In one of my favorite, word-nerdiest TED talks, Erin McKean says the internet is made of words and enthusiasm. I'll add that the internet is also swarming with nanobots ready to do your bidding.
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| credit: TheDigitalArtist |
None of us can ever have enough digital eyes and ears. When you are waiting for an agent, editor, or journal to open back up to submissions, save yourself some clicks! You can use the site visualping.io
Their tagline makes it pretty clear what their service is all about. Plug in a link, tell visualping how frequently to check, and they will send you an email when it finds the website has changed.
When you sign up for the free account, you get a small number of free checks. You can ask it to check a lot or a little. (Maximize your free checks by setting each one to check monthly, but beware of agents who open and close for those 30-min windows).
There are plenty of web monitoring services out there. I have found visualping.io particularly helpful for writer life because some submission opportunities are unpredictable.
Stop clicking refresh while you wait for Godot. Let the robots do the watching for you!
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| Just some random robots I found on Etsy |
Here's another way to approach writerly anxiety. Maybe stop worrying about clicks and likes etc. A writer's work is to write.
ReplyDeleteJust a thought ;)
Ah, I may not have described it clearly enough. The intent isn't to point it at your own site and create pretend traffic. This is to point at other sites.
ReplyDeleteIf you are waiting for a certain press to announce they are open for submissions, then the bots can email you instead of you needing to browse past the site each day.