Just a reminder…
I like having the ask box on the tumblr. On a good day I’ll probably answer two or three asks. On a bad week I probably won’t get time to answer any. And every day about fifty or sixty asks come in. More, if I just answered a cluster.
Most of them are really nice. And most of the people sending them in know that the odds are against me ever answering them, and that’s just the way it is.
(The odds are especially low if you are asking something I’ve answered already, and even lower than that if I answered it yesterday.)
But some of the people sending in asks are starting to get pushy, or whiny, or grumbly about me not answering, or they are taking it personally, or flooding the ask box, or writing really long messages split over a dozen boxes. And lots of them are starting to ask for things: will I read your book, or conduct your wedding, or call your beloved and tell her you want to marry her, or draw you something to be tattooed, or be interviewed, or do your homework because you have to get a reply from a living author or you’ll fail the course and please reply privately before 6 pm…
Which is of course your right.
I like things as they are right now. I like that Tumblr doesn’t feel like work, and it’s relatively guilt free. I treat the asks like I treat my Twitter feed - hundreds of them flow past, and here and there I answer, depending on auctorial whim, and what I happen to be doing at that moment.
You’re more likely to get a question answered if it’s relatively short, easily answerable, and you can’t simply find the reply by googling. I’ve probably answered every possible variant of what to do if you have writer’s block, or have lost interest in what you’re writing, or you want to be a writer, or you don’t want to be a writer, here or on the blog at neilgaiman.com already. If that’s your question, I’m not ignoring you. I just hate repeating myself.
You’re less likely to get a reply if you ask something like “People say that a good writer should hate everything they’ve done but I like what I write is there something wrong with me?” because I don’t know how to answer a lot of these kind of things without sounding impatient and grumpy (In this case, “Don’t be an idiot,” would be the best possible reply, and it’s not one that will make the person getting it happier).
I quite like having an ask box. I do not want to make it go away.
It seemed like a good time to reblog this. (The unanswered asks in-box just hit 28,000.)
As long as you are happy with knowing that I will probably see what you sent (as long as it’s not the kind of crazy day when a few hundred asks come in as Tumblr doesn’t really seem set up for dealing with anything but the most recent dozen or so things) but that the odds are always against you getting an answer, this thing will keep working.