Making Connections

You get two posts today because I didn't get one done last night. This is actually yesterday's post; today's will come later tonight.
I don't network. I don't really understand the concept, honestly. It seems to mostly consist of pretending to find people interesting until you've interacted enough to start a Facebook message conversation with them without it being weird, and if that's different from how you get to know people normally, without networking, then I have questions about how other people interact. Maybe knowing someone well enough to strike up a conversation doesn't translate as smoothly into actually finding them interesting?
Anyway, networking is Very Important in the writing world, but like, it doesn't actually have to be a Thing, provided you're willing to make the dreaded small-talk on the way. Making actual friends is probably better for your career anyway.
My fiancee and I spent like 40 minutes talking to a random guy we met outside the cat cafe. This was very cool because we don't have many friends locally yet. New Guy, whose first name I can't remember in any case, is a filmmaker, so that's sort of cool. (Advice for all artists: be friends with other artists outside your medium. They Understand, but are way less likely to get on your nerves than people in your own medium.)
Then we volunteered to get very involved in a nonprofit for speculative writers, doing stuff that will probably let us make even more friends in the area, this time with other writers. The whole thing happened on the public internet so I could probably go into detail about it but I'm not going to yet.
Then I rather forcefully corrected someone's misconceptions about what editors actually think about the word "said", on Tumblr. And then someone reblogged it saying "yes wreck that bitch", and positive attention from strangers is always nice.
And then I spent a bunch of time reading blog posts and webcomics and watching videos on my RSS feed. My RSS feed is actually very important to my writing, and not just because some of the things I follow on it are writing related. It's also a way of keeping up with what's going on in the world without completely inundating myself in the awfulness, hearing the thoughts of people whose thoughts I like, and taking in some serial narratives at the pace a person is meant to take in serial narratives, rather than vast chunks all at once on Netflix. Oh, and it lets me get some news and facts on non-writing topics I care about, without setting myself projects I lack the time or initiative to actually do. The lack-of-initiative thing is important. It all just kinda shows up in my feed, so I don't have to remember to check 4 different webcomics two of which don't have a regular update schedule. It's also a jumble of different topics and mediums, which makes it easier to focus and sometimes creates interesting juxtapositions.
Nothing I got done this weekend was actually writing. But all of it's important to being a writer. I should be doing more of the actual writing part, but I'm not here to agonize about my writing process, because that helps no one. I don't write every day. Not everyone does. Interacting with people; just regular people who are not Useful and might not be Interesting. Being active in your local and digital writing communities. Reading different kinds of things. Learning stuff outside your field, stuff that isn't research. None of that is as important to being a writer as actually getting words on the page, but it's pretty damn important. It's really hard to be a good writer if you're not actually living in the world.