How is it August already?

It’s been a while since I’ve written, I know. I’ve been busy! I paneled at Flights of Foundry (online) and Balticon (in-person) this spring, I was an invited Guest of Honor at Washington County Free Library’s annual FanCon (in-person), and I participated in Clarion West’s 2023 Write-A-Thon (online)! I’m trying to keep my Linktr.ee page updated as more of my stories, translations, poems, and essays get published. I’m also working on figuring out to have an online shop so people can buy art, chapbooks, and other objects I create.

Since I’ve last posted on this blog, I planned to:

• post monthly updates about how my self-promotion and writing goals were going,
• write book reviews (I’ve got 3 drafts with titles and no content, not sure I’ll ever get to them at this point),
• update you on my convention appearances and translation accomplishments,
• share the weird things I’ve overheard other people say in the wild.

And then life and the social media apocalypse happened.

2023 has been a Bad Year for my health. In the first few months of the year, I was briefly in the hospital (still trying to figure out why), and then had a separate (unrelated?) health scare a month or two later. I felt like I was in the clear, and then a month or two I started developing new symptoms that made it hard for me to walk or stand or sleep. That seems to have cleared up for now, thankfully. I’ve been to a lot of doctors this year, been through a bunch of tests, and still no answers — we’re still in the “ruling things out” phase, which is probably a good thing (though it can be quite frustrating).

2023 has been a Bad Year for social media (was there ever a good one?). It’s super easy to self-promote when you’ve reliably got an audience on a massive social media platform (Twitter) that ALSO puts your messages in front of strange new people on the regular. Posting a quick message on Twitter has always required *some* braincells and effort (for me, anyway), but it was WAY easier than maintaining accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Facebook in addition to keeping up with several writer/publishing Discords, maintaining this blog, and keeping author websites updated *in addition* to actually *doing* writing, editing, translating, attending & paneling at cons, volunteer work, chores, and maintaining healthy connections to other humans.

My braincells are in short supply. I’ve grown a lot quieter online, because — in the words of Florence + the Machine — I don’t know where to put my love. I have a bunch of social media accounts, but it takes a surprisingly large number of braincells to post the same thing across all of them. I want to have an online shop, but it’s surprising how many braincells it takes to photograph things available for purchase. I have stepped back from some of my volunteer work responsibilities (while strategically adding others) to accommodate some of my long term goals for being involved with (and giving back to) the writing community.

I’ve been thinking about deleting this blog. Most of the hits seem to be coming from web scraping tools (Internet Archive is welcome, but the others, less so) and there are plenty of other ways to find & follow me. That said, I like helping people, and my Kickstarter analysis posts, various book reviews, and my Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker drinking game have been consistently popular. I may leave this up here for posterity. Undecided.

I might start a newsletter and/or a Patreon. I enjoy reading the newsletters I receive from various writers and publications, and my blog posts already tend to be like newsletter or Patreon updates. That said, if your inboxes look like mine, you may not want more updates cluttering it — but then again, I look forward to the monthly updates from creators I follow.

If you’ve actually read this far, thank you! I’d love to hear from you — please reach out and share your thoughts!

My social media:

• Bluesky: @molowrites.bsky.social
• Instagram: @molo_writes
• Mastodon: @molo_writes@wandering.shop
• Twitter: @molo_writes (<– not sure how much longer I’ll stick around here, but still no clear better alternative)