Tag Archives: Twitter

Revitalized

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When I last posted two-and-a-half weeks ago, I was taking a break from social media and blogging, in order to focus on starting my new writing project off on the right foot. It has been a wonderfully creative time for me, and I’m trying to make the benefits of it continue into the future by not going back to the same place as before — namely, the place where I am spending way too much time each day trying to keep up with Facebook and blog reading. I don’t hang out on Twitter all day anyway, and I think the benefits of my writing two or three regular blog posts per week outweigh any time constraints I feel from them. But reading blogs had begun to eat away at my mornings, and Facebook was something I found myself turning to several times throughout the day, when I had two or three minutes here or there, which always drags out to ten or fifteen minutes. Not good.

Honestly, I haven’t missed most of the blogs I stopped reading these past two weeks. A very select few (I’m talking less than five) still pique my curiosity enough that I check them every couple of days. But I am not missing the 25 or 30 others that I’ve taken off my regular reading schedule. Most of those are related to publishing, writing, freelancing, etc. I know it’s considered good practice to stay up on industry news through blogs, but I just can’t do it any more, not every day, not in those numbers.

So, what have I been up to in all the wonderful and glorious time I’ve inherited by making this decision?

* I’ve been on a lot of long runs. Running is one way that I am able to get my mind loose and relaxed so that I can think through things — and this past couple of weeks I can really tell that it’s helped me feel healthier (both mentally and physically), which also helps me feel more creative. On a side note, all this extra running has led me to start training for a half-marathon at the end of September.

* I have stared at the living room ceiling a lot. No kidding, this is a great way for me to come up with ideas, lying on the floor, being still and quiet and just thinking. Last week I came up with a name for my new project by lying on the floor for about twenty minutes — and titles are one of the more difficult things for me to write. It sounds crazy, I know, and if I ever get a roommate she’ll probably think I’m nuts when I explain that this method can be part of what I mean when I say “I work at home.”

* I’ve read a lot of books, particularly ones from the publisher I’m interested in for my young adult novel. Reading is the best thing I can do to improve my writing. (Note how I cut down on reading blogs in order to read more books. A good trade off, I firmly believe.)

* I made first contact with above-mentioned publisher. A big step for me. And now the waiting begins.

* I’ve done a ton of research on successful Kickstarter campaigns. I’ve read articles, looked through successful project descriptions, watched sample videos, analyzed successful reward offers. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right.

* And I guess I’m going to do it, because my project was approved by Kickstarter. Now I’m writing my project’s narrative, editing my video, planning rewards for my backers. More to come on this in the next couple of weeks. Lots more to come.

* I froze the blueberries I picked at Bill’s Berry Farm, and I picked a bunch of peaches at Ray French Orchard. Fresh fruit in season is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

* I bought a gorgeous hanging basket with verbena and petunias and ivy from Selph Landing Nursery. Flowers on my patio are another of life’s greatest pleasures. I bask in that pleasure each day now, as I water and snip at and admire my huge basket of flowers. It’s equally as relaxing as running.

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New Project and Social Media Fast

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Last November and December when I was in Texas before moving to Washington, I spent some time with my grandmother, learning to make the cream pies she’s been bringing to family events for as long as I can remember. Part of my goal for the time was to learn to make the pies — part of my goal was to hear her tell stories. Man, does she love to tell stories (you can read some of those stories in Passing Down Pie Heritage, a new article I recently had published at Texas Cooking).

I’ve heard quite a few stories from her over the years, some of them related to the time she and my grandfather spent in West Texas during their early years of marriage. I’ve also heard quite a bit about that time from my dad and my aunt, especially in preparation for my West Texas camping trip with friends last October. And especially since my aunt and her husband had been diligently scanning and labeling the 800+ family slides from the 1950s, many of them taken in West Texas.

West Texas and those slides have hovered in the background of my imagination for months. I’ve looked at the photos, mesmerized by the scenes they depict. Cowboys and wide open landscapes.

My dad and his siblings as shiny faced kids in 1950s clothes and hair styles.

My grandmother sitting on a swing in a park, the background opening wide behind her.

My grandfather working out in the oil field with his survey crew buddies. (The colors on this photo haven’t been altered — that’s what the slide looked like when they scanned it!)

