Today I read a really interesting post on BlogHer by a blogger with spina bifida regarding what she shares or doesn't share on Facebook. She said people often tell her they wish they had her life because of what she shares on Facebook, but there is so much she doesn't share about her disease. She writes:

Because, God forbid I should choose the joyful family Christmas dinner in Puerto Rico as the venue for disclosing how I’ve totally slacked off on my neurosurgery stuff and am now desperate to schedule a follow-up with my neuro to find out the results of my MRI, which I had done before the holidays.

That got me to thinking about what I share, but more importantly, what I see other people sharing. This morning I got onto Facebook to check notifications. I almost never read my feed, because I feel like if I respond to one person's post that doesn't specifically name-check me then someone else might think I should respond to theirs. Of course, this is extremely self-centered of me to think people will care what I do or don't "like," but I don't think I would know when to stop. I don't *want* to spend hours on Facebook every day, and I don't want to worry about whether or not someone liked my profile picture change or what have you. In that way, Facebook is too transparent for me. I don't know who reads my blog from day to day, and I really prefer it that way. I don't want to wonder if I offended you or you've just been trapped under three feet of snow trying to get through the day for the last week.

Today, though, I read my feed for about five minutes and immediately was happy and sad for people (some of whom I barely know) and felt like I should say all the right things and click the appropriate emotion buttons and I got totally overwhelmed and just shut down the tab, pretending like I'd never opened it.

We share so much information now, and it's overwhelming to me. I've been thinking about why for several years now, and it's finally occurred to me it's because I get the news when I don't have time to process it. If I go to lunch with a friend and she tells me her dog died or she's been diagnosed with cancer or she's just in a slump, I'm already there, focused on her, with time set aside already in my schedule to talk. When I hear news, good or bad, I really want to respond immediately. I'm an extrovert and I really love being with other people. So when there is so much in the feed that there is no way on earth I'll ever be able to keep up, it actually makes my stomach hurt. Thus I avoid Facebook, only checking in every day or every other day to see if there's anything specifically directed at me, because I also have a fear of ignoring someone without giving them a reason why. Even then I find I've ignored invites to events or what have you because Facebook is the only place they were announced.

But that's not all of it. Not really.

I was immediately relieved when I closed the tab, because I noticed that in the five minutes I'd been reading, not only did I feel sad and happy, I felt jealous of some of the announcements and photos I saw, even though I know damn well we all edit the selves we present in social media and because of it, the standards for what our houses should look like or the presentation of our home-cooked dinners or the outfit we wear to Target go up and up and up. The standards I once thought applied only to the landed gentry suddenly feel like they're applying to me sitting here in my home office in suburban Kansas City with plans only to buy my daughter a new pair of tennies and maybe hit a family-friendly pizza place on the way home tonight. I used to feel really proud of myself for baking anything and this morning I felt guilty for making my daughter a Valentine's Day breakfast of chocolate chip muffins because it was a mix and I didn't put them on a cute plate and the muffin liner thingies had Christmas trees on them.

My fucking muffin liners aren't even good enough.

I blame Facebook and Pinterest. I really do. The television was always there. The catalogs were always there. The magazines, same thing. I didn't know if my friends were watching or reading those things, and if they dressed better than I do or cooked beautiful meals, I chalked it up to personal taste or income levels or interest differences. Now because I see everybody doing those things, I feel like it's the new norm.

Are seasonal wreaths really the new norm? Why does everyone have such cute boots? When did I get left behind?

Is it okay I don't care about a lot of those things? I mean, I care a little, but well, I still go to the grocery store in yoga pants and a hat All.The.Time. My cooking has improved dramatically since we started eating in as much as possible, but I'm really proud of myself just for using fresh vegetables instead of canned or frozen or God forbid insta-mealed. It doesn't have to look pretty, too.

I reject you, higher standards! I want to feel good about my not-matching wood and my non-mermaid hair. I want to feel like what I surround myself with can be just functional sometimes and doesn't have to also be gorgeous and flawlessly maintained. I have no servants who live downstairs, and I'm TIRED. 

I want to be good enough.

Do you ever look at all the people making sexy fish-faces on The Facebook and wonder how we got here?

Then, in the midst of my judginess, I look at my own damn profile picture, which is one of the only pictures I've ever taken in which I'm not smiling, because I was trying to be serious and authorial and not giddy. Totally no different than The Facebook. I'm guilty.

