Remember, you can subscribe to the blog by email, just like Dave does...

It’s now been three months since I decamped from the social media fields and stopped pushing notice of blog posts here to Twitter, Facebook et al.

Facebook was an easy drug to kick; Twitter was harder: for weeks, my phantom tweeting limb would conjure fully-formed witty ripostes. But I got over that too, in part by refocusing my writerly energies here on the blog.

What continues to happen, though, is that I run into friends and family, used to getting a ping from Twitter or Facebook about new blog posts; they simply assume I’ve stopped blogging (or died).

I’ve almost fallen off the wagon a few times as a result: “I’ll just push notices to Facebook and Twitter, but I’ll ignore them otherwise.” But I’ve resisted. Pringles in the top cupboard are still Pringles.

All is not unrosy, however: one of the delightful side-effects of the new world order is that I regularly get comments, corrections and cautions, in reaction to posts, from my friend Dave.

Dave, you see, has an unusual (read, “different from mine”) daily schedule that, if memory serves, sees him rising daily at 4:00 a.m., feeding the chickens, writing several young adult novels, chopping a cord of wood, and running 10 miles, all before breakfast.

But Dave subscribes to the blog by email–just like you can–and so in there somewhere he reads the previous day’s posts. And where, in an earlier day, he would have simply hit “Like”, or polished off an “attaboy” (or “what hell!?”) tweet, Dave will now send me carefully-worded emails when something strikes a chord.

This very fact alone is enough to make the decamping worth it.

So perhaps you’d like to join Dave?

You don’t have to write me carefully-worded emails. But you’ll be free from the need to ever remember again “oh, right, Peter has a blog.”

Click here to get it all started.

(You’ll get one email a day, maximum)