Those slides are precious to me because they hold family — and they hold the land that made us who we are, the land that captivated me last October. The slides are also precious as a glimpse into that era and that place. West Texas in the 1950s is the same time and place that shaped George W. and Laura Bush, and I was also captivated by Laura Bush’s descriptions of it in her autobiography.

And so, I’ve felt the stirring to do more with the slides and with my family’s stories than let them sit and simmer under the surface of my imagination. My grandparents, well, they’re not young, and if I’m going to document their stories of that time period and put them together with the images they made, I believe the time is now. Funny how this idea took full shape once I moved across the country to the opposite border, but I also believe this scenario isn’t a mistake. It will take some careful planning, careful budgeting, and most likely an upcoming project fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, but I think it can all come together to do the research, organizing, and writing of my first nonfiction book here in the Tri-Cities area, with a few trips back to Texas.

Another thing I’m sure of as I type out this idea on this blog (making something public is so very scary!) is that I need to spend some focused time making sure I’m headed in the right direction with this project. First, I want to seek God deliberately on this issue — I’ve been doing that all along, but I want to step back and make absolutely sure. Also, I want to spend some deliberate creative time on the first stages of the project, including what the scope of it will be and what it will take to get the funding. I’m at the point of wrapping up my novel revisions and sending that book out in search of a publisher — now I’m figuring out how to move forward with the next project.

In order to do that, I feel like I need to take a social media break. A bit of a fast, if you will. I’m not throwing off social media for good, just for a while. I want to use the time that I normally spend each day (and it’s spread throughout the day, not just in one blob) to be quiet, to be creative, to pray, to make sure I’m hearing things correctly. I feel so inundated with information from the internet most days, and I contribute my own voice to share in that cacophony. I need to step away for a while and not post or read blogs, Facebook, or twitter. I don’t know how long I will do this, at least a week or two. And hopefully when I come back, I’ll have great news to share with you about the next big project and how you can be involved!

Until then, email me if you need me…

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About Goodreads

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After my post yesterday about Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl, a friend asked me on Facebook if there was a way I could organize a place to share books and recommendations. Thus, this post about Goodreads, the place that is already organized to do just such a thing.

I’ve been on Goodreads longer than I’ve been on Facebook. Only by a few days, but still, Goodreads is technically the first social media site I used. Kind of appropriate for someone who loves books as much as I do, huh?

Goodreads is a super cool site for several reasons, and I’m going against my typical stance on lists in blog posts by highlighting those reasons here:

Goodreads is great for keeping up with what your friends are reading. As your friends update their books, you can log on and interact with them, or you can choose to get email updates. If you have a lot of friends who read, it’s a great way to stay in touch about what you’re currently reading, what you are enjoying, what you wouldn’t recommend.

It’s also handy for nerds like me who like to keep track of what we’re reading or have already read. You can make list upon list on Goodreads, as well as let people know what page number you’re on in your current read. I’m not so obsessive as to update page numbers on a regular basis, but I have used that feature to keep track of my progress during my poem-a-day in 2011.

Goodreads is the best way I’ve found to give book recommendations on Facebook and Twitter. I went through a couple of Facebook apps for sharing book reviews, star ratings, and recommendations before realizing that Goodreads is just the best. It’s easy to link your Goodreads account to both Facebook and Twitter.

It’s also easy to link to a blog. See that link on the left? It takes you to my Goodreads shelf called “Favorites.” Any time you want, you can click to see what books I love. Any time. My friend Jen uses Goodreads on her blog to highlight the books that she’s found useful while training for triathlons.

It’s a great site for looking at reviews when deciding if you want to read a book. Once upon a time, I consulted Amazon’s reviews alone for this information, but now I check Goodreads before Amazon when deciding if a book is worth my read. Which leads me to say…

Goodreads helps out writers. Writers can choose to develop a Goodreads Author profile and have more opportunities to interact with potential readers. Obviously, good reviews given to authors on Goodreads lead to more people buying and reading their books. And writers who interact with readers through social media also have the potential to increase book sales.

Goodreads has one of the best newsletters for keeping up with the latest books to hit the shelves. I get a lot of email newsletters in my inbox, but I actually read the one from Goodreads before deleting it. And I’ve purchased books that I read about in that newsletter, which means, once again, that Goodreads is helping writers and publishers.

Are you convinced yet that you should start a Goodreads account? Be sure and friend me when you do.

 

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Remembering the Mystery

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I remember when I used the phone as a phone. To call and talk to people. I don’t have a smart phone, but I still find that I text more than I call people.

