Social media. It's a Thing. I agree in principle with All The Experts who insist online presence is important for creative professionals. It is a way to maintain contact with readers as well as friends & family. BUT. Being online drains energy and mental focus. So I have an adversarial relationship with social media. I'm out here, but I'm not HAPPY about it.

Here be the platforms I'm on. I'll take them in order of how much I'm using them, which is more or less the inverse of how social the platform is.

1. Discord.

I have my own quiet l'il server where I post remarks, food pics, garden pics, cat news, & more. It's like my online house. (so you CHAT with me. Asynchronously, of course.)

Discord has the Just-Right feel of informal interaction without the false, artificial intimacy of "friending" strangers or the pressure to Produce Content And Constantly Socialize. Best online platform since UseNet, IMHO.

PLEASE VISIT MY SERVER! Contact me via the form on this site or via Twitter for an actual Discord invite or send me your Discord handle & I'll add you. (Putting an invite in this post would be tempting bots to scrape it & I do not like to encourage that kind of bot.)

You can lurk and/or interact there as much or as little as you like, and it's cool if we connect more over time & become Discord friends or only ever connect in that particular server. There's variety LIKE REAL LIFE CONNECTIONS BUT ONLINE! I like Discord rather a lot, in case it isn't obvious.

Anyway. Onward.

2. Twitter

I'm @kmherkes on Twitter & of course I would love for you to follow me, but full disclosure, I don't automatically follow back. There are many ways to curate Twitterfeeds, but none of them work well for me (THANKS, ADHD) so opening it feels like walking into a very large, very loud party every time.

Parties are fun, but they're also exhausting and shut down my brain. In order to focus long enough to tweet or respond to others, I have to minimize what I can see. Like blinkers for a horse. I have a second account ( @dawnrigger) for lurking & surfing. I am likely to follow you with that one if you follow my primary one.

Look. I didn't say it was a logical system. Just that it's working for me. The only thing I tweet from the @dawnrigger account are retweets of Big News from my main account.

SPEAKING OF BIG NEWS.

Alla y'all should subscribe to my Author Email Newsletter, dammit. Direct link right here: https://tinyletter.com/kmherkes

It's an occasional, reliable high-points digest of the writing-related activities. Click "View Letter Archive" at the subscribe link to get a no-obligation peek at one I sent earlier this year.

3. Facebook

I'm so absent from FB these days that I only learned of a recent huge outage after it was over--from my Twitter feed. The main/only reason I haven't deleted my account is that it's the only channel used by some longtime IRL friends. I have claimed a page as well, but it's barely a placeholder.

Notes on Facebook friend requests:

• If you just want info, it's easy to just follow my account. My writing posts are all public.
• If we don't have any mutuals, and I can't figure out why you're requesting, I'll delete it -- especially if you're a socially attractive member of the military or medical professional, and nothing is visible on your FB profile except your profile pic + posed shots of you & your adorable pets.

4. Instagram:

I'll be shuttering my account in the next day or two. It's just another Facebook, I don't like anything about its desktop-hating post setup & I don't really surf visuals, so It isn't worth the time suck.

5. Pinterest:

I hate/love Pinterest. I use it but not socially, if that makes sense? It's useful for collecting online sites for research or building idea boards. If you want to follow boards I make, that's great! Just...don't expect much action.

I think that's all the outlets where I lurk. No TikTok for me. No Twitch, no Youtube, no...I don't even know.

And that's more than enough rambling for one post. I still owe the world a report on Gen Con, and I need to write an applesauce post because it's fall and I"m making apple everything, but that can all wait.

Until later!