Susan Fanetti

Hi there! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with many aspects of my online life, and in the past six months or so, that disillusionment has hit a critical point. I am very much over the megalomaniacal oligarchs running most social media platforms, not to mention the biggest point of sale for authors (indie or otherwise), and all the dirty tricks they’ve pulled to overflow their pockets and empty ours while they tear the world apart. On top of that, AI is infiltrating creative spaces and …

Anyway. You live in this world, too. You know what I’m talking about. Rather than swan dive down a rabbit hole of ranting, I’ll simply say that social media is a place I don’t really want to be anymore. And writing through the world’s existential crisis and my own is quite the challenge.

I’ve been struggling with all this for months (longer, really), but through that constant agonizing, I’ve come to some decisions that will (hopefully) brighten my path enough that I can find the things that bring me joy again.

Writing is one of those joyful things, and I want it back, dammit.

I haven’t stopped writing, but WOW has it been going slowly the past while. I’ve been trying to keep it going, putting words down anytime I can drag a few out of my distracted, despairing head, but it’s been existentially frustrating, to put it mildly.

What it comes to, I think: social media is killing my mental health. Besides the daily firehose of doom and panic, I have learned too, too much about the billionaires and their minions who run the platforms, and my personal ethics take a hard hit every time I log onto any Meta site. (I deleted Twitter on The Day of the Sink, so Meta is the locus of my billionaire blight.) Like most everybody, social media is how I connect with virtually all my friends and family, where I get most of my news, where I find the cute and heartwarming content that serves as an antidote to my otherwise relentless angst. So it took me a LONG time to realize that the bad of social media far outweighed the good.

Today I fully deleted every Meta account I had: Facebook (my OG social media account, started in 2008, AND my primary author page, started in 2015), Instagram, Threads, even Messenger. The only social media I now have is this blog and my Bluesky account. (If you’re interested in the non-author me, that’s where you’ll find her.)

Simply having made that decision unlocked something for me, and I’ve been able to write with much more flow, and much more joy, in the past few weeks. I’ve finished a short story (the first thing I’ve finished in more than a year), and I’m about halfway into the first draft of Book Three of the Signal Bend Heritage series—and starting to feel some confidence that I can finish it. (Hoping to do so over the summer and publish it in the early fall.) The path ahead has brightened enough that I’m even feeling fresh inspiration, starting to make plans and jot notes for wholly new story ideas again.

Backing away from most social media is the right choice for me, for both ethical and personal reasons. But I don’t want to lose touch with my readers. So I’m restructuring and streamlining how I do that.

This is where all my book and writing-related content will be, starting now. The best way to keep up with book news, preorder and release dates, etc. is to subscribe to this blog (subscribing is free). If all you’re interested in is info about my preorders and new releases, you can also follow my author page on whatever platform you use for ebooks, and you’ll get an email whenever I publish a new book.

To mark this big change to my social media presence, I’ve done a little refresh of the blog look and layout. I’m planning to post here regularly: twice a month, with content ranging from personal musings, thoughts about the craft of writing and the business of publishing, and original fiction content like deleted scenes, character sketches, short stories, and more. I expect a lot of this fiction content will be situated in one of the story worlds I’ve already created—The Horde and the Bulls, the Paganos, the Vikings, the folks living at the base of the Sawtooth Range, and so on—but I hope there will be stories set in brand-new story worlds as well as well.

In fact, I’ve posted some original fiction today—exclusive for blog subscribers. It’s “interview notes” from Gia Lunden. If you’ve read Virago, Book One of the Signal Bend Heritage series, you know Gia is working on her doctorate in cultural anthropology, and she’s chosen to study outlaw motorcycle clubs for her dissertation. In this new story, she’s visiting the Bulls in Tulsa and sitting down to talk with Eight Ball.

You can find it under the “Subscriber Exclusives” link.

And please note: in order be able to restrict some content to subscribers, I had to add a plug-in that’s intended for monetization. I have no plans to monetize anything in this blog, at least not now or for the foreseeable. The plug-in added the “register” link at the top of my page—you can ignore that and simply subscribe to get subscriber access.

To all my readers reading this: thank you for sticking with me. I appreciate you so very much, and I’m glad you’ve stuck around.

xo

s—

PS: If you’re interested in an insider’s look at Facebook/Meta, I highly recommend Careless People, by Sarah Wynn Williams. It’s a page-turner—but I warn you: the look into the inner workings of that company ain’t pretty.