I remember when, if something funny happened during my day, I called a friend to tell the story, or I waited until I saw whoever I was eating dinner with and told the story over the meal. Now my first inclination is to formulate the cleverest, pithiest, succinctest Facebook status I can, and I post it as soon as I can. It’s good to allow myself this writing exercise, to practice brevity — but I miss calling people instead of posting. Calling individuals instead of posting.

I remember when I had joy (or excitement, or sorrow, or frustration) in my daily goings-on, grand or mundane, though I didn’t notify the greater population. “If a tree falls in the forest,” so the saying goes. If I experience a moment of sublimity and don’t update my Facebook status, is the experience still sublime? Or more sublime?

I remember several years ago I started uploading my photos to the Kodak website so I could share my albums from China or vacation or wherever with my family. I never would have dreamed of sending the link to anyone other than my parents, my sister, my cousin, and my aunt. Who else would want to see my photos in an online album? What’s the point in that?

I remember even before that, when I still had a film camera, I would sit down with one or two family members on a corner of the couch during a holiday gathering and flip through an album, narrating as much as they were interested in hearing, trying not to be the person who tells boring play-by-play stories of every moment of a trip.

I remember meeting my friend for coffee at a bookstore in Arlington so that she could show me her album from her previous summer in China. It was 1999, and I was thinking about going to China for the summer myself. Hearing her stories, seeing her photos, it made the country real to me, it gave me the chance to ask her questions, to hear her own former reservations. That conversation over coffee was pivotal in helping me decide that a summer in Asia wouldn’t be the end of me. It’s hard to say how things would be different if this had happened several years in the future, but I can’t imagine experiencing the same emotions while clicking through a Facebook album. There’s something about the time involved in sitting down to talk, a time wholly dedicated to communicating with another person, the dialog that can happen when you’re talking face to face.

I remember at one point in my life I wrote e-mails to close friends and family to update them on the latest happenings in my life. Before that, I wrote letters on stationery. These letters and e-mails went to only a few people, only those I felt the need to stay in closest contact with. Now, often in a conversation I’ll start to tell a story or reference something that happened recently, and people who I never would have suspected will interrupt me and say, “Yeah, I read about that on your blog.” The blog, Facebook, they’re efficient ways to communicate, but I miss being able to tell people things in person. I miss life being somewhat mysterious, not knowing seemingly everything about everyone through online connections, not having people feel like they know everything about me through a 160-character Twitter profile.

I remember when I journaled every day.

 

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Holiday

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It’s been almost eight months since I arrived back in the States from China, and I have just five weeks and a few days left before I make the drive from my current home base of Texas up to Washington, where I hope to figure out my next home base.  Those five weeks include Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s—a busy enough time of year when you’re not trying to pack and relocate across country at the same time you’re trying to start a freelance business and edit a novel.

So the blog is taking a break for the holidays.  Not necessarily because it takes huge amounts of time to write the entries.  It takes some time to do that.  But, I’ll be honest with you, I find myself wasting time checking my stats page, looking for comments, looking on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else to see if anyone is paying attention to what I’ve posted.  And I need a break from that.

Actually, I need a permanent break from my need for attention.  That need is quite a dilemma for me, as a writer who has only recently started letting people read what I write—isn’t attention part of what it’s all about?  The desire for attention doesn’t have to be all bad—it’s a good thing to want what I write to hold meaning and benefit for others, for them to pay attention to my words.  But when I’m more concerned with checking the number of clicks I’m getting on my site or how many “likes” certain posts get on Facebook, then it’s switched to a different kind of need for attention, and that’s a problem with my heart that needs to be dealt with quickly.

Aside from this heart issue, I also just need a break from messing so much with the blog and Facebook and Twitter so that I can focus more intently on the things going on right here and now.  I enjoy blogging about trips or my book or other things as they are happening, and I will continue doing that in the future.  But right now, I just want to enjoy the moments while I’m in the moments.  All this online stuff will still be here in a few weeks.

Or if it’s not, that’s ok too.

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Things I’ve Learned So Far About Networking

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I wrote a few weeks back about how I was joining Twitter so that I could connect with other writers and begin learning more about the publishing biz.  I’ve also tried to be more involved in other people’s blogs, the blogs of strangers, as a way of supporting fellow writers and interacting with and learning from people who’ve walked further down this path than I have.