Sometimes I get so tired of myself and trying to promote my writing and trying to be, just, well, MORE. More as a writer, more as an employee, more as a mother, better, faster, more.

I have plenty of friends who ask me why I feel compelled to write books on top of all the other things I do in my life, and I think the real answer is that I take myself too seriously. When I'm honest with myself, I know there are almost 300,000 books coming out every year and it's a bloody miracle if anyone finds mine, reads it AND likes it, so sometimes it seems very silly to keep trying. And here I am, writing another one, not knowing if this next one will be bigger, faster, more or not.

Then I think, well, if I didn't try, then what point is there in doing anything? I was commenting on a post this week about a woman who doesn't like to make her bed because she doesn't see the point, but I always make my bed and the point is to have a made bed because I take myself and my bed very, very seriously. I take everything seriously, except for The Facebook, because The Facebook depresses the shit out of me and every time I go over there I find myself feeling bad that I'm not doing everything better, faster, more, and I hate feeling like that, like just living without hurting anyone else isn't enough.

I think I might need a vacation. 

Some of you expressed interest in what I'm doing with my publishing interactions with readers and other authors. My motto is pay it forward and hope and also pray hard and row for shore. In other words, while I think there is something to books sell because they are really beautiful or profound or poignant, there's also even more to books sell because people realize they are there in the first place. That's the toughest part of publishing right now. With 235,000 self-published books coming out yearly -- that's self-published, not even counting the number of books that come out with a traditional publisher -- distribution and discoverability are huge to a book's success. Knowing how hard it is out there for a gangsta, every author I've befriended and whose book I liked has received his or her share of tweets, Facebook likes, Goodreads shelves and now Riffle lists that I can provide. I've even starting to write Amazon reviews -- I didn't realize in the past how powerful those are. I know, naive. But it's so true. The nicest thing you can do for an author is throw out an Amazon or Goodreads review.

I've been digging through the various places in which one can get a review or a mention. In addition to the usual social media channels, there are also very book-specific sites. Today I'm going to cover one in particular: Riffle. It is brand new, and I got the insider scoop because of a job-related connection. As a beta user, I've been busy curating lists:

• Shaped My Life
• Writing I Admire
• Learned Something About Writing or Technique
• Great Reads for a Rainy Day
• Good Books for Teens
• Books I Threw Across the Room (the anti-list)

I also use Goodreads almost daily, but I use Goodreads differently than I use Riffle. Both tools are good for discoverability. On Goodreads, I seek reviews and I give reviews (I need to catch up on that, note to self) and I also use the shelves to track which books I'm going to read in which order. With two to three books a month that I need to read for my job as managing editor of the BlogHer Book Club (another fabulous place to get ideas for what to read next, *cough*), two or three YA novels a month I'm reading to get a feel for what works and what doesn't and a few other picks mixed in, I'm plowing through more pages a week than I have since graduate school. And you know what? It feels great. I feel energized after I read a good book. I don't feel that way after watching TV. Sometimes, I'm too drained for anything but TV, but I've found since I started reading more I feel like the world is more interesting.

And isn't that interesting?

Back to bookish tools. I digress.

As a reader and an author, I want to help other readers and authors find great books. I don't see Goodreads and Riffle as being any more competitive with each other than I see Pinterest and Facebook being competitive with each other -- they tap into different facets of the same communication. Riffle is very visual and very curated -- it's pretty much pure discoverability, and I love the way it works visually. Here's my profile page on Riffle:

Here's my profile page on Goodreads.

Riffle is just pretty, and the lists I curate there are not everything I've read, but things I've read and mentally sorted into a list. Sometimes physically sorted on my bookshelves at home.

I follow other people on Riffle -- people I know and people who have clever list names. Here's the main Riffle page.

I have friends on Goodreads, too, and if someone sends me a recommendation and I know that person, I usually put their recommendation on my shelf. Both Riffle and Goodreads are useful tools for those of us who just inhale literature and don't want to waste our time on books that just aren't good.

Life is short. Read the best.

If you'd like to get an invite to Riffle (it's currently invite-only as the rollout begins), click this link between October 29-31st. They'll know you came from Surrender, Dorothy, and this is the only place you can get access to this particular invite. I know, we're totally snooty around here, right?

And also, please do friend me on Goodreads if you use it so we can see each others' books. I am reading gazillions of things right now and I'm happy to give you my honest take on whether or not I liked it on a variety of levels.

