my friends<\/a>. But that doesn’t really get at the heart of the question; and this is not the first time that question has arisen. I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m terrible at PR, that I can only blame myself for continued obscurity if I don’t take a lead from the Rob Sawyers of the world and become a Terminator of Relentless Self-Promotion. And because I’ve heard this a lot, and because even a partial response would be too long to fit neatly into a batched bolus of comments, I’m going to respond in this standalone post instead.<\/p>\nIt seems to me that a solid majority of writer blogs are infested with look-at-me. It starts with the number of words they wrote today on Project X; but it’s only a small skid down to what music they’re listening to, what they had for dinner, how their kids fared on the intramural spelling bee, and what their favorite fucking recipes are.<\/p>\n
I cringe when I encounter many of these blogs. I can’t imagine anyone beyond the occasional stalker really giving a shit about any of that stuff, in my own case at least.<\/p>\n
There’s a reason this newscrawl is called No Moods, Ads, or Cutesy Fucking Icons<\/em>. There’s a reason I refer to it as<\/em> a newscrawl rather than a blog. If you’ve been lured here by my fiction, I can only assume it’s because, like me, you’re interested in what my fiction explores. You want to talk about neurofreakishness and deep-sea biology, cats and climate change. You don’t want to be regaled with my favorite recipe for breadfruit souffl\u00e9.<\/p>\nI crave attention as much as any writer; I’ll announce con appearances and translation deals, I’ll point you to reviews of my stuff, I’ll leave no one in any doubt about Peter Watts’s opinion on any number of subjects. But I do not want to look any more self-absorbed than necessary. There was a dry spell a while back where I didn’t post for the better part of a month. That wasn’t because I had nothing to say; it was because everything I might have said would have been pure chest-thumping: Le Monde<\/em> gave me a rave review! The Koreans want to publish Blindsight<\/em>! I got pimped on Daily Kos<\/em>!<\/p>\nA little of that goes a long way, and if you don’t mix it in with other stuff it starts sounding pretty self-aggrandizing. Unfortunately, the technical nature of that “other stuff” means that it doesn’t get posted either until I’ve had time to read the source material, check out a bit of third-party commentary, and think about whether I’d have anything interesting to say on the subject myself. So when I’m pressed for time, and the only news in stock is me-me-me, sometimes I figure it’s better to not say anything at all.<\/p>\n
It’s not that I’m not needy. It’s not that I don’t crave attention. It’s just that I don’t want to make it obvious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Position statement here. While replying to a batch of comments on a recent thread, I encountered the following sentiment from Seruko: I am somewhat troubles by the lack of self-pimping. I really wanted to read \u2018The Island\u2019 but didn\u2019t know it had been published until a month or so ago. If you can\u2019t shill for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=827"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":831,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions\/831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}