Sarah and I are now seriously thinking about looking for a job for her in New Zealand and some other places needing teachers.
Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
Twitter Killed My Blog: How I’m Bringing it Back
Hey, remember when we all used to blog?
Let me take you way, way back to 2007. You could still buy and sell a house for exorbitant prices, and there were still banks that would give you loans for that. You probably actually had a job, you know, working for some company that employed real live people, instead of spending all your time launching small businesses or polishing your resume and carpet-bombing employers with it. Twitter was around, but only Left Coast liberal elitists used it. Not us normal, real, working Americans! Not bloggers. We thought “what in the world would I say in only 140 characters? Give me my Blogger/WordPress/Movable Type/Other!”
Maybe that was just me?
Times changed fast, didn’t they? I picked up Twitter, became a heavy user, and then 2010 became the year that my blog died. I’m blaming Twitter, whether it’s honestly responsible or not. I have made over 11,000 tweets, but the quality of my blog posts is generally higher than my tweets. Overwhelmingly, my blog has provided more value to my readers than Twitter has. But Twitter is like information crack. Need another hit? Oh look, another 400 updates to your stream. And writing a tweet takes 1/100th the effort of penning a blog post.
It wasn’t long after I signed up that I found myself doing nothing but Twitter and ignoring my beautiful, inspiring, educational, and—above all else—humble blog. Instead of writing posts that connected resources together and shared them in a meaningful context, I tweeted links, sometimes without any context. Talk about instant gratification though. People retweet a hell of a lot more than they comment on blogs. You can watch in real time as something funny or clever spreads virally from your friends out into groups of people you never even heard of with vaguely disturbing personal profile photos. You really get the sense that people are listening on Twitter. It’s harder to know when people are reading your blog unless they are commenting on it or retweeting your announcement of the post. Nothing satisfies the need for attention quite like retweets. They’re dead easy to do, but empty of real conversation generally. They’re a medium, not a message.
It’s not just what Twitter has done to my sharing habits that disturbs me. It’s the way my thoughts themselves have changed. For a while now, I’ve felt my thoughts turning much more shallow, and I can probably only blame that partially on my heavy use of Twitter. But it doesn’t take generating real, actual content on Twitter to get that little dopamine buzz of attention. You can just share a link from your Google Reader. Or retweet someone else. I didn’t just become a consumer of information—I became a lazy syndicator, with the false feeling that I was generating content when all I have really been doing is shifting around someone else’s content (coincidentally, this also describes a bunch of internet news sites that will remain unnamed here).
I’m not going to beat myself up about it. At the same time I was spending more time on Twitter and less time on my blog, I was launching my web design company Clockpunk Studios. And Twitter has some very large positives associated with it. It has been invaluable in making business contacts. I’ve gotten more than one client from a Twitter recommendation.
So look, Twitter’s not all bad. It’s not all good. It’s just a new thing that I need to balance along with all the other things. Maybe you’re struggling with that too? Let’s talk about this. Has Twitter killed your blog too? Head to the comments! And keep it civil. If you just want to make fun of people who use Twitter, find some place else to do it. Like your own Twitter account!
I’ve sworn to myself—because I apparently enjoy making ridiculous oaths to myself—that I would relaunch my blog before the year is out. The new design is only half done. You’ll notice an absolutely lack of sidebars. But we’re gonna focus on content for a while here, and let those other features fill in with time.
I’m starting with this post (which I am writing 5 days ahead of publication, as a part of a general effort to a: spend more time on blog posts, and b: get the content log rolling ahead of me to build momentum). I’ve worked up a tentative weekly schedule, which will certainly change once I’ve gotten into it a bit and begin to understand what is working and what isn’t. When I blogged regularly, I kept a 3 day a week schedule, but that would be too easy to slip out of now after being so out of habit. Regular, daily content generation is the only thing that’s going to build up my blogging muscles again. So here it is:
My New Improved Blogging Schedule!
Monday: Personal Anecdotes
This is the day you won’t want to miss if you’re really super interested in the day to day of my life as a small business owner, aspiring midlist writer, and sometimes photographer. I’ll be digging into my past in these posts with a general goal of trying to understand how I became who I am today and how that impacts who I want to become. Of course, it will all be written in my trademark humorous style. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will wonder why you became friends with such a blatant narcissist.
