Farewell, my lovelies

It’s been a while coming, but I have finally made the decision to no longer update my Twitter account @SirBenfro. I’m not shutting the account down, and it may well be that I return to it some day, but for now I’ve had enough.

I first started tweeting in early 2009, frustratingly just one month after the @jamesoswald Twitter handle had been taken by someone else. I imagine Pembrokeshire County Council, coming to the site a little later, were similarly annoyed to find some weird Scottish bloke had already taken the handle that would have been best for them. Such is life.

It was fun in the early days. I’d dipped my toe in the crime fiction waters by then, having been shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger twice, and become something of a regular at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Fiction festival in Harrogate. I had some SF and Fantasy friends too, so it didn’t take long to build up a reasonable following. It took over from the Sir Benfro blog I’d first started five years earlier (and which is still there, if you’re of a masochistic nature) as a place for my random thoughts and general wittering. Somewhere to quip or carp or simply share photographs of cats.

When the book world came knocking, my publisher was keen to use my social media presence to aid with marketing. Even back then, I was reluctant. It was social media, after all, not commercial media. At best I thought of Twitter (and by then Facebook too) as places where I could communicate with readers about all the other things I found interesting, rather than as an advertising medium in itself. Nothing that’s happened in the intervening years has changed my view on that.

I quit Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. I’d grown out of love with it anyway, and that was a convenient reason to cut all ties with the Zuckerverse. My publisher wasn’t happy, but to be honest I didn’t have all that many followers anyway. At the time, I even considered washing my hands of social media altogether. That was perhaps one step too far though, and this was back when Elon Musk was just a dork and not the dangerously radicalised fascist that he has become. So I stuck with Twitter and tried not to let it become too much of a distraction.

That worked for a while, but two things have come together to convince me it’s time to leave, for a while at least if not forever.

First, Twitter just isn’t much fun anymore. I’ve kept to the ‘following’ category rather than letting the algorithm pick what I see and when, but even so the timeline is only perhaps 20% the kind of interaction I enjoy (less if you count the ads that pop up every third tweet). I’ve tried not to let my feed become an echo chamber, but seeing the same book cover retweeted time after time rather puts me off wanting to read it. And if it’s not book Twitter, then it’s the same reposting of outrage-farming articles that make me want to scream. The world is in a perilous place at the moment, I know, but endlessly retweeting it isn’t going to make any difference except possibly to encourage the bad actors to ever worse.

That’s the one side of it; the second reason is more personal. Twitter has always been a time sink, as has all social media. Before these sites came along (or more realistically, before broadband arrived in the sleepy corner of Wales where I was then living and made them usable), I probably read twice as many books and many, many more comics. I even watched the telly from time to time. I worked a day job and then wrote novels, and logged on once a day for ten minutes to download emails. Ah, happy, simpler times!

I’ve paddled the shores of depression for pretty much my entire adult life, never fully plunging in and generally coping by keeping myself busy. That’s easy enough to do when things are going well, but harder when the world feels like it’s about to explode. Harder still when you’ve had great success in the past but now seem to be fading into obscurity (yet another problem with being constantly bombarded with other people’s book news on social media). Finding the focus necessary for the work is more difficult for me now than it was even five years ago, and I suspect that lately I’ve been suffering a little bit of old-fashioned burn out. Hardly surprising when you think that my 23rd novel will be published in March, not quite 12 years after my first.

There are a few projects open on my computer as I type this. Inspector McLean book fifteen is the most important, as that’s under contract and has a deadline. There are other books I want to write though, other stories to tell. And yet the mad enthusiasm I once felt, the thrilling rush as words came pouring out through my fingers, is missing a lot of the time.

That’s when distractions are all too easily succumbed to, and there’s no greater distraction than booting up the browser and having a wee peek at what’s happening out there in social media land. If I’m not careful I can find myself in a repeated loop of finishing a paragraph, then instead of engaging my brain to work out what needs to come next, popping onto Twitter instead. Nothing’s changed since the end of the previous paragraph, of course, and neither will it have done by the end of the next one.

So I won’t be posting to Twitter any more (in truth, I haven’t for a couple of weeks anyway), and neither will I be checking in there. I have an account on Bluesky (two, as it happens, but I keep on forgetting about the @jamesoswald one I grabbed before anyone else could). You’ll find me there as @SirBenfro, but not often. I’ll still be writing my newsletter, although as I type this blog post it’s January 11th and I’ve not done one for this month yet. Enthusiasm, you see. In short supply and needed for the main work.

I aim to blog more, too, although how anyone will find out is not so obvious. I think you can subscribe, and there’s probably a RSS Reader link somewhere too, if understand that sort of thing. This blog is hosted on my website, under my control, which hopefully means it’s not at the whims of some drug-addled racist man child with abandonment issues.

If we make it through the next decade, I think historians will look back on the rise and fall of social media as an upheaval on a par with world wars. It was meant to bring us all together, and for a little while it did. Maybe it will again some day, but for now, for my sanity, I’m going to let it go.