Mystique of withdrawing

I'm feeling particularly nasty as of late, and disinterested in the online world in general. It's a common problem, I think, at least with me — sometimes the online world holds no interest — and it's during these low times I wonder what the point really is. Have we as a society lost something now that we can access our heroes online? When I was growing up, my favourite authors were enigmas. I may have read an occasional interview, or lucked into catching them on television for a few minutes, but by and large I knew nothing about those people beyond the words that made up their fiction. The weirdest thing for me as I aged was having to kill those heroes off and replace them with the regular men and women that shared their names. Some of that was killed by the simple act of writing and submitting my own work — simply by being part of the written world I ended up meeting people within it, but the highest amount of slaughter came from the internet. One can email pretty much any author nowadays and, with a few notable exceptions, get a personal response. Now that I can touch these people, some of their magic is gone.

I wonder if being an active participant on places like FaceBook and Twitter and the like really help the new and struggling author, or do they in the long run hurt him? This blog, for instance, occasionally covers my frustrations with writing: does this give readers pause? If I show doubt in a piece of work, is that doubt contagious? Will it spread? The fact that people can send me a message and get a response creates a level of intimacy that I think can help as much as hurt. Up until about a year ago, photos of me on the internet were non-existent; I didn't like them, didn't allow them, strove to avoid them. I let that rule slid over the last year, but I wonder if it was the right thing to do. Where is the mystery nowadays?

I'm not sure what the answer is to this. Another author I know went through this same crisis a couple of years ago and all but disappeared from the online scene. And yet he's back now — he's not as prolific as before, but he still appears quite often. Is it inescapable, this new level of intimacy? Is the mystique of the writer now gone forever? Will a career fail without succumbing to constant exposure? These are things I wonder, and for the life of me I cannot determine the correct answer.

Which is a long way around the block to say that I just don't feel like participating lately, which is a shame because I have this new book out that I think is dynamite yet can't drum up the motivation to let the world know...