I've lived in the land of oblivion so long, I guess you could call it my hometown.
Things just don't occur to me that occur to other people. At least until someone says something and then I have a big "duh!" moment. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to with one person and then recounted the conversation to someone else later only to have that second person ask questions I have no answer to. Why? Because the most basic of queries just don't occur to me until someone else mentions them.
The oblivion covers many areas. Writers are supposed be observant, right? Me? Not so much. In college, I remember saying to my roomie that I thought a guy and a gal on our dorm floor liked each other. Yeah, very late to that party since they'd already been dating for a while. I'd like to chalk this up to youth, but unfortunately I'm still slow on the uptake. I pretty much need to be hit over the head.
What got me thinking about this is a conversation on one of my loops where the authors were talking about promoting each others' releases on Twitter. This was another "duh!" moment for me. Why wasn't I retweeting when authors made announcements about their new books? I was congratulating them, but not resending the message. It wasn't deliberate. It was my obliviousness at work again. I'm going to try to be better now that I have a clue. Of course, retweeting when I'm at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) is difficult, but I'm going to try to mark the post as a favorite and retweet when I get home.
More oblivion about asking people to guest blog over here. I guess I figured that other writers wouldn't be interested, but I should have thought about asking, right? I did unjam my brain enough to invite one person (thanks, Carolyn!), but that trickle didn't penetrate my thick head enough to get that I should be asking others. This goes under the heading #friendfail. Maybe the other authors wouldn't have time or maybe they really wouldn't be interested, but I should at least think to ask. I'm going to try and be better here, too.
I don't know what predisposed me to reside in the land of oblivion. Maybe it's because I was such a dork when I was in school and I escaped into my fictional world (I had stories in my head even then) to avoid the pain of the real one. Maybe I'm missing the gene that makes things everyone else thinks of invisible to me. Maybe it's something else all together, but I'm going to attempt to improve across the board.
This is going to be a work in progress, of course, because my obliviousness is dense enough that it's going to take concerted effort over a long period of time to overcome it, but at least I finally realize I have a problem.
