Tag Archives: twitter

I Need to Stop Digitally Hoarding if I'm Going to be a Writer

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I realized this last night as I flipped through the pages and pages of usernames and passwords for different online accounts that I have. I can guarantee that I don’t even use half of them, and another 40% of them I probably only use once in a great while, especially if I need to procrastinate something. Still, I can hardly bear to get rid of these accounts. A perfect example is the Facebook account I deactivated. I know how to fully delete it thanks to Matt, but can’t bring myself to do it. What if I do want to use it again? I ask myself. Then the facebook.com/elizawhat username might be taken and that’s my name. It’s MINE. I didn’t really even use the thing, and yet I can’t convince myself that it’s okay to delete it forever. The same goes for my old @elizawhat, @freakingbookwrm, and @lettersoflove Twitter accounts, and a bunch of other accounts. Those names are MINE, dammit. What if I want them later and someone has taken them?!

I’m a digital hoarder.

I’d really like to simplify my digital life. I’ve been wanting to for a while, but while I knew it was the right decision, I still had a really hard time letting go. I try hard to be honest here and to be honest with myself, so here’s the truth: I have many websites and different social accounts. I almost always create them on a whim, and then I feel guilty for ignoring them, so I feel obligated to keep them, but only end up using them occasionally. A perfect example is Letters of Love. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very, very proud of that site. The thing is, I created it during a time when I really needed it, and I don’t need it anymore. Because I don’t need it anymore, I don’t have the passion I once had to keep it going. At the same time, though, I can’t bear to let someone else take it over because it’s mine. It’s my baby. Call me possessive, I don’t care. I just can’t let go, and I can’t bear to leave it sitting there collecting digital dust.

I also started Freaking Bookworm, and then fell way off the book review bandwagon. The thing is, I feel too obligated; I feel like I have to review every single book and comic that I read, so then I feel overwhelmed and just don’t review or write anything there. Plus, once I found Goodreads I started to wonder what the hell was the point in doing both. I argue with myself in my head all the time: “Goodreads is just a social network. One day it could disappear. Freaking Bookworm is my site and won’t disappear unless I want it to.” “Yes, but why update both? It’s a pain in the ass to review the same book twice, and repetitive as hell. How can I possibly write two different reviews about the same book without repeating myself?!”

I have a different problem with this blog. I enjoy writing here. I don’t ever feel obligated. However, instead of writing stories like I should be doing, I end up writing posts here. Instead of doing the dishes or cleaning or something else productive, I write draft upon draft that I will probably never actually publish. I regularly have to clean out my drafts because they’re either no longer relevant, half finished, or just too much information to post publicly. I know that I need to let go of this blog and focus more on my fiction writing, but dammit, it’s hard. It’s hard because it’s a security blanket, but it’s also hard because I know there are a lot of you who like this little space and I hate to let you down.

Still, I need to simplify. I don’t want my digital life to resemble the homes we see on Hoarders. I’m sick of leaving half finished projects behind me. I’m disgusted with myself for wasting so much time online when I should really be honing my writing skills; I say all the time that I want to be a writer, but instead of using that time to actually write and improve, I sit online. (I should say, though, that this morning I wrote a story before doing anything else, other than checking my bank account’s balance and a few other quick, important things. I’m damn proud of myself.)

I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet. I mean, I have a pretty good idea, but I’m still thinking about it. Mostly, I’m thinking about the execution. Basically, I want to embark on an adventure next year. (Because holy shit, in a couple of months it will be next year.) I’ve seen another writer, Deanna Knippling, do it and she’s learning a lot and getting a lot out of it. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, pretty much since she first started posting about her experiences with independent epublishing. My first thought was, Damn this is cool. I wish I could do it. A few weeks ago I thought, Maybe I could actually do it. Since last night I’ve been thinking, I want to try it.

Since my writers’ group started in September, I’ve been trying — well, okay, I haven’t been trying too hard because I’ve been blogging here instead — to write one short story a week, that way I’d have something new every week for my writers’ group. So far, I’ve written two, and that’s counting today’s story. I’ve had a lot of writers’ block, but it’s getting better finally. I’m also gearing up to do NaNoWriMo this year in November. Coincidentally, elizawhat.com is up for renewal in November. Now, granted, I’m pretty good about sticking to the writing during NaNoWriMo. The rest of the year, you can forget it. I don’t want to be like that anymore. I want to be disciplined, dammit. I’ll be completely honest with you: I’m thinking about not renewing this blog. I’m also thinking about cutting down on all of my online accounts, quite severely. At the top of the list are Tumblr and Formspring. I’m keeping my @elizabethbarone Twitter, but the other ones are probably going, too. I’m also going to make myself permanently delete my Facebook.

