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Originally Posted by Charles Stross
Slacking
I am author: watch me goof off on the job!
Today I have done no writing of fiction whatsoever. Instead, shockingly, I went shopping with my wife. In a dastardly plot to deprive my fans of their rightful 0.5% of the next novel, we went to IKEA and bought a new bed. (Because the old one is pretty much broken.) And tomorrow, in a callous display of selfish work-shy negligence I shall assemble flat-pack furniture, break down the old bed — and then I shall go to sleep! And while I am sleeping, I will not be working at all!
In fact, over the next 24 hours I will be so lazy and uncaring for my fans' right to read my next novel that I really ought to fire myself. Except that I've declared Thursday and Friday to be an honorary weekend, and it's quite possible I'll be slaving over a hot keyboard all of Saturday and Sunday.
(Ahem.)
This is by way of adding a parenthetical footnote to my previous posting, namely to illustrate the fact that not only are novelists self-employed, but they work really weird hours. As another writer of my acquaintance explained it to me, many years ago: because writing is socially isolating — because we do it locked up alone in an office, as a solitary occupation, for months or years on end — we have to learn to fit our social lives in around that of our friends, who are far more likely to organize their time around institutions such as their employers and the schools their children attend. But by the same token, we don't need to work from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, except for public holidays — we can work whenever we're driven to it. Being able to hit IKEA off-peak at 3pm on a Thursday is one of the perks of an otherwise reclusive occupation: and I can spend the 3pm Sunday rush hour in front of a word processor instead.
Incidentally, if you were wondering why authors blog ...
Being a novelist is an intensely socially isolating job. In fact, if you haven't done it, you might have difficulty comprehending just how weird the lifestyle is compared to any other occupation. We lock ourselves in an office for several hours a day, every day, and we don't interact with other people while we're working. In almost any other job, you deal with co-workers or members of the public and chat around the coffee station: but not if you're a novelist.
Blogs and social networking have, in the past decade, come along and given us a vital sanity-oriented pressure release valve. They occupy a much more important role in the life of the working novelist than might at first be apparent to someone with a regular job. They operate in effect as a substitute for the normal workplace social interaction: without which we tend to go a little bit crazy from pure isolation. (There's a reason alcoholism is an occupational disease among writers ...)
Obviously, there's an element of marketing and self-promotion involved in any public figure who runs a blog. But I don't believe that my blogging entirely pays for itself in book sales. Rather, it pays for itself by keeping me in contact with other people, by providing the equivalent of the office coffee station or drinks cooler, and the casual contact with co-workers and members of the public that most of us take for granted.
... Which ought to go some way towards explaining why some authors (including GRRM) respond very negatively indeed to suggestions that they stop posting to their blog, or stop posting about stuff that interests or entertains them outside of work. As Jo Walton put it, if you see your surgeon down at the supermarket checkout, do you chide them for not being up to their elbows in someone's abdominal cavity? Writers are human beings too: they are unlikely to work for more than 25% of their time (which, if you think about it, is 42 hours a week), and like everyone else, they need the human socialization of a real life. Blogging has become an essential part of it over the past few years. And if you expect an author — who is, by profession and instinct a communicator — to stop communicating by venting at the coffee station, you can expect push-back.
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