I just write for my amusement.

Part of going off social media was to reinforce that to me, that writing was something I was doing because I enjoyed it, not just to attract eyeballs. I found that liberating. So, now I’ll go log into Facebook and see if I’ve got a shadow…