I need to do this. It’s hard to think about it, and it’s going to be hard to do it, but I need to. I’ve known this for a long time.

I just hope you won’t be too mad at me, or too disappointed. I’d really like to give you a new short story every month. I have a ton that need to be edited so that they won’t suck when you read them, but I’d also like to write a new one every week, for real.

Now, I’m still thinking about all of this, but I’ve slept on it and still feel the same. Usually, when I need to make a decision, I sleep on it because I rarely feel the same the next day. As hard a time I have making decisions, I also tend to go completely the other way at times and make rash decisions. Today I still feel like this needs to be done.

However, if I do delete this blog, there will be a new one. You’ll just have to wait and see it. It’s going to be awesome. And there will definitely still be Liz’s Anatomy. The rest I’m not so sure about.

Letting go and moving forward

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Sometimes, in order to move forward, we have to leave things behind. It’s never easy to leave these things behind, but by doing so, we become lighter so that we can hold more of what is just ahead.

That’s how I interpret the adage, “When one door closes, another opens.”

I’m sure you can guess where this is going.

I have been blogging personally for about ten years. Maybe more, but I feel old if I think about it too hard. I started off in Diaryland or My Own Journal or something like that, moved to LiveJournal, and then found WordPress and have been using it ever since. I’ve always written about my life and what I was going through in a physical, paper journal, but I found blogging to be more rewarding. I made a lot of friends while sharing my life, and met a lot of people going through similar things. It was comforting, knowing that there was always someone out there listening.

I used to look at my blog as a security blanket. I couldn’t go a day without writing in it. More and more, though, I’m finding myself going days without even thinking about it, and when I do finally think about my blog, I realize I have nothing I feel the need to write about. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time — even before I mentioned anything — and I’ve decided that it’s time to move on.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against personal blogging. I’ve just come to a point in my life where I have no use for having my own personal blog. I want to focus on the adventure ahead of me: going back to school for my B.A. in English so that I can read and write for a living. I want to spend my time reading and writing, and not worrying about updating my personal blog or Twitter account so that people don’t think I’ve fallen off of the planet. I want to spend more time nurturing Freaking Bookworm, because I’ve finally found my “niche” in the blogosphere.

I want to shed the things I no longer need or use so that I can make room for the things ahead. I want to simplify, instead of collecting.

I’ve felt lighter ever since I made this decision.

I’m not just shedding my blog, though. I’m cutting down on all of the domains I own. I’m not using more than half of them, so I’m letting them just expire. I’m letting go of my @elizawhat account on Twitter and just using @freakingbookwrm. I’m looking for someone to take over Letters of Love. I’m getting rid of all nine-hundred of my email addresses, and just using liz@freakingbookworm.com. I’m considering deleting my Facebook, too.

I feel so good about all of this, even though it does make me a little sad. There is so much ahead, though, that I don’t feel empty the way I would have if I’d made this decision a few months ago.

I’ve already set up my new email address, but I don’t have a definite date yet for when I’m killing everything else. You all know where to find me, though, and of course, I know where to find you.

Why Realistic YA Literature Saves Teens (and Adults) #YASaves

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Between last night and today, I read a Wall Street Journal article stating that today’s YA literature is too dark and “grotesque” for teens. I say “between last night and today” because last night I couldn’t get past the sixth paragraph. Today I read the seventh, and then I slowly read the rest. I found the article condescending, not only to YA books and authors, but to teens and parents as well.

How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

I have a hard time listening to anyone who talks down to me and refers to me as “my dear” (unless she’s my Noni, who is the only person I know who can make that sound sweet and loving). I also have a hard time looking at anyone between the ages of fifteen and eighteen as a child. A teenager is not a child, no matter how you look at it. Much is happening in those years to change that child into an adult, which is why the word “teenager” even exists. I’m almost twenty-three years old, and even now when I look back on my fifteen-year-old self, I don’t see a child. I see someone who used to be a child, who wants desperately to hang onto that childhood, but is heading very quickly toward adulthood and is immersed in this terrifying world of changes and things my parents didn’t talk to me about.