Tuesday: Inspiration
This is where I’ll share the inspirational bits of things I’ve collected over the previous week. This will include snippets of cool web design, awesome quotes in writing, cool comic book panels, and so on. Stuff that inspires me to be a better artist, photographer, writer, and human being. And not only will I share them—I’ll talk about why they inspire me. The goal here is to get beyond surface level thoughts and back into that critical thinking mode that got me through liberal arts college with a solid B– average.
Wednesday: Tutorials!
I do a lot of stuff. Sometimes, other people want to know how to do that stuff too. I’ll be writing up various creative tutorials for Wednesdays. This will run the usual gamut of topics, but expect a lot of website related stuff. Your feedback will guide the direction of these posts, so if there’s something in particular you want to know about, then speak up. As a comment or on Twitter. Either way.
Thursday: The Week in Links
I have to give myself at least one easy day! I’ll run down a list of links of interest that you might enjoy that I’ve gathered up from various resources throughout the week. I’ll even go a step further than the old Delicious.com auto posts and actually provide some context to the links! And they won’t be posted daily, so you’ll probably have seen and read every single one already, but hey, who knows…
Friday: Lesson Learned
Finally, I’ll look back on the week and talk about a lesson I’ve learned, with a particular emphasis on my self-employed lifestyle and running my business. But I reserve the right to make it lessons I’ve learned in just about everything.
So that’s that. For now.
It takes remarkable ego to write a blog at all. My ego’s going to have to grow a little bit to manage 5 days a week of hopefully scintillating content. But with a little fertilizing in the form of feedback from my friends and complete strangers who clicked through from a Google search for “Yogi Bear foot fetish”, I think my ego will grow and grow until it wins 1st prize at the County Fair.
So here we grow!
Don’t Damage Your Brand as a Marketing Twhore
Twitter is fast becoming a pimple on the backside of my social networking life. It’s always been an odd thing, under attack by spammers of the traditional sort as well as nontraditional. I block social media experts, SEO experts, and porn stars on a daily basis. They don’t care what I have to say, they just want to sell me stuff. Twitter’s a great way to share things, but straight-up product pitching has been really getting on my nerves.
But in the past month, I’ve noticed an even more unsettling trend on Twitter. I am not going to be polite about how I describe this. I’m calling this twhoring. A lot of other activity on twitter has been assigned this term, but this is a better subject for that descriptor.
What is Twhoring and Twimping?
Twhoring is happily advertising/spamming product names as hash tags to your entire followers list for the off-chance that you might win some piece of tech. Twhoring ranks lower than actually advertising or prostitution because advertisers and prostitutes actually get paid for what they do. Twhores tweet away with a slim chance of getting anything for their publicity efforts.
The same sort of people who will complain about ads on a website or on a TV show seem to lose their senses when presented with an easy opportunity to “win” a Apple product. You might think you’re clever and start tagging the hashtag to every one of your tweets. This is what the twimps like Boxyspace and Moonballz want you to do. Strut their stuff, spread their branding far and wide. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll give you a snack cake. A Twinkie perhaps?
It doesn’t help that I loathe both companies involved in twimping out their products with twhores. “Build your own website” companies generally offer shoddy products and compete with professional designer/developers such as myself. No drag and drop system is going to build you a better website than someone who has done it for years. And if it does, then you’re probably a designer yourself and you didn’t need their software anyway. But that’s beside the point.
You may think that tagging your posts once and a while doesn’t do any harm, but when everyone on Twitter is doing it, it becomes old real quick. There for a while this week, I’d say 30% of the tweets I saw had MoonBallz attached to it. It’s like a twitterly-transmitted disease. It spreads rapidly, and it makes you ooze marketing pus.
Disinfect yourself, my friends. Stop being a twhore and start holding out for something of real value, at the very least. This isn’t a contest you’re participating in, it’s a unnatural viral marketing campaign that makes the participants look gullible.
Too many people I respect have fallen prey to this. You are giving it away, folks. Value your brand. It’s worth more than a laptop.
5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves
There are two schools of thought on marketing and writing. Some think that marketing can lead to great success, or that marketing alone is responsible for the success. Dan Brown is someone I hear this accusation levied at from time to time. Others will argue that no amount of marketing will make a bad story good. Bad in this case generally being bland and boring. I waffle back and forth between these opinions depending on the writer and how jealous I feel, but ultimately, I ascribe to a synthesis of the two.
