Something new and something old

Although I started with such a clever title, I don’t want to keep up the suspense, which must be killing you for sure, so I’ll let you know right away that I’m talking about the new year on one hand and some sketches I made in the past but never got to publish on the blog, on the other. Your chance to close this page and move on to more entertaining content.

I keep drawing these sketches of my favorite literary women in the form of Cucuteni goddesses, and I can’t say that I am not very fond of them. I feel like they encompass so many of the things that hold meaning in my life: writing, feminism, ancient matriarchies, female deity cults, dark literature, creativity.

I’m obviously no plastic artist of any form, but I do enjoy doodling like everyone else. I guess literary women sketches is something that I do now. And this is quite the elite group, though isn’t it?

Shirley Jackson is joining in from her own blog post, which I did publish on the blog some time ago, when I remembered I had a blog.

I just wanted to gather all these in a blog post, to save them on my website for the future. I haven’t posted anything here in the longest time, and instead I waste a lot of energy on Instagram. Lately, though, I have been feeling that uncomfortable feeling again, that I am giving these social media platforms free content to do with it as they please. And while I get various benefits from it (exposure, connections) I feel like it’s a waste if I don’t publish it on my own website. I am pretty annoyed with Instagram lately and the “algorithms” they push at us, so that my feed is populated by whatever they deem more suitable for me, instead of the chronological order of posts from the accounts I care to see. I probably should unsubscribe from many accounts so I only follow the ones that I care about most. Like reduce the number to under 100. Would the algorithm manage to screw that up also? Probably. I have moments when I feel this urge to republish all my Instagram content on a page on this website. I have resisted it so far. I don’t know how much sense that would make.

I don’t know what to do about Facebook either. Many ethical dilemmas there. But I feel like I do need it to connect with professional groups that I need to be involved with. So I deleted my old account that contained too much personal stuff and started a new clean one, which I plan to keep strictly professional in tandem with the author page. It’s not working already.

Keeping up with social media is becoming too much work, right?

I listened to a podcast on Me & Orla yesterday on using Pinterest as a business and found it so interesting that I had to implement some of the advice immediately. I do like Pinterest a lot and use it frequently especially for food and clothes, not so much for promoting my writing or to send traffic to this blog. Vertical images with text. And mixing up your own pins with repins on the same boards. It’s what I’ve come away with.

So, yeah, I might post more over here this year, because social media always ends up scary and disappointing and making you feel like a tiny, stupid cog in a machine controlled by malevolent forces.

See you around ?