You're all an evil bloodsucking waste of time, it seems...

[julesjones]

Went out first thing this morning, and have only just got back, to discover that half my flist is either rolling around laughing, or saying, "She said *what*?" about Robin Hobb's latest rant. It would seem that LJ is a vampire, draining the lifeforce of writers by giving them something to do instead of writing actual books.

Um. Yes. As you may have noticed from the stream of prattle my LJ often turns into, I'm one of the many writers who use LJ as a way of having a social life with people who have similar interests, without having to worry about distances in meatspace. It can indeed be a good way to waste time I might otherwise have spent writing, but I rather suspect that without the social contact LJ and other blogs give me I'd be writing less anyway. And as one or two of my writer friends have been pointing out, it provides useful interaction with one's fans, which is A Good Thing for some writers, even if others find it more intimidating than helpful. I know that there are days when *I* find it easier to keep arse in chair and fingers on keyboard for having more sense of an actual audience out there than is given by my royalty statements.

If I disappear off LJ, it won't be because it's a vampire sucking creative energy from my writing. It'll be because the new owners are vampires trying to turn it into all ads, all the time.

Comments

[erastes.livejournal.com]

It's the hypocrisy and the attention grabbing that makes me laugh the most. It's not blogging apparently if one isn't doing it on Livejournal but is doing it on one's own domain?

Sheesh. *shakes head in amazement*

[julesjones]

I did in fact wonder if it was deliberate attention-seeking (if so it's certainly very successful, given how many people are talking about it), but she's done this sort of Ranty McRant before. A lot of people have been saying that she's perfectly right for some writers, including presumably herself, but that she seems to be having a One True Way moment about something that is simply not generally applicable.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

It's not blogging apparently if one isn't doing it on Livejournal but is doing it on one's own domain?

Well, there's no obvious way to leave comments there, so she'll not get bogged down in that.

FWIW, I thought it was amusingly OTT, and intentionally so, holding a kernel of truth, as commenting, flist-reading, comment-replying and so on can become a major timesink.

If you let it. Perhaps she knows she's susceptible to addiction, and assumes everybody else is, too?

[julesjones]

I think that's pretty much it -- that she's assumed that what's true for her must be true for all other writers. She's not grasped that for some of us, a certain amount of wheel-spinning is part of the process of getting words on disk, and if it wasn't blogs we'd find some other cat to vacuum.

[ciciaye.livejournal.com]

I can't honestly say Livejournal has ever taken time from my writing, or from anything else, really. Livejournal is here to look at when I'm not doing anything else, but that's pretty much it.

I know there are people who watch it for hours, refreshing constantly to see who's commented, but I've never found it that addictive.

CCA

[ciciaye.livejournal.com]

Do you have an URL for this rant? I'd like to have a laugh at it too!

CCA

[julesjones]

It's currently here: http://robinhobb.com/rant.html

Unfortunately the best "WTF?" thread I've seen so far is in a friends-locked journal. or I'd link to that as well.

[sarahf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, WTF? Jeez. I'll admit I use LJ to cat vacuum, but you're right--I'd find another if I didn't have it.

[julesjones]

There have definitely been times when blogs have sucked too much of my time, but the flipside is that sometimes I need to think about something other than the WIP for a while, or moan about it to writing friends while I wait for something to shake loose, and that's when LJ is invaluable.

[growlycub.livejournal.com]

Interesting. And interesting too, that there was a (not always friendly) conversation over on DA about reader expectations/demands on what an author ought to do not too many moons ago, and how reader expectation can sometimes lead to more and more demands on an author's time (and some rather ridiculous demands at that).

Can I say without getting flayed alive that I actually found her analysis amusing in a good way and that I think there are some truths in what she writes? Maybe singling out LJ was not the best choice to get her message across (considering that there are many more authors on other blog platforms than seem to be on LJ).

