Where to find me

Something about maintaining human connection on the internet feels so precarious right now; between everything becoming SEO-farmed/hashtag-optimized #content and all the various social media platforms fracturing, it’s getting really hard to just make my own little posts and look at other people’s little posts without having to wade through a morass of bots, bullies, and bad feelings. I spend way too much mental and emotional energy these days yearning for the imperfect but far less toxic era of early 2010s blog culture, even though I know in my heart of hearts that those years are behind us.

Anyway, I am fully aware that most of my audience solely follows me on Twitter, which at this point in time is a severe bummer of a platform to be on. I don’t plan to fully quit the platform or deactivate my account (both because I want to keep my username and because I know my tweets serve as a publicly available resource for some people) but I’ve found that I’m way less active on it these days because it simply does not feel good to be there. I’ll still post sporadically and make whatever important announcements I have on Twitter, but as of now I don’t hang out on it scrolling and participating in conversations anymore.

If you are so inclined to follow me on other platforms, here’s where I’m active these days. Quick note that I am not a cross-poster. It’s not out of principle or anything; I just do not have the energy to repost the same thing across platforms. I know people who do and I admire them for it, but that is simply not me. I genuinely post different stuff on all these platforms, so please do not assume that if you follow me on one thing that you’ll see the stuff I post elsewhere.

Bluesky: @doodlyroses.bsky.social

Since this is the most Twitter-like platform, it’s been the easiest one for me to jump to and dump my random practicing thoughts. If you liked the format of Sharon-on-Twitter the most, this is the closest thing I have to a one-to-one replication.

Substack: doodlyroses.substack.com

This is where I pour most of my posting energy; every Friday I send out a little newsletter that’s a combination of updates on projects I’m working on, musings (both music and non-music related), interesting books/articles I recommend, music or videos to enjoy, playlists I make, etc. It’s a little weekly labor of love and this is what I recommend if you liked keeping up with Sharon as a Person.

It’s a long-ish story but when I moved my Patreon activity over to Substack, I created paid tiers so my lovely supporters could continue contributing to what is essentially my recording studio fund. If you genuinely want to keep up with me but really do not have the budget or inclination to pay $5/month, let me know and I’ll be happy to comp you the weekly newsletter subscription. (I would much rather comp you than have you sign up for free trials and cancel them, which some people have been doing—I do my own business accounting and have to log the refunds when you do this, so please save me the trouble and just ask for a comp.)

Instagram (Stories): @doodlyroses

You get a totally different flavor of Sharon posts on Instagram, largely because it’s mostly where I post stuff for my IRL friends. I do tend to treat Instagram Stories as Twitter-without-the-character-limit; I am embarrassingly prone to just posting large blocks of text over whatever random quotidian photo I have snapped, so if you liked getting my long-ish trains of thoughts on Twitter, you’ll probably enjoy my Instagram.

Places where I digitally exist but am not active

Facebook: Sharon Su, Pianist // I never post here and frankly forget this page exists.

Tiktok: @doodlyroses // I signed up just to reserve my username; I still haven’t done anything with it.

Threads: @doodlyroses // Ditto.

Mastodon: @doodlyroses@space-pirates.com // I pretty much never post on Mastodon anymore.

Here // who knows, maybe I’ll bring blogging back.

2022 in Books

While I will always write these posts for myself, I figured no one was actually waiting on tenterhooks to see what I read last year, and that it would be no big deal if I didn’t get around to writing my 2022 reading recap for a while. Then I got a text from a friend saying that she was checking my blog every few days waiting for “2022 in Books” to go up, which warmed my heart so much, so, hi A! This post is for you!

(For the few of you who still follow my blog but don’t follow me on social media or Substack and have been wondering what I’m up to, I do owe you a “what I’ve been up to” update post at some point. For now, please see this Substack post which summarizes a bunch of the things I’ve been doing/preparing for.)

After two somewhat driftless years of focusing on just making it through a global pandemic, 2022 for me was “the year a ton of stuff happened*” which felt extra intense given that I hadn’t been used to running at full speed in a while. That is my explanation for why, after reading 102 and 100 books in the two previous years, I squeaked out of 2022 only having finished 65 books.

*Stuff that happened: I jumped back into performing after several years of a pandemic-forced hiatus, the concerto project picked back up, I continued to write professionally, I got married and went on my honeymoon, etc.

I am aware 65 is a perfectly respectable number of books to read in a year, but I feel a little sheepish about it given that “girl who reads a lot” sort of became my personality; at multiple points throughout the year, friends would introduce me to new people by saying something like “This is Sharon, she reads a lot.” Such an introduction usually prompts people to ask the same questions (I mean, what else do you ask someone who you’re told reads a lot?) so, an FAQ:

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2021 in Books

Somehow, without really meaning to, I read 102 new books in 2021. (As always, I only count books in English that are new to me, so re-reads don’t count, my stumbling through children’s books in other languages doesn’t count, and I only count books I’ve finished. I have a very generous “if you truly hate the book you don’t have to finish it” rule for myself.)

Quick aside: ever since I started logging my reading, I’ve been dying to run a bunch of nerdy data analysis; I think it would be interesting to track my ratio of, say, fiction to non-fiction, and to analyze what percentage of my reading is by writers of color, women and nonbinary folks, etc. I also casually noticed that this year, I was sometimes blowing through 10+ books a month, but nearly came to a stop as soon as the Animal Crossing: New Horizons update dropped. (I just think that would be a super funny graph.)

However, I am so tired (we are still in a pandemic) and it was hard enough for me to grit my teeth and make this post, so alas, no graphs and charts for me.

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