For example, my parents didn’t talk to me about how to react when your boyfriend is spiraling down the rabbit hole of drugs, trying more and more dangerous things. They also didn’t tell me what it’s like to have two of your seventeen-year-old friends get fake IDs so that they can work at a strip club. While my parents talked to me about puberty and safe sex and saying no to drugs, they didn’t talk to me about meeting someone who used to do hard drugs and occasionally had urges, and how I could be a friend to that person when they were going through those urges. I’m going to get super personal here, and say that my parents never talked to me about self-injury and that it was not a good way to cope with my feelings… until after I had already begun self-harming and it became a deeply embedded addiction.

Cut, by Patricia McCormick

I finally read a YA novel about self-injury in February, 2010.

Some of these things parents just can’t prepare for. As adults, we don’t always know what our children are going to encounter. It’s a scary, scary world that gets scarier by the day. We read about things in the newspaper all the time that are happening to teenagers across our country, and we wonder how we are going to protect our children in a world that moves so quickly.

In a world like this, knowledge is power. We must learn about the world around us if we want to be aware, and one of the best ways to learn about our world is reading. Newspapers don’t tell us what is happening until it’s already happened; books can tell us what is happening every day. I didn’t read a Young Adult book until I was fifteen or sixteen. The book was Go Ask Alice, and my friend with the hard addiction let me borrow it, because she wanted me to see just how bad drugs are. After reading it, I understood much better what she had gone through and what she was going through when those random cravings hit, and I was able to be a better friend. I also learned that I never wanted to touch hard drugs, because the book scared me so badly.

Still, I didn’t approach the YA section of the store or library because I thought that YA books were unrealistic, and that none of the authors understood what I was going through during those years. If I had known there were books about characters struggling with self-injury, I would have read each and every one of them, so that I could figure out how to overcome it myself. If I had known YA books were so realistic and full of the problems teens face, I would have spent a little less time reading every Stephen King book ever written, and a little more time researching which YA books I wanted to read.

I don’t consider myself a huge YA fan, even now, but mostly because I really like thrillers — specifically crime and medical — and you don’t see many teen characters investigating a murder or opening a corpse to see how it died. However, last year I wrote a YA novel about a girl whose best friend becomes addicted to Ecstasy, and all she can do is watch because her friend is so far out of reach. I wrote it because of what I experienced as a teen, and because I know that, at least in my city and its surrounding towns, Ecstasy and heroin are very popular among teens. I wanted to write something that showed how scary it is to use these drugs, and how scary it is to care about someone using these drugs. I posted each chapter online as I finished it, and had a handful of people waiting for the next chapter. Many of my readers thanked me for writing something so realistic — something so different from the stigma that YA is just fluff.

In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that this stigma has faded. YA is now a genre where authors are expected to write realistically about problems that teens have, and I am constantly applauding YA authors for daring to do what many adult fiction authors are afraid to do. The YA section is a safe haven for teens, a place where they can find someone who understands what they’re going through. Teens don’t always find it easy to talk to their parents; I know I didn’t, and my parents have always been the kind of people who listen and then try to help me. Parents also find it hard to talk to their teens, even if they always had a good relationship.

Teens — and parents — need YA literature to learn from and relate to, no matter how dark or horrifying it might seem. If adults can’t always know what the world might expose their teens to, there has to be a way for teens to learn more about the world they’re living in.

YA saves.

Learn More About the #YASaves Movement:

If you wrote a blog post about the WSJ article or what YA means to you, or created something else for #YASaves, leave me a comment with the URL and I’ll link it up here!

Do you think YA is too dark for teens? Leave a comment and tell me why or why not!

If you badmouth a family's way of grieving for their child, you are a piece of shit

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You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to like it. And you certainly don’t have to watch or look at it. But if you badmouth someone’s way of grieving the loss of their loved one, you are low.

Everyone grieves differently. If a family wants to take a photo with their deceased child’s body, then let them. Let them do it in peace.

I’m disgusted that one of the Trending Topics on Twitter tonight is “DEAD BABY,” and most of the tweets are people calling this family “ignorant,” and “fuckers.” You are ignorant, for saying horrible things about the way a family is grieving a child.

When my grandfather died, I went downstairs that morning and kissed his face. I knew that was the last chance I was going to get to kiss his face, so I made sure I did it.

If you knew that you had one last chance to hold your child, you would do it, too.