“There is a disturbing (lack of) presence in the Force”

It was pointed out to me recently, that my footprint on Facebook has been, for quite some time now, limited.

‘What the hell have you been up to?’ I was asked.

‘Well, you know … Stuff,’ I replied.

‘Writing stuff?’

‘Living stuff. And writing stuff,’ I replied.

‘Well it’s the living stuff we want to know about,’ they said. ‘We all know you can write, Matt ...’

I turned forty last year. Some people know that. Most people don’t. It wasn’t a world-changing event. Not even to me. We went drinking around Sheffield, and before that we took the kids to Centre Parcs for a week. It was a good time. But when I turned forty, I didn’t mark it with a flurry of activity on Facebook, it was just one of those things that was the mid-point of my life.

I am at that place in the book, to use a writing analogy, where there are less chapters ahead of me than there are behind. But that’s okay, because I’ve achieved quite a bit.

When I was eighteen I believed that by the age of thirty I would be published. And by the age of forty I’d have a family. I count myself lucky that I’ve done that. True, back when I was eighteen I thought I’d be a bestselling author at forty, like Stephen King, and probably married to the girl I was with when I was eighteen, but life doesn’t follow the plans of an eighteen year old. It does its own thing. It makes it interesting, and nowhere in life’s book is a blurb about how it might all go, nor can I skip to the end and read the last sentence.

For many people, Facebook is that life book, a record of it at the very least. A living one that people can read along to, if they have the time. And that’s one of the big problems I have with it: Facebook consumes time as much as it records it. After spending too much time behind the camera than in front of it with our first child, I’ve discovered that when you are running a commentary on your life, you’re not living it.

That’s how I feel about social media as a whole really, which is why only on rare occasions do you find me tweeting about family things, and only then because my kids are as geeky as me (poor souls). If people want to know what’s happening to me, they can use their imagination: I’m living the life of a middle-aged man, happily married, with two lovely kids, and I’m a writer; and all of this is happening in a leafy corner of Sheffield. I can see the Peak District from the window where I write. Today there is sunshine. Plenty of it. And, coincidently, as I type this, Scott Matthew’s Sunshine is playing over my stereo.

Life is good.

‘So why have a Facebook account at all?’ I was asked during that tiresome conversation, where I felt I had to justify myself, as all non-Facebook users have to.

I didn’t have a reply at the time. You see, I don’t use Facebook for business either. In my view, friends and family shouldn’t be pushed into buying my books. They will or they won’t. That’s up to them. As long as they know one’s coming out, that’s great. I will, on occasion, just give people the head’s up, and today I changed my profile picture to After the Sea Rose, and I may even say when it’s published at the end of August. But I draw the line there.

So, I just shrugged my shoulders to the question, sipped my drink, thinking of ways to change the conversation.

It was only later that it dawned on me why, indeed, I still have a Facebook account.

I guess Facebook reminds me of where I came from. It’s an anchor. Everyone needs an anchor, especially an author who has flights of fancy; someone who spends much of their waking life hiding in their imagination.

Also - and this is where my 40^th and the 40^ths of those I went to school with reminds me - it was there, back in South Cheshire, that my peers insisted I would be a published writer one day. They, like my parents, had complete faith I would make it.

I never wanted to let them down.

I have confession: 

Each book I’ve had published, each little success, I have thought of those times in the school library, or in the 6^th Form Common Room of Holmes Chapel Comprehensive school, where I listened to my friends say I would be published; that those mental, and sometimes quite horrific short stories of mine, would one day find an audience, (other than those friends I spent several years with – and I might add, several of the most important years of my life).

Yeah, faith goes a long way. If faith had an exchange rate, I’d say there were moments it had dipped in value over the last twenty-five years or so, but I’m glad I banked it all, because really, faith is why I’m here.

So maybe I don’t need Facebook to sell books, and I don’t need it to remind me I’m doing okay, or tell others that I’m fine.

But on occasion, perhaps I need reminding it took a lot of hard work, and the faith of others to get me here, on this chapter.

On this page.

Thanks guys.

- Matt