I love drama.

I admit it.

I love a good blog drama.

I admit it.

But they are exhausting. I don’t want to just read what one person has to say, I want to know what everybody has to say. I want to see both sides…well, unless it involves pedophilia in romance, then I’m pretty much of the mind that the other side isn’t worth listening to. I lose diplomacy there and I can’t even be sorry about it.

Rambling…oh, yeah. I love a good drama. I can’t help it. I’m nosy. Insatiably nosy. So many dramas do come down to some people being utterly convinced they are right and no other way is acceptable. Some of them boil down to misunderstandings. Some of them boil down to a difference of opinions and personality clashes. And some are just…well, drama.

But man, are they exhausting.

I get caught up in them. There are days when I spend more time skimming blogs than I do writing. I spend more time formulating my response to a drama than I do my main chracters’ dialogue. How I present myself to the online community matters to me. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. I hate it when I see people doing/saying stupid things that lead to dramas or add to them, when it would have been so easy to avoid it. That’s why I’m careful about what I say, how I say it. Image, I’m telling you, it matters.

But on one given day, if I spend more time worrying about drama than I spend worrying about my deadlines, there’s a problem. It’s not good.

I’m a writer. Not a columnist, not a reporter, not a PR person. I’m just a writer. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I get paid to do.

I do like to weigh in (often) but lately I’ve been thinking it’s time to not weigh in so much. The issues that really do matter to me as a person (ie: writers stalking a reviewer, pedophilia in romance), yeah, I’ll probably find it hard not to weigh in, but so many of the other dramas, things that have little effect on me, or things I can’t really affect, I think I need to stop letting them eat up so much of my time, and brain.

Eating a brain-kind of like a figurative zombie.

Hmmmm…dramas as figurative zombies. Yeah, I can see it.

I don’t see me giving up my bloghopping, although I’ve cut down a lot. But at the end of the day, if I chime in here, or comment there, I have to wonder was it the best use of my time? No, probably not considering if I’d focused, I could have written another 20 pages of story. So I do think I’m going to try focusing a little less on my drama obsession…and a little more on the thing my readers want from me anyway-writing.