The big question on my local RWA chapter's PAN loop is what would it take to get more members to participate. For me, the answer is TIME. I don't have any. I can't make it to meetings because if they're during working hours, I'm at the day job and if they're during the evenings or on the weekends, I have to write. Have to. Maybe if I were in a position to ditch the day job, or if I didn't continually have short deadlines, I could find a little time. But I do.
Take last night for example. My goal was to do a little writing and get to bed very early since I'm still not 100% well from when I was sick last week. How did I do?
Well, I opened my chapter, and realized I hadn't done a newsletter for October yet. I wanted to promote the chat the Crimson City writers are doing tonight at Romance Reviews Today, so I pretty much had to do it last night. This takes a while since I have to think about my news for the month and compose the items.
Next, I remembered I'm scheduled to post on the 2 B Read blog on Thursday. I have the bare bones of an entry, but it certainly had a lot of work left to do on it. Including research, and looking up a couple of links to insert. This took a couple of hours.
Then there was email. Tons and tons of email that had to be answered. Anything that could wait a day or two, I flagged and will try to tackle today or tomorrow. Also, there was a great post about Crimson Veil at the RBL Board that I needed to reply to. And there are a couple more posts over there that I need to try to answer this morning before I leave for work.
By the time I finished all these things, it was an hour later than the time I planned to go to sleep. Sigh. I need a clone or something.
One of my friends told me to drive traffic to my blog, I need to comment on other people's blogs. Great in theory, easy enough to do, right? It would be if I had a spare 5 minutes. I have time to read other people's blogs, but no time to comment. It's a matter of priorities. I could run around half the blogosphere commenting, but that doesn't get my next book written. Same thing with my local chapter's PAN group. I still haven't found time to comment on the email loop about why I don't participate much. It takes time to answer email, and so far, most loop email hasn't reached a high enough priority on my To Do List.
Some day, this won't be a problem. Some day, I'm going to make enough money writing to quit the day job and then I'll set aside a certain time each day to answer email, comment on blogs, write newsletters, and blog entries without it infringing on my writing time. That's the island this rat is swimming for. :-)