Talent and genius are not all that is required to succeed in writing. Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time. But there’s a problem that doesn’t have anything to do with how good you are.
There are a lot of other talented people out there doing work just as good, if not better. And they’re all vying for the attention of the same people you are. Sure, you can segment the market a bit, and narrow your niche, but ultimately, we’re all looking for readers, and there are only so many (and apparently growing fewer by the year). Forget the national deficit, we’re running one hell of an attention deficit these days. Luckily, there’s no shortage of appetite for good stories. Human being are voracious consumers of the stuff. But each person is presented with a veritable buffet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good. It’s such a big buffet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casserole and the candied yams. They may fill up on bread.
Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.
Writers don’t want to be salespeople. If we wanted to be salespeople, we wouldn’t be writing. There are no shortage of jobs for salespeople. Maybe you’ll win the publisher jackpot and get a great marketing deal with your three book contract. Or maybe your publisher’s internal process will hiccup and the book sellers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time pushing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival. Or, maybe you’ll publish in high quality, but somewhat obscure markets that not nearly as many people read as you might wish.
A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to market themselves and their work. You’ll have help along the way, from the editors and publishers who buy your work, but not always. Then you need to step in, and market yourself.
It’s a bad word though, isn’t it? I feel slimy just for even saying it. I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really information technology any more so much as it is a form of marketing. I have the negative stigma attached the idea as well. But I’ve come to know some excellent and effortless self-marketers in the writing world, and it’s convinced me of the overall value. They had the talent first, but even talent can use some help.
I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/blog to market yourself. I’d like to discuss some alternative methods, or at least tangential ones. So without further wind-up, here are a few more off-the-wall marketing ideas for writers and aspiring writers. Use at your own risk.
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Get Em Young
Volunteer as a speaker for your local school system. This will probably go over best when you’ve got some credits to your name that you can show to teachers and administration. Offer your services, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writing. Bring along age-appropriate free samples (ARCs, magazine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids. Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing yourself a bit of a favor, and helping kids, you’re also increasing the exposure of the genre as a whole. So it’s good marketing and it’s just good karma too.
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Twitter Away
You already know about Twitter, right? I’ve blathered on about it enough. Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-marketeers, marketing gurus, and all manner of social snake-oil salesfolk. The Twitterati can smell a marketer from a million miles away. I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basically created a Twitter account to blare about their work, or product, or whatever. They’re not subtle. You need to be subtle, and you do this by not being an asshole. Twitter’s for socializing. This means you talk to other people, you listen, you participate. You don’t use it as a broadcast medium. It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really. But retweet stuff too. Answer replies. Tell people how cool they are. Be a genuine human being. And stay the hell away from anyone telling you that they have the sure-fire method of gaining you 16,000 followers in 24 hours. That stuff has to be bogus.
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Become an Expert (or share your existing expertise)
This goes back to something I wrote about yesterday, which is that I believe writers should have passions outside of writing itself. Few of us make a living at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like. So, make yourself an expert on your passion, and share it with others through online media. An audience member is an audience member, and no, I don’t have any hard figures to support the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less person who has never heard of you.
Call it becoming an expert, or establishing authority. Either way, you do so by offering something of usefulness to other people. Like I have been so desperately attempting to do with this blog for the past several weeks. You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-an-expert sites. Join a community around the subject and be helpful to others. Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.
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Manufacture a Controversy
Tension sells in fiction and it sells in real life too. And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actually work sometimes. Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any publicity is good publicity. Manufacturing a controversy, even if your outrage is true and heartfelt, can backfire. Controversies inherently bring emotions to the table, and discussions can turn into flame wars in a second when emotions are at the table. I’ll be honest. I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some people would take exception to them, to the degree that they would be compelled to write a reaction. That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time. But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writing was that some people would disagree with me.
In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blogging technique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my position. Nick took me down yesterday in about fifteen minutes, and gave me trouble, rightfully so, for not researching before I wrote. So if you want to manufacture a controversy, keep that in mind. Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.
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Forget Everything I Just Said
Sometimes, the best marketing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, helpful, genuinely interesting person. Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meeting and talking things over with new people. Those people do well because they earn it.
I’m trying to be that kind of person, but I’m also twittering, sharing my expertise (what little there is), and sometimes, not necessarily by accident, manufacturing a controversy or two. To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writing done outside of the blog.
