What’s a writer to do when the Internet goes down?  Depending on how long the internet connection is down for, the withdrawal symptoms will vary.

1. No more facebook access ~ can’t spend the morning scrolling down the newsfeed…what a disaster.

2. Forget about updating twitter ~ will the world get by without knowing what I ate for breakfast or how my exercise workout went or where I’m going for lunch?!?!? 

3. What about my blog ~ my faithful followers are waiting with bated breath for my daily blog…I don’t think they’ll survive without my next blog posting today.

4. Email’s down ~ how will I make it through the day without email access.  I’m sure I have hundreds of messages, not to mention the messages I didn’t even get through reading yesterday. 

5. You mean I can’t surf the news sites ~ forget about watching the news on TV…I want to scroll the news sites online.

6. Online marketing ~ I need to access the Internet to promote my latest book on the local forums, chat rooms and other social media sites. 

Now back to reality.  Our Internet connection at home has been slow and acting up lately and it gave me the idea to blog about our dependence on online activity.  Believe me, I am one of the addicted ones.  Every day, the first thing I do before I start working in my home office is to check my email.  Lately, I’ve been checking facebook and twitter even before my yahoo email account.  Throughout the day, I check back on facebook and twitter, but I tell myself it’s because I also manage various FB and TW accounts for different marketing clients.  Shh…but I do check my personal page also throughout the day.

I finally just got the TweetDeck app for Twitter on my phone, as well as the app for Facebook.  I’m not sure that it’s such a good thing, but now I can update my status from anywhere, just like so many other people are doing.

So, am I saying that the Internet is bad?  No, it’s not bad but our dependence on it can sometimes be bad.  However, it’s great to have Internet access on my phone when my husband and I are out and we need directions or are looking for a specific restaurant’s address to input it into our GPS. 

As writers, we especially need the Internet in this day and age, for marketing and networking with other authors and with our readers and publishers and book reviewers.  The wonderful balancing act of not allowing our access to the Internet to hinder our main goal of writing every day and trying to complete new manuscripts should be the driving force in our daily interaction online.  We use the Internet for research as well and social networking with friends and family, but we must remember that we are using the Internet and not the other way around. 

Now back to my marketing work and then to work on another chapter in my book ~ but I’m sure I’ll see you on Facebook or Twitter not too long from now!