Face Deactivation

Today I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account.  There are a couple of reasons why I logged off.  The first reason is that I was ever so slightly addicted to the daily bombardment of mindless, self-absorbed drivel every five damn seconds from some people.  Yes, we all have morning tea, but it's really not interesting enough for public consumption, so to speak.

I would never suppose that anyone would be vaguely interested in what I had for morning tea, or what I was doing at 2pm every damn day.  Yes, that's a real thing apparently.  WHAT THEY ARE DOING AT 2PM EVERY DAY.  I'm not saying their drivel is unimportant, but I have better things to do with my time than trawl through it.  And whenever I logged on I was there for a while, doing nothing in particular for the most part.  Facebook can be a massive time consumer, if you let it.   

I still use email to keep in contact with people - yes, totally ol' fashioned - but the rest I don't need to know about all the time.  Although, while it is snuggly ensconced in the land of social media, I can't imagine ever deactivating my little blog - it's just me, my words and my own little world. I heart it.

The other reason for cutting off bits of social media is because I want to start writing my e-book, so I'll need all the spare time I can get my hands on.  Yes, I want to start writing a fictional psychological thriller e-book. I do. What's wrong with that? It's so not above my means. Being successful at it (for example: finishing it) is very possibly above my means, but w'ever. I'm sort of mostly convinced that I can do it. What I do know is that you can't achieve anything if you don't give it a shot. 

I recently read an article about Australian action thriller uberauthor, Matthew Reilly, who offered advice to budding writers such as, 'if you want to be a writer, then call yourself a writer'. Makes perfect sense I suppose.

Write 'writer' on your tax return.  Tell Homeland Security you're a writer when they interrogate you over your supposedly dodgy fingerprints. Reilly didn't mention that one; the thought of important paperwork just reminded me of one of the more poignant moments of my recent trip to the United States of Crazy. Homeland Security; that's what holidays are made of (my apologies to Van Halen).

I'm also a bit put off by the phenomena of social media at the moment following the Tom Daley and Charlotte Dawson Twitter incidents.  Both Daley, a U.K. Olympic diver, and Dawson, an Australian TV personality, were viciously bullied by so-called Twitters 'trolls'.

Can it only be a matter of time before Facebook descends into the same vexatious, provocative and often downright ugly death roll as Twitter?  Truly horrible what those with troubled minds and/or a lack of any morals or values are capable of when they are able to anonymously spew hate.