Tag: writing cartoon

IWSG: BuT nOBoDy ReAds AnYmoRe!

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 21 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Victoria Marie Lees, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and C. Lee McKenzie.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

People don’t read anymore.  People’s attention spans are too short due to social media, YouTube and TikTok, podcasts, A.I. generated slop content, yada yada, et cetera et cetera… I’m sure you’ve heard this before.  I’ve been hearing it a lot lately.  It’s almost enough to make me worry.  I mean, if it’s true that nobody reads anymore, what’s the point of me doing all this writing?

Except I don’t think it’s true.  Certainly, social media addiction is a thing.  Brainrot is a thing, and some people’s attention spans are being affected by that.  These are real problems, but I think self proclaimed experts-on-the-zeitgeist exaggerate how big and how universal these problems really are.  When I think about the people I know in real life, do some of them spend too much time online?  Sure.  But most of them don’t.

And as for the assertion that nobody reads anymore… again, when I think about the people I know in real life, I know a lot of people—people of all ages—who are avid readers.  Their taste in literature may be different than mine, but they’re still avid readers.  Granted, I also know some people who don’t read much.  Turns out some people enjoy reading and some don’t.  That’s nothing new.  That was true before, too.

It is a fact that some people are struggling with various flavors of Internet addiction.  It is also true that some people don’t like to read.  Extrapolating from those two data points that nobody reads anymore because everybody’s got brainrot?  That doesn’t add up.  And the people who keep saying things like that?  These same people tend to make a lot of broad generalizations about what’s going on in the zeitgeist these days.  I have no idea what their agendas are, but they’re wrong.  It’s time to stop listening to them and get back to writing.

IWSG: Time

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 20 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Liza at Middle Passages, Shannon Lawrence, Melissa Maygrove, and Olga Godim.  If you’re a writer and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group!

Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group asks a question.  The question is totally optional.  Members of the group can choose to answer it in their blog posts, or not.  This month’s question is:

In this constantly evolving industry, what kind of offering/service do you think the IWSG should consider offering to members?

As you know, I love space, but I also love writing (almost as much as I love space).  Unfortunately, love isn’t always enough.  Enthusiasm isn’t always enough.  I have plenty of love and enthusiasm.  What I really need right now is time.  Maybe I’m asking for too much here, but is there any way the IWSG could make the day a little longer?  That’s something I think every writer would appreciate.

I can think of several ways we could do this.  As demonstrated in this comic from xkcd, if we all started spinning counterclockwise, we’d alter Earth’s angular momentum, slowing the planet’s rotation and making Earth’s day just a fraction of a second longer.

Or we could start relocating writers to Mars.  Mars’s rotation rate is already slower than Earth’s, making a Mars day about 36 minutes longer than a day on Earth.  That’s 36 extra minutes for writing!  True, we’d have to deal with the ultra-thin  atmosphere, the scarcity of oxygen, the toxic soil, the radiation, the extreme cold… but think of how much more writing we’d get done!

Another option: a while back, there were rumors that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (a nuclear physics laboratory in Europe) might cause the accidental creation of a black hole.  That sounds scary, but hear me out: black holes create major distortions in both space AND time.  Could those space-time distortions allow us to make more time for writing?  Maybe!  Or maybe not.  I’m not great at math, so I’m not sure.  Alex, check with a physicist before you try this idea.

In the meantime, I recently negotiated a new work schedule for myself at my day job.  My new schedule is a little weird.  My boss and several of my coworkers were initially confused about why I’d want to work such strange hours.  But my new schedule frees up several hours worth of time, which I can now use for writing.  And I did it without altering Earth’s rotation, moving to Mars, or generating an artificial black hole.  So that’s a win for me!