I honestly write these posts out of a desire to be helpful, and to feel like I am engaging in the community around me. If I’m trying to market anything, it’s my services as a freelancer. I don’t have a book and my short stories are rare lately. Maybe the best policy for a writer regarding marketing is honesty and authenticity.
So what do you think?
Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?
The structure and nature of short stories haven’t really changed in the digital age, as far as I can tell. They’re still told the same way mostly, same perspectives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3–7000 words). E-zines are for the most part straight forward adaptations of the print magazine format, to varying degrees. PDF magazines are identical to print magazines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hypertext features, but the stories themselves do not take advantage of of any of those features except in rare occasions.
Flash fiction, or stories under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with electronic magazines such as Brain Harvest specializing in them exclusively. Personally, I don’t find such short stories very satisfying very often, despite my involvement with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fiction). I don’t think I’ve ever written a really successful flash fiction story. I would argue that flash fiction is even less popular than regular short fiction, which is pretty unpopular in the first place.
10 Writers, Editors, Agents, and Interesting Parties to Follow on Twitter
Twitter is all the rage these days. I resisted it for more than a year, not seeing what purpose it had. But then it achieved critical mass in my community and I was on-board. Now I can’t remember what life was like before it. Combine micro-blogging with texting and instant messaging and you kind of have an idea. When you’re hooked in, it’s like having one big slow group conversation, with side conversations everywhere. It’s like being at a party and not having to choose which people to talk to and which conversations to get involved with. You get involved with all of them.
Here are ten people that I think you should be following if you’re interested in the business of science fiction:
- @PaulGrahamRaven is the editor of Futurismic, a great site for SF fans and writers. He doesn’t handle the fiction selection over there, but his twitter stream is often has interesting links and quips.
- @ColleenLindsay is the agent behind the recent, controversial #queryfail. Colleen is full of advice for writers. She speaks truth to nerds.
- @Pablod is the one-man-band behind Tor.com the cool online site run by the SF publisher Tor. Stories, articles, blogs, with a side of social networking thrown in. Pablo is a great source for tech-related information that concerns the publishing industry.
- @Charlesatan retweets the hell out of writing and publishing related links. The man is a machine, well worth a follow.
- @Jay_Lake is the prolific author of novels such as Green and Mainspring is a good look in on how a working writer balances the rest of his life. Jay has always been a role model for me that it can be done.
- @ArachneJericho is the queen of the Kindle. With the Kindle and ebooks on the rise, she’s a great source of information on the subject. She’s not exactly unbiased, but she tries to be, and that makes me respect her opinion on such matters even more.
- @MaryRobinette is a wonderful SF writer and puppeteer. You’ll be hard-pressed to find tweets that are more surreal, but grounded absolutely in reality.
- @GordSellar is nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year, an award that @JayLake and @MaryRobinette have won in the past. He’s my pick to win this year. His writing is hot stuff. He is often full of really interesting insights on living abroad in South Korea as well.
- @TobiasBuckell is the author of Crystal Rain and one of those Halo novels (an obscure series of military science fiction novels about–oh, who am I kidding? This book put Toby on the best selling list!). Tobias is a new parent of twins. Ask him if he’s getting any sleep. He loves that.
- @JohnKlima is the editor of the acclaimed publication, Electric Velocipede (which can use and is deserving of your help, by the way.).
This list is most definitely not a comprehensive one and I’m probably leaving out people that I will hit myself over the head for later. If you’re interested in finding more, hit up my follow list over on Twitter.
Do you have suggestions for folks to follow? Please let us know in the comments, even if it is yourself. I’m always looking for more interesting people to add to my stream. Twitter is rapidly becoming the place to talk with people in the business, and there’s always room for more in the conversation.
Previous Advice For Author Websites (and some new)
This week, we continue our trend of answering questions from readers. Right now I have enough questions to get me through at least another week of posts. So BlueTyson asked in the post of questions last week:
Not for me, obviously, but ‘here’s how to consider doing a site about a book/author’?
I have written about this subject in great detail in previous entries, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so. I’ll break things down into a few points, with links to previous posts:
- First of all, hire me. I’m available, I work at a reasonable rate, and I know author websites well. Some of my clients include Mike Brotherton, Jay Lake, Rudi Dornemann, Shannon Page, and more.
- