personal – Mick Canning

Twitter can be an absolutely toxic place. Obviously there are plenty of other social media platforms and I’m sure they can be equally toxic. It’s Twitter I’m currently on, though.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

It seems to be a continuation of ‘If you don’t agree with me then I will hate you.’ No, it seems more like ‘If you don’t parrot my views exactly, then I will destroy you with vitriol!’ There are apparently countless people whose time seems to be spent searching for posts or comments they can disagree with, and then piling in on them with as much vile rhetoric as they can. And, by coincidence, as I was writing this post, I replied to a vaguely related post elsewhere: ‘I think this is part of the issue around all social media, concerning the perceptions of the person behind the keyboard. We’ve all seen ghastly stuff people will post on twitter or other platforms that they would probably never say in real life, just because it feels as if they can rant into an empty space with no come-back. I post some personal stuff, although not very personal, but before posting anything (or, indeed, tweeting) I find it helps to stop and think ‘would I say this if I was standing on a stage addressing a thousand people in an audience?’ Because that, in essence, is what you’re doing.’ This was written in response to a post about sharing personal information, but it applies equally to posting one’s opinions online.

One inevitable result of this has been to leave me less sympathetic to their cause or point of view, even if it is one I support myself. And I would imagine it has a similar effect on quite a few other people. It also leaves me less inclined to engage with anyone on Twitter, since more and more I anticipate an angry response to something innocuous I’ve put up. I’ve noticed that over the last few months I’ve hardly posted anything on there, and equally rarely commented on others’ tweets. It also made me question my presence on here, although there was never any real chance of my leaving.

And at the moment, I can’t really see that changing. I’m in one of my occasional ‘shall I just leave Twitter altogether?’ moods, although I don’t suppose I will. There are a few (not many, to be honest) people on there I really want to keep up with, and it has been a good source of information about new (to me) books and music.

But I do feel I’m keeping it at arm’s length more and more these days.

Well, blimey. Another of those passages of time when I’ve been just so stupidly busy, that I’ve hardly had time to take breath, never mind look at blogs or think about doing any writing myself. And…it’s going to be quite busy for another couple of weeks.

Yet, here I am grabbing an hour to write something and, hopefully, catch up with one or two other blogs. And I have no idea what to write about! I usually have a few ideas mulling over before I sit down at the keyboard, and one or two half-finished posts on the computer that I can draw on. Today, though, zilch. I have one finished post that is on a somewhat contentious subject, which I’m going to leave a few weeks so I have time to properly respond to any comments it generates (who knows, though, perhaps there won’t be any?), and a couple of partly begun travel posts. I need more time than I can spare at the moment to sort out photos for those.

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Random and totally irrelevant photo of the week.

Yet…a blog is a personal thing. We’re not journalists, with deadlines to meet and news stories to tackle before they go cold. We’re not being paid to produce highly detailed technical notes on a particular subject. So my personal blog, today, is simply about my progress, or lack of, with my writing.

So, yes, nothing for the last couple of days. But I promised that I would produce an Author’s page on Facebook by the middle of the month – I will! – and that I had a bawdy, riotous, Elizabethan short story to post in a couple of instalments at the same time. That one is a bit more interesting! Having promised I would do that (primarily to give me the impetus to write it), I got stuck in and by the end of last week I already had over 8,000 words done.

Far too long for a couple of posts, which I feel should be limited to around a thousand words. Certainly, I almost never read posts that are much longer than that. I don’t have the time, unfortunately. So I have a bit of an editing job to do on that.

When that is out of the way, I am going to collate some of my longer short stories together to publish as an e-book and, perhaps, a POD paperback. I won’t have the novel ready this year, so the short stories will be this year’s publishing project. I hope I have enough decent ones to be able to produce a themed collection.

And then? Back to the novel!

Tally ho!