Sunday, March 24, 2013

Champagne and Twitter

[Didn't realize it until today,  02 April 13, but this is my 100th post.]

I started the day by attending a champagne brunch at a friend's home, which means that all productivity flew out the car window on the way home, or maybe out the kitchen window after that first mimosa.

The food was delicious: fresh fruit, assorted muffins, two types of quiche, and bacon wrapped dates. I brought along a loaf of French bread and two home made flavored butters (brown-sugar/pecan and peach/lavender). We ate and talked and drank, and then ate and talked and drank some more. It was pleasant, and that's what I need right now, the company of good friend, delicious food, excellent conversation, and nay I say it, champagne. Not because I'm celebrating, certainly not, but because champagne is my favorite wine and should be consumed on a regular basis. Especially with breakfast.

My friends have been the best. Even my crazy work family has been supportive.

And I'm okay. Sad and tired, but okay. It's something I've dreaded for years, and now it's over.

Last week was a total bust, writing wise. I did nothing except lay on the sofa and read or watch old movies. But that's what I needed to do. I didn't even leave the condo until I had to go back to work on Thursday. A couple of days were what my friend, Patti, calls pajama days. I didn't quilt; I didn't write; I didn't blog. I allowed myself some downtime.

That doesn't mean I didn't feel guilty about it, but I just couldn't muster the energy to care enough to make the effort.

Yesterday, I re-doubled my efforts at editing, and slogged through eight chapters. And this editing isn't just looking for typos. I went through and highlighted words that I tend to use a lot like look and turn, and in the case of Maggie's PoV chapters, I used the word maybe and okay a lot. Of course, I tried to cut some corners with the highlighting, and ended up kicking my own butt. I though this is easy. Every time ok shows up, I'll just highlight it red. Replace all. Do you know how many works have the letters ok in them? Let me just say, A LOT. And that wasn't so bad, except when I tried to back it out, then I ended up with words like loOk. It was a mess. And remember that this book is approximately 120K words, 214 MicroSoft Word, single-spaced, pages.

So I spent a lot of time dicking around with find/replace for nothing, but I did manage to get those eight chapters re-worked. And I was going to work on the next section today, but a champagne brunch and Twitter got in the way.

But I consider Twitter, and the relationships I'm building there, as part of the marketing process. But for me, I'm marketing myself.

I don't really understand Twitter yet, but I do know that the many many people there who only want to sell stuff, they annoy me, and I don't want to be like that. I have mentioned Couillon about six times in two weeks, but there are people out there hawking their book every hour. The problem, for me at least,is that they turn into an advertisement, like a commercial on TV which I ignore. I see the tweet and think, or it's X again, selling his book.

I also don't understand how people are supposed to read all these tweets. To be honest, I don't think they do. They can't. Some of these people are following thousands, tens of thousands of people. Right now I'm following 268 people and have 158 followers, but is pretty normal, the skew that is of followers to following. I find it interesting, all the things that are being pushed, everything from what not to do on Twitter to acne solutions. It's crazy. And it makes me feel so self centered, because even following only 268 people, I've gotten to where I just look to see if someone has tweeted, favored, or retweeted me.

On the good side, there's a ton of information out there about anything and everything. I found the @Crowtographer [http://instacanv.as/thecrowtographer] on Twitter. He focuses on photographing of crows, almost exclusively. Duh, right. He's the Crowtographer after all, but he also posts facts about crows. My kind of guy, cause you know I love crows. I'm trying to build a business relationship with him. I want to use one of his photographs for the cover of the Counting Crows novel.

There's also another person, @Streetcrow, who mimics crow behavior. A typical post from @Streetcrow is something along the lines of "Alley. Peck at undefinable goo" or "Branch. Rub head." and usually once a day something like "Murder. Highway." He's entertaining to say the least, and he gives me plenty of ideas about how crows act.

And then there's just the purely entertaining tweets. The @DrunkCatLadies posted "Hey, who drank half the bottle of the wine I bought? Asshole." to which I replied (and gained a favorite from @DrunkCatLadies) "hey, i found it on the counter. if you're just gonna leave un-drunk wine around, well... i'm just sayin'".

I don't know if this is correct Twitter etiquette, especially if -- to use the recent jargon -- I'm trying to build a brand, but if I can't have fun along the way while I'm building my brand, then it's not me. It's not a good representation of me.


With all this said, I had a good day. And that's all I'm really after.



No comments:

Post a Comment