Rich Hailey

Lots of resolutions made; we’ll see how many get kept!

Among mine are this blog here. Time to dust it off and crank it back up. There are several things driving this resurrection and in this first post, I’m going to talk about them a bit. If you’re short on time, the TL;DR version is “I’m getting serious about writing and Facebook can be a hindrance to that.”

1. I’ve never been sent to Facebook jail, most likely because my friends list is pretty well curated. I tend to hang out with opinionated people who have the ability to handle disagreement without running to mommy every time they get their feelings hurt. And while I post nearly everything publicly, my followship is not big enough to attract negative attention from the congregants at the Church of the Perpetually Offended.

Although I’m hoping to change that, which brings me to…

2. I’m going to be concentrating on this writing thing. I’ve set up some goals (50,000 words of fiction per month; minimum three blog posts per week (Mon, Wed, Fri) hitting roughly 1,000 words each, expand existing sports writing opportunities, get published and paid.) and these goals are gong to require some accountability, which is where the blog comes in. On Mondays, I will document progress toward each goal. There may also be requests for alpha and beta readers, snippets of works-in-progress, etc. All the stuff you’d expect from an author wannabe trying to make things happen. Social media can help with that, and I plan on leveraging it to the max, but it is not an appropriate primary platform.

3. Getting thrown into Facebook jail will have real world repercussions on my efforts to become a professional author. Given my philosophy, if my popularity grows, it is inevitable that some crystalline water entity will vaporize on reading one of my opinions, and I will learn first hand what it’s like to live in Zuck’s House of Inappropriate Opinions. So I’m not going to give them the opportunity. I want/need to be able to express my opinions, feelings, ideals, etc freely and most social media platforms are run by folks who find that appalling. So screw ’em. I’ll use their platforms to me benefit, but, as much as possible, won’t give them the power to interfere with me.

4. I tend to think and write in long form. In high school, for four years, I had to write at least one paper per week in English class using a five section standard.

• Section 1: Present the topic of discussion with background
• Section 2-4: Defend your position/explain your topic/present three main points
• Section 5: Summarize and conclude

As a consequence, my thoughts tend to present themselves in that pattern. Social media is designed for short posts. Hell, Twitter expects you to be able to express a complete thought in under 200 characters. That only works when you boil the idea down so far its as limp as 3-day old stewed turnip greens. That’s not how I think or write. I want space to explore an idea, to examine it’s foundations and explore its implications.  I have ECLAIR, or Education Compulsive Limited Attention Infinite Retention syndrome.; I teach myself everything I’m curious about and I’m curious about everything.  My interest fades once I grasp the major concepts, but I integrate them into my understanding so I retain them.

That leads to some very random seeming segues, as well as rather interesting dreams, but that is the subject for another post. The main point here is my dronings are too long for Facebook to handle conveniently.

5. Censorship sucks. Deliberately silencing a point of view or an ideology is anathema to freedom. Facebook, Twitter, et al are engaged in the systematic throttling of viewpoints they find disagreeable. They own their platforms, so it is their choice to do so just as it is my choice to find a platform they do not control.

So, what does this mean for you, my audience? Simply this: You’ll need to add a bookmark to your favorite browser for this space. My presence on Facebook will diminish. While I’ll still post family stuff, and links back here (which may or may not trigger the zuckorythm for instant suppression) on FB, the good stuff will be here.