I read an article on Salon this morning by a college professor regarding what she sees going on around her: kids utterly dependent on their parents, still, in college, and parents intent on following their childrens' every move via cell phone or Facebook:

College is a perfect middle ground for this age group: Students are forced to make their own choices and take responsibility for them, but help and guidance are there if they need it. What I see, though, is that the self-reliance they should be developing is thwarted by parental involvement. An academic advisor at Drexel told me the other day what she is most surprised by is how students “tolerate parental interference.” 

A few people have asked me why I set the young adult novel I'm writing in the year 1990. My truth was that a lot of the plot twists couldn't have happened if cell phones and texting existed. Kids today seem a lot more transparent than they were when I was in high school. It was possible for someone to intercept the note you wrote your best friend about the cute guy, but short of taping it to the hallway wall, there wasn't really a way to mass publicize it. And your parents found out what you were doing from gossip -- they usually didn't have cold, hard, photographic evidence.

I wonder if it's harder to separate ourselves from our kids now because we CAN keep track of them easier. We CAN give them cell phones and insist they pick up when we call in order to have such cell phones. We CAN follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook or what have you. We're told we SHOULD at least be aware of what they're doing online -- I worry for me, though, will that be the gateway drug to stalking my kid? 

One of the hardest moments for me as a parent so far was the first day my daughter went on a field trip with her daycare to an amusement park. She was riding up there with another parent, a parent I didn't know. And it was AN AMUSEMENT PARK. On a very, very hot day -- I think it was more than 100 degrees that day. I worried she would get too hot, get dehydrated, get kidnapped, fall out of a roller coaster -- there were at least three thousand things I worried that day. I could've volunteered to chaperone that field trip, but I forced myself not to because it would just feed my need for control. 

Of course my girl arrived home sweaty, slightly sunburned and full of stories of adventure, high speeds and junk food.

It was so hard to not know.

If I have that much trouble with a field trip, I know I'm going to be a trainwreck the first time she leaves home without me. If I thought I could track her movements with GPS, I probably would. But that's the point of the whole Salon article -- there's a reason kids move out of the house when they're old enough, and it's this: They need to have their own lives.

I'm sure if my parents could've tracked me better in college, I would've behaved worse, not better. With them to rebel against, I probably would've rebelled. As it stood, I barely missed a class and got straight As, because I knew there was no one to make me do my homework and I saw kids around me failing out of college right and left because they couldn't discipline themselves. 

I better bookmark this post and make myself read it every night when my girl goes to college, because I'm sure I'll have accidentally left a GPS chip in her luggage.

Oy.

On Monday, I talked to a business communication class at UMKC about business communication as it pertains to social media. I told them the story about how a commenter on this blog tried to get me fired from H&R Block years ago. I told them about how I started this blog anonymously and how I evolved to using my real name as my username for pretty much everything. I talked about strong language and politics and privacy.

They asked why I hated Facebook. And I tried to explain how it is when you don't grow up with something -- how that degree of visibility feels different to me. I know anyone with a screen can read my blog, but I also know that most people I know or am related to in real life don't. Or at least not every day. But I know people who are glued to Facebook for hours every day, lots of people, including, probably, from the looks on their faces, these students who I can't help but think of in my mind as kids, though they were sophomores and juniors in college.

Standing there trying to explain how I came to my job in Internet publishing back in 1999, what it was like to pop in the bubble, how this recession is maybe longer but not so different from that pop if that was your industry, going from a career started with very different public and private Ritas to just one now, what it used to be like to have the people with whom you worked really know nothing you didn't want them to know about your personal life, back when you could go to work without everyone knowing who you went to high school with or what you got for your birthday -- it's not so much that I oppose this information being out there -- obviously I don't, I think you take the chaff with the wheat -- but it's different than what they're growing up with. It's been something of a hard adjustment that varies by personality type, but it's one thing to grow up talking to your friends in this way from the get-go and another thing entirely to have started one way and had it evolve before the rules were established. Exhilerating, yes, exciting -- my life would not be the same without this technology -- but also at times disconcerting. It must be what it was like to start life riding in a carriage and end it changing your oil. To start life with only a radio and end it with a flatscreen.

I barely restrained myself from saying "when I was your age." I do think I also restrained from explaining I had a typewriter in college. It was an electronic typewriter that had this new-fangled thing in the side called a disk drive, which I never used. 

Okay, I have to go to my job on the Internet now before I find myself reaching for dentures.