Social what?

   Oh, the social networks.  I think I have myself plugged in to everything, but honestly everything that I feel I need to do in order to get connected to other people sounds like work.  Go to facebook, to twitter, to forums, to blogs, make friends, leave your website address sprawled across every flat surface you come across on the internet.  Work, I tell you, and I believe it because as a writer I try to avoid anything that feels remotely like work, and social networking stinks with it.
     This is not to say that I don't desire the community and fellowship of other writers.  I do, very much.  Writing is, I feel, a very lonely art.  You pour a lot of yourself into your writing, and there's no easy way to let your precious creations, as dear to you as children, loose into the world to get ridiculed and pounced upon as are few other things.  A novel is a piece of you.  If you're a writer, you know what I mean.  I just feel like I'm trying to be sneaky and underhanded about the whole fellowship thing.  Like, hey, let's be friends, but I'm going to leave a link to my blog after my comment so other people can find me because yours is the more popular site.  Does it work?  Undoubtedly it works!  I have seen this so much on blogs, this stealthy theft of the other's fanbase.  And I hate, I hate being advertised to.  I simply despise it.  But will I stoop to the same thing, even though I know and fully understand the implications of what I'm doing?  Yes.  I have already created a twitter account (God knows why, I write novels, not tweets), a new facebook, and I joined a forum.  But I don't like it.  I'm not a marketer, I'm not an extrovert, and being a persona on the internet doesn't appeal to me.  That's why I'm a writer. 
     I haven't edited my first manuscript to completion, and so I haven't even begun the process of trying to get my novel traditionally published, but I keep seeing these articles and statistics about authors needing these kinds of skills, about how the traditional publishing that I'm counting on is slowly dying in the new era of e-books.  If I knew how to do this right, I would probably search for those very articles I'm indirectly citing, and I would leave a comment with a link back to this article, leeching those viewers away with a promise of similar content.  But that feels wrong to me.  If anyone out there is reading this, can you tell me another way?  Have a great night, guys.  See you tomorrow.