Handling Twitter

Okay, I’m working on my time management regarding all of the bullshit an independent author needs to handle – primarily, social media for non-fun marketing and networking.

I’ve already covered that I hate the follow-for-follow game. It’s really pointless because you end up with followers in the same boat as you, and other than being able to offer words of encouragement, they will not broaden a network that suits you. (Unless, of course, you are in that sweet spot where your follower numbers affect whether or not you are ‘chosen’ and you have enough followers to make a difference – and if you do, you are probably not playing the game.) And then, you complain that you have all these followers that you don’t know or don’t talk to. What?

I follow someone I find interesting. I comment on posts I find interesting, and try to make posts that if they are found someone else will comment. I try to make real connections. Call me silly, but I do believe that will make a difference.

Anyhoo, I’d been playing around with the idea that I should give each platform a spot on a schedule. It looks like Sunday mornings before work is a fun time to scroll through Twitter and see what’s out there, because it’s not enough time to sit down and write (remember, too, I hate my writing being interrupted by work).

Today was my first official Twitter Day. I started late, because something in me felt motivated and I washed dishes (Yay, me!).

I even got a thought of something I wanted to write about – with the specific wording – and typed it all out!

I did my routine of checking Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It was then I decided to give each one its own time slot (except Facebook; I still use that mostly for fun).

I saw that I was followed by someone whose comment I liked. I scrolled through that person’s page and saw a lot I liked and connected with, so I followed back.

And then I got a DM ad from that person, a thank-you-for-the-follow-check-out-my-new-book.

Sigh.

So, I sent back an “I will if you will” message with an ad for my own new book.

I will make Twitter work for me.

On Sunday mornings.

 

Life’s Little Surprises

I didn’t expect to be writing here so soon, but a little happy event prompted this. I’ll admit, it could be my ego feeling the need for a follow-up so soon after a public declaration of depression – I have a hard time sometimes, admitting my ‘human-ness’. It must be the man in me. 😀

Yesterday was my day off from work, but because I work for one of the few places that does not participate in direct deposit I have to go in for my paycheck. When I got there I found a duffle bag with my name on it and a note that said simply “From a customer”.

The bag was full of books – and not just any books, but books that pertain to me and my writing! Each book I pulled out was a book that had appeal to me, or some correlation to what I write about.

Without knowing at first who left it for me, I knew that this was one of the most thoughtful gifts I’d ever received – if it had come from a romantic interest, I would’ve considered it a marriage proposal. Have you ever had a batch of books curated especially for you? It would have to be from someone who understands you, who listens when you speak …

I did figure out who it was from.

I met a man and woman who come into my store, separately – they never come in together. Over the past 6 months I’ve been working at the store, I’ve developed a sort of friendship with them. We bonded over books and writing, and they were very interested in what I was writing about and asked how to get a copy of my book.

I found out later they were married to each other, and that they are reading (and enjoying) my book, together.

I can’t ignore how much wonderful-ness is in this little event: a surprise gift, a surprise thoughtful gift, validation as an author, connection, acknowledgment … and the little lift I get when I realize a married couple is reading my book (that’s the ego speaking; I’ve been accused of being a raging feminist who is against marriage). and the two of them, reading – and enjoying, as they said – my book together, makes me so happy.

They left the books for me.

And all of this came from the job I resent so much.

Isn’t that a kick in the ass?

 

Getting Back in the Saddle

Forgive me, Susie, it’s been – hold on while I check – 19 days since my last post. I wasn’t planning on writing here daily, but I think my original goal was at least once every two weeks.

The whys of a period of not writing for me never have the reason of “nothing to say” and almost always rely on outside circumstances. This is not my first blog; I’m now writing  3 separate ones (sorted by topic, somewhat). With the first blog – or the first time I tried to start one – my issue for delay was fear, plain and simple. Why do it? Who’s going to read it? Will I be taken seriously? I pushed myself into doing it. It took 3 separate starts before it ‘took’.  Then when I got into it and got a modest (very modest) following, it got easier – as in, less fearful.

*One thing I learned about fear in writing, as far as it goes for me, is that when I notice I’m most afraid to hit the publish button is the time that I have to. It’s a sign to me that what I wrote was my most genuine.

I think we tend to start new things when we realize we are in times of transition, and then later realize that it might have been better to have waited til the end of the transitional period to start something. Routine anything is hard to maintain when everything seems to be changing.

My original blog (the one that stuck) was put aside temporarily while I finished my book; I wanted to make sure I wasn’t writing the same things in both the book and the blog. Plus, those last few ‘hours’ of the rewrites and edits take an exhausting amount of time, and like most writers I have a day job that I can’t yet quit.

The next ‘blog interruption’ came in the form of marketing said book. All of my ‘free’ time was spent on getting the word out, contacting independent book stores (and visiting independent bookstores when I was able to put aside some money to buy a significant stash of books to deliver), tweaking all of my social media accounts to allow for promoting and selling, and then wasting time grumbling about how much more work it was to promote a book than to write it.

