Making contacts

In the past couple of weeks, I've started using Twitter. I learned about this application when a political figure made the news by tweeting about a secret mission to Baghdad, letting the world know when he wasn't supposed to that American politicians were visiting Iraq. (Thank goodness the people in charge are rocket scientists.)

So I googled Twitter and found the website, signed up for an account, and off I went. At first I couldn't understand how posting 140 character status updates could be useful. I did it anyway, though. Call it an experiment. (What can I say? I'm an experimental girl.) By giving Twitter access to my email address book, I found several of my friends who were already on Twitter. So I started out following those nine people. And pretty soon, most of them were following me, too. That, on its own, was a little like the status updates on Facebook. I could see what those friends were doing from time to time. Okay, I thought. This is easier than Facebook and less of a time sink.

There were applications that could take your Twitter status updates and make them your Facebook status updates, and I considered using on of them. But then something interesting happened. I started using Twitter differently than I used Facebook. I developed a Twitter personality, almost. One that my writer friends said they'd never seen before. "You're funny on Twitter," they told me. Hunh?

The next step was to look for the Twitter feeds of published writers. And sure enough, without too much difficulty, I found some. Followed by those of agents, publishers, and other interesting people and organizations.

Now I'm a huge fan of Twitter. I completely see how a person could meet a lot of others in their industry or just get to meet people whose work they're fans of. And some of them are very entertaining. You can follow anyone you want, unless they've blocked access to their updates. And anyone can follow you. It's a really interesting way to meet people who you'd never ordinarily get a chance to meet.

For example, one of the people I'm following is John Cleese. You know, THE John Cleese, from Monty Python. It's strange to see his updates in real time and to be able to reply to them if I want to. Now, Mr. Cleese has 80,000 followers so obviously he can't answer every tweet he gets, but he does answer some of them. Cool.

But here's my bete noir: There are a whole group of Twitterers who are trying to market themselves or their products with their Twitter feeds. They randomly follow thousands of people in hopes that those people will look at their tweets (Twitter messages are called tweets, if you haven't gathered that by now) and buy their products or subscribe to their feeds (and eventually buy their products or tell others about them.) I've even seen Twitter links that talk about some kind of multilevel system that automatically gets people to follow you on Twitter. This is really annoying. I don't want 10,000 followers who are only in it for some random marketing reason. If someone is following me, I want it to be because we share some interests. So when people start following my tweets who seem to be just marketing people, I block them.

it's true that I myself am thinking forward to the day when I'll have a published book. Everybody's got to make a living. But can't I just put my message out there, like setting a bottle adrift on the virtual seas, and see who comes looking for me? I hope the crate of canned goods washes up on the deserted island with me though. Otherwise, this may be a long, hungry sojourn. (Note to self: Bring a can opener.)

You can find my Twitter feed here.

Write or Die

I discovered a writing program called Write or Die that puts pressure on a person to put words on the blank screen. This seems both like a helpful idea and a terrible idea. The premise behind is that the only thing you can't fix is a blank page. I don't know if I agree with that. If pressure makes you write in the wrong direction entirely, you will end up wasting a lot of time trying to fix pages that shouldn't be there in the first place.

But on the positive side, I wrote more in 22 minutes with this program than I normally would in 2 or even 4 hours. It worked because it forced me to not be distracted by other things. How did it do that? Well, on "normal" level, when you don't write for more than about a minute, the screen starts to turn pink, then red. When it gets red, a loud annoying song starts playing in the background. (My only issue was that I actually couldn't stop singing the song for the next two days.)

But, as a coworker asked, was the writing good or was it crap?

Well... to be honest, it had it's weaknesses. But generally at this point, when I am constantly forcing myself to write, I end up having to do revisions, major revisions. Even if it takes me hours to write a couple of pages. So at least I made some progress. I think the events are fine. It's the wording that needs work. And that's ok.

It's a very different experience of writing for me. I'm usually slow and careful, easily distracted by ideas that I have to research and sometimes this leads me to other ideas and soon I've done a ton of research, only some of which is useful, goofed off some, had a snack and my page might still have only two sentences on it. I'm still deciding whether this is a better way. Try it for yourself and let me know what you think.