The news is bad. Really, really bad. And the awfulness doesn’t take so much as a breath before the new awful comes; every day in every news cycle.

Paying attention to the news on a minute by minute basis or even a daily basis is making me miserable. It’s giving me nightmares. It’s putting a wall between me and my muse who is huddled in the corner, wide-eyed, scared and refusing to work with me. Without my muse, there is no novel and I very much want to have a beautiful, well-plotted, well-written novel that will knock your socks off.

So I’m going to stop the news for 100 days.

In practical terms this means wiping my systems of news sources, avoiding Facebook and Twitter, and avoiding going to news sites.

As I see it, this is going to present three problems in the next hundred days:

1. I need to be able to administer the Memphis Zen Facebook group since that is part of how we organize and keep in touch.
2. My friends and family need to be able to get in touch with me and I need to communicate with them.
3. There are terrible things going on in the world that need my support and I need to respond to the great needs I see.

Here are my solutions to the problems above.

1. I will continue to administer the Memphis Zen Facebook group once a week but will do it from my computer. I have deleted the Facebook app from my devices for the next 100 days.
2. I will send alternate contact information to family and friends. Further, I will use this blog to let them know what I am doing. This blog can automatically post to Facebook and that is what I plan to do. I will keep comments relatively open on this blog so that if friends and family want to respond to me here, they can.
3. I cannot help everything in the world. What I can do is pick two organizations that will make good use of donated money to fight for causes I believe in and to respond to humanitarian crises. I will pick these in the next couple of days and will send them money.

So that’s basically the plan. I guess it starts now.