First, a reminder: My “public” email address is:
I check it once per day, usually in the early morning. And now, the reason for the reminder...
Some years ago, well after Facebook had gotten established as a power on the Web but well before its current near-universal reach, another writer advised me to get on it and “get involved.” At the time he and I got along with pretty well. Just to spare you any speculation, there aren’t many such persons. Nearly everyone who’s gotten to know me more than superficially has backed away from me. I know the reasons for that, and in my opinion they are entirely defensible, so I don’t take it amiss.
So I registered for a Facebook account. Three days later I deleted it. The other writer noticed and asked why. I told him. It marked the end of our interaction.
Fast forward to 2016. Another writer with whom I’m amicably acquainted asked why I’m not on Facebook. (No, I can’t honestly call him a friend. A friend is someone you love and who loves you. Someone you can call at 2:00 AM with an urgent need, and who will do whatever it is you need done with no questions. I don’t have any of those.) I gave him the reason that had distanced me from the writer I mentioned in the paragraph above. May God bless him and keep him, we’re still in touch, though I wouldn’t doubt he thought it over for a bit.
The aforementioned amicably acquainted writer – let’s call him AAW, just to save keystrokes – said that Facebook had been invaluable for promoting his books...that he could attribute at least half his sales to the promotion he did there. He urged me to get back on. So I did.
Well, about three weeks later Facebook disabled my account. They were purging conservatives at the time, and something I said probably drew their attention. They did it subtly, by asking me to verify my identity. I sent them copies of my driver’s license. They never responded, and that account, tied to my “main” email address, remains disabled to this day.
That’s Facebook for you. It’s a haven for children, idiots, and social justice warriors – yes, that opinion is the reason my Facebook-enthusiast friend ceased to communicate with me – and if I weren’t interested in the promotional possibilities AAW hinted at, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But as I’m the next best thing to a hermit, publish exclusively under my own name and aegis, and can no longer go to writers’ conferences – I can’t fly, for medical reasons – I find it hard to sell books. I wanted whatever promotional power I could derive from Mark Zuckerberg’s frivolous “social media” site. So I created an account under the name of my readers’ favorite character: Louis Redmond. To this point, Facebook hasn’t detected the ball-under-the shirt play.
However, I’ve just been reminded why I deleted my original account there. Facebook sucks you in. You start to spend lots of time there. It suggests “friends” to you: almost exclusively people have never met and will never meet. You start scanning its puerile, left-leaning conception of a “news feed.” You get into arguments with imbeciles and SJWs. (Yes, the intersection is a non-null set.) More and more of your time and energy goes to such things. After a while, you find that you can’t bring yourself to close the browser tab on which Facebook is open. It would be like cutting off the world and everyone in it...however much you might value that collection of miscreants.
Even now that I’ve retired from wage employment, I don’t have time for that sort of foolery. Among other things, I’m a working writer: both in the realm of fiction and here at Liberty’s Torch. My days are full, both from that and from other involvements I’ll forbear to specify. Besides, I’m an old man. I can’t afford to spend my time reading trivia, arguing with the brain dead, or scanning Facebook’s “friend” suggestions. I have no idea how many days are left to me, and to spend any of them at Facebook would be a waste.
So I probably won’t be going back there, no matter how many books it might theoretically help me to sell.
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