It was that grumbling period, though, that prompted this particular blog. I wanted to write about writing. I see many other people blogging about how to write, sell, promote (and I thank every one of them for their time and valuable information), but that wasn’t what I wanted to do; I wanted to focus on the life of a writer, my life as a writer-with-a-day-job, because I know my experiences are not isolated. All of us writers (those of us who are not yet fortunate enough to just be the writers we know we are) experience so many of the same issues regarding familial and friend support (or non-support), being taken seriously enough to be ‘allowed’ the time to write by our immediate circles – even my cats think they can dictate whether or not it’s time for me to write, dealing with insecurity and sense of worth regarding our work, managing our time to be able to write, and learning the steps of self-promotion (and all the new insecurity that gets dredged up with that).

Right now (obviously), my issue is with time management. I’ll be honest, right now this period of transition (and I have to force myself to look at it that way to make myself understand it is temporary) is especially difficult for me; I’ve been forced to realize and admit that I’m dealing with a depression I’ve never sunk to the depths of before. I may write more about that later, but for right now I’ll say that depression is a knock-out punch to motivation. I want to write, but sometimes can’t even work myself up into enough enthusiasm to sit my ass at the computer.

Another silly deterrent of mine isn’t time so much as enough time. Part of my previously mentioned ‘condition’ is a strong resentment (best I could say) to my job. Nothing frustrates me more than being at my computer and writing (happily writing) and having to stop because I have to go to work. We all have peeves with normal interruptions, I know, but I realized sometimes I would just rather not write than deal with the total frustration of that kind of interruption because I would go to work more resentful than I already was.

Yeah, I’m working on that.

There’s also an odd dichotomy at work for me, too. I’m promoting a book that I am actually very enthusiastic about and proud of. Sometimes I feel like I’m two people: on one side, I’m the sassy, opinionated female and writer I want to be – or know I am;  and then there’s the other side: the depressed, under-employed (overworked), menopausal, and trapped slug.

In a clearer moment, like right now, I can see a little benefit in the lessons I’m learning about time, change (which I’ve actually always been a big fan of), and synchronicity. It’s the synchronicity and small serendipitous ‘coincidences’ (and I don’t believe in coincidence) that I’m so happy I still have my wits about me to notice.

My first ex used to call me a “Fucking Cheerleader” – and he never meant that in a good way. Since I do believe negativity is a choice of focus, I can see how annoying I would be to someone who wants to believe that the world is a terrible place and that life is supposed to be hard. I can even see how annoying it is for me when that inner cheerleader shoves those fucking pom-poms in my own face when I want to wallow.

She is here with me now, and I’m letting her sit next to me for now. And I’m writing.

And I’m going to hit the ‘publish’ button in a few minutes, even though my original plan was to write about the ideas I came up with to ‘help manage writing time during changing times’ and I never got to that.

Because, at least, I’m back in the saddle.

Rah-Rah-Rah!

 

Don’t Fence Me In

 

I try to be clever with my titles and will admit to playing over on Google with different forms of the word ‘niche’ or any word that I could associate with it in some clever way.  Fortunately, I got myself reined in after only about 20 minutes, and just before I fell into a rabbit hole about ‘niche memes’ (that’s a thing?).

I have this thing about limits. I don’t like them – especially when it comes to being creative. I believe creative people are just that: creative, in everything they do. I think that a primary focus or niche is purely more of a personal choice. Stephen King and Nora Roberts wrote in other genres, Bo knew more than just baseball, and DaVinci did everything else. And Robin Williams? He managed to scare me as much as he made me laugh. And cry.

So why is it that when you tell someone you are a writer, you are expected to give a one-word answer to the question: “What do you write?”

What don’t I write? I have 5 books currently published: essays, comedy, coloring books and a book about writing. My external hard drive is holding 1 finished screenplay (a sequel of sorts to a well-known movie), 1 almost finished (for a musical), 7 completed episodes of a planned 13 for a sitcom, song lyrics, poems, suspense stories, song parodies, ‘rebuttal’ song parodies, jokes, craft project ideas, advertising (print and commercials – I have two entire ad campaigns written out for two well-known brands), birthday party ideas, road trip plans, romance stories (including one in-progress dual-story novel), short film scripts, and individual page documents of ideas of story-lines, scenes, and lines. Pretty much the only category I don’t have anything written in is science fiction.

So far.

Seriously, the easiest question for me to answer would be, “What are you working on right now?” That list is decidedly shorter.

I get confused when people ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’m sure every writer is sick of that question because most of us don’t understand how people don’t get ideas like we do.  My problem is never coming up with ideas – because they come to me; my problem is being able to just sit down and write and not have to pay attention to anything else, like a stoopid day job.

When I first started writing publicly after hiding it for most of my life, I decided that taking writing classes would allow me to toe-in. I found that no matter how creative the creative writing in the class was, there was too much of a push to focus on one genre, one type, one voice.

None of us are that. Yet formulas are shoved down our throats at the same time originality is praised. Which is it?

It took me a couple of years to reconcile that struggle in myself. I’m still going to do me, but I will make some concessions for the sake of ‘sorting’.

That’s what niche-ing is: a way of sorting for marketing purposes. People need labels to be marketed as and to. So when I finish the romance novel (and my goal is this summer) it will be published under a pseudonym. I’ve noticed that I’m slightly different personas on each different social media site I am on, too. Only slightly, though. I can’t stop being who I am.

I still balk at being pigeon-holed. It may be easier to market my work, but at the same time it causes people to only see me one way. That is limiting.

I choose not to see limits.

What do I write?

I write words.