I’ve tweeted.  I’ve left comments.  I’ve retweeted and been retweeted.  I’ve learned how to use hashtags to let people know that I #amwriting and #amreading.  I’ve been mentioned on #FollowFriday.  I’ve participated in a weekly Twitter chat about literature.  And I now have more followers who I’ve never met than ones I know in person (though I still hate the term “follower” because I’ve never wanted to be a cult leader).

Thus far, it’s been a positive experience, and I really have learned a few things, some of which I suspected beforehand, some of which I wouldn’t have guessed.

I’ve learned that online networking is a good thing in moderation.  I’m just beginning to write, and I enjoy the moral support of reading what other writers are experiencing.

I’ve learned that information overload comes quickly.

I’ve learned that time spent on Twitter is time not spent writing or doing whatever other work I need to be doing.  Duh.  But it’s true.  And physically setting a timer to limit myself, as so many people have suggested, really is the way to go.

I’ve learned that certain people tweet constantly.  I sort of don’t get it.  Unless someone’s paying them to tweet, how do they get anything done and earn a living?

I’ve learned that, when commenting on the blog of a best-selling author, I shouldn’t check the box for “send me an e-mail when other people comment” unless I want to be receiving dozens of e-mails for the next two weeks.

I’ve learned some of the current trends in young adult novels from agents and publishers.

I’ve learned what age group would be most interested in Lydia’s story, if written from the perspective of certain times in her childhood.

I’ve also learned what ages would not be interested.

I’ve learned that no matter what is popular right now and what looks to be gaining in popularity in the years to come, I really just want to tell Lydia’s story.  I can’t say that I don’t completely care whether anybody ever picks it up for publication.  I do care.  But I know that I don’t want to quit trying to write her story the best way I possibly can because I’ve read online buzz that indicates one thing or another about the young adult book industry.  I want to remain dedicated to Lydia’s story, to writing what’s on my heart, to getting her story out there in the purest form possible, untainted by the expectations of others.

I’ve learned that I want to be informed and educated as I enter this business, but I also just want to write.

I’ll continue to check in on Twitter a few times a week (look for me, I’m @rebeccadiann), and I’ll continue reading and commenting on other blogs every couple of days.  But mainly, I’m going to write.

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My Twitter Solution-Problem

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Twitter has successfully stayed out of my browser’s bookmarks for the past couple of years as it has gained popularity.  As long as I was in China with an unreliable internet connection, no smart phone, and a job that required me being offline throughout the day (or for a week or two at a time), there wasn’t much point in my setting up a Twitter account.  I needed to be focused on villagers in the mountains on the Burma border—not much tweeting going on with them.

Now that I’m full force into learning the writing business, it’s that business end of things that I find I’m most inexperienced in.  I’m faced with the reality that unless I want to keep my writing as a hobby on the side or become a self-published author with only family and friends as readers, I’m going to need to learn the (to me) bewildering details of publishing.

From what I’ve read, having a blog appears to be a step in the right direction.  Great, got that one figured out.  Now if I can just get people to read it.

Numerous writers have posted articles about how Twitter is a great way both to learn the latest tips of the trade from those who are already on the inside and to increase the number of readers on your blog.  Yesterday I read approximately 538 online articles to learn how to use Twitter most effectively as a writer.

Twitter should increase the readers on my blog.  But in order to do that, I need to have followers on Twitter.  To have more followers on Twitter, I need to be retweeting other people, so that they too will retweet my posts.  In order to have my retweets count as a social commodity, I need to be retweeting them to a respectable number of followers.  Which I don’t have.  Which is the source of the problem.  Right now the solution is the problem, and every one of those 538 articles had more and more solution-problems.

The Twitterverse is daunting.  I feel like, at this point, I can no longer stay out of it completely and still expect to meet or learn from people in the circles that I’m wishing to join.  Yet I haven’t quite figured out how to jump in boldly.  But I’m smart, I am.  I’m not going to let Twitter beat me.  The website that someone (I know who you are, you know who you are) is using to cheat against me in Words with Friends—it’s beating me.  But Twitter won’t.

Suggestions, commiseration, mistakes I could learn from are all welcome.  If you’re already established in the realm of Twitter, please follow me (@rebeccadiann) and I will reciprocate.  And if you ever read something on my blog and think a friend would be interested in reading it too, please do a girl a favor and pass the link along.  Thanks!

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