I am sitting at my desk finishing off my beer. A local brand, Red Hare Brewing Company, here in Marietta, Georgia. Long Day Lager – Perfect for the situation. I am selling my house, doing this writing thing, making sure the children get to school (and back), and trying to find myself in social media. Hell, I am not even sure I know what that really means.
I have been working on this whole social media thingy-do the last few months. Quite frankly, I understand only minor portions of it. At the present time, 11:54PM EDT October 9, I have 172 followers and I am following 330 Twitter accounts. I haven’t tried to touch anything else really.
There are a lot of interesting people out there. I have been focusing on the writing crowd. Those are the ones I want to understand. What is working for them and what isn’t.
I have been looking at the number of Tweets that folks can put out. Social media is like swimming in a giant pool with a bunch of those shiny little fish. They all look just like you and flit about in the water real fast. The Twitter page will update you on the number of Tweets you missed while you were trying to read some of the ones displayed in your timeline. I timed it once. In less than 10 minutes I missed reading over 200 Tweets. Like anybody can read that fast or would they really want to. Some of the tweets are just downright silly.
“Hey, I just stepped out on the porch. It’s raining!”
“Did you know if you flush the toilet, the water just whooshes right out of there.”
“Hey! Read my book. It is just fantastic! Somebody else thinks so too!”
Then you have the guy who thinks that he can only have friends if he ReTweets, I don’t know, a thousand Tweets in a day. If a real person can spend that much time performing the thumb or wrist gymnastics to get it done, when do they write their own fiction? Thank goodness for the Mute function.
I suppose that Tweeting is like blogging. You get out of it what you put in. I do like the interaction with my “peers.” I don’t know that I have any ability to keep up with what hardly any of them are saying. It is still fun to have a lookie-lou every now and again and see what everyone is going on about.
I think that the Twitter timeline reminds me of the scene in Poltergeist where Carol Anne is staring at the television. Noise. If you stare at it long enough, though, stuff just starts popping out at ya.
Keep writing.