Certainly we would find other ways to amuse ourselves and procrastinate (ehm, am I indeed just writing a blog comment when I should be writing a VERY LONG overdue review on Pulling Strings?). After all, we managed to procrastinate just fine before there were blogs, but the message that I see underlying Hobb's argument is that reader expectations and 'caving in' to that expectation of having a web presence and a blog may not always in the best interest of the author. I feel she's questioning the worthiness of a new reality.

Whether or not that genie will go back in the bottle and whether authors will be able to survive professionally longterm without these promo tools is the question, I think. It is most certainly true that access to authors has become more commonplace, but with it has come, for me at least, the sometimes unpleasant realization that I would have been better off not knowing how an erstwhile favorite author is really not a nice human being. I'm one of those readers who obviously cannot separate the writer from their oeuvre and I have stopped buying several auto-buys because of their 'public' behavior.

Food for thought. And yes, I will write that review soon, very soon... maybe I'll do it right after I check to see if somebody replied to my comment from yesterday on DA. :)

[julesjones]

One of the reasons she's getting the "WTF?" reaction is that what she says is absolutely true -- for *some* authors. But she's writing about it as if it's true for all authors all the time. And there's a Kipling quotation that's popular among sf writers:
"there are nine and sixty ways
of writing tribal lays
and every single one of them is right"

PNH (who just happens to be a senior editor at Tor) puts it well:
http://pnh.livejournal.com/34737.html
:-)

The fan access to authors is a somewhat separate issue to the simple time sink issue, in part because in sf fandom there has always been blurring of the boundary between fan and pro (and PNH is one of the pros who will get Very Annoyed at any suggestion that he is no longer a Fan because he is now a Pro).

But I think it is going to cause more problems in the future, not least because of the phenomenon already familiar to tv stars where people feel that they know the author through their online presence, and that therefore the author must know them in turn. But it's not always reciprocal -- for example, I do know you and sarahf because we hang out in some of the same places and often "talk" to each other or at least take part in the same group conversations, but there are people who take the RSS feed of my LJ and never comment, and who I don't seem to have any other hangouts in common with. And you can get situations where authors with a large readership have a lot of folk like that, some of whom will inevitably feel snubbed if the author doesn't treat them like an old friend. That's definitely got potential to cause real problems.

[growlycub.livejournal.com]

I understand the WTF reaction and generalizing will get you that reaction every time. On the other hand, making a point always seems to involve generalizations of some kind.

"It said she had finally caved in to reader pressure and was going to keep a blog."

This sentence was the key in how I interpreted/related to the entire post. I am a reader, not a writer, so I took this post much more personally in the sense of 'here's an amusing bit of warning what reader pressure can do to authors' regardless of the fact that she was addressing authors. Maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but it almost felt like a clever way of telling readers off without coming right out and saying so. And yes, I'm paranoid, why are you asking? :)

I can easily see why authors dislike the implication that what holds true for her must be true for them.

It might be that the recent discussion on this topic regarding reader 'over'expectations (I'm still shaking my head at the guy wanting to buy Nora Roberts for a day as a birthday present for his wife) is fresh in my mind, but the 'this is how it is for me and that's why I think it has to be like that for you' aspect really didn't come to the forefront for me at all, even knowing before I read it that that was exactly what folks were objecting to.

I know I'm odd, and maybe it's because she so right about me, personally, right now with regard to the time sink factor, that I cannot manage to bring up any kind of indignation at her (over)generalization. :)

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

Before I found LJ and started blogging here and elsewhere, before I started reading many, many blogs and before I started spending lots of time on flickr, I wasted time each night playing FreeCell. I think I've found a more productive, constructive way to spend my evenings when I wouldn't be writing, anyway.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

That's sooo sweet of her to concern herself with how other people choose to spend their time....

She does tend to put me in mind of the proverbial Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. A disconcerting number of people journaling, blogging, whatever, do that at times :) But she and her ilk tend to do it more...