Writings and All That Social Media Mess

[fivecats]

Thoughtful Bear
Tennessee, October 2014

A few weeks ago toddpage was kind enough to give me an invite code to Ello. As a blogging platform it's pretty sparse -- there's no easy way to find people you know, there aren't any good editing applications yet... and yet I've found myself posting photographs and a brief line or two to it on a daily basis.

I find all of the social media choices overwhelming. Between Facebook, Twitter, LJ, Blogger, RSS Feeds, Google+, Ello, and all of the others I don't even have accounts for, it seems to me that keeping up to date on all of them would be a part-time job in and of itself. And I have neither the time nor, frankly, the interest in doing so.

LJ has always been my long-form essay place. I would write here to keep my writing chops from getting overly rusty. Over the past few years, however, I've found I have less and less to say. There are days when I think about posting a specific observation (the first day the weather is warm enough to not need a coat in the spring; the first day the fluorescent yellow-green pollen covers the black hood of my car, starting to play the mandolin) but the effort to write a full entry just seems so heavy.

That, and my Nikon D50 finally died. I'm now left with my iPhone for a camera. (When I first started carrying an iPhone I took hundreds and hundreds of photographs with it. I've become frustrated by the iPhone's limitations, however, and haven't been doing much with photography lately, either)

Writing time, now, is supposed to be time spent with The Book. That means more (seemingly endless) revision time -- something I don't have much enthusiasm for these days. (It's getting done, albeit more slowly than I wish)

Posting to Ello makes me feel like I should be doing the same here. I miss the community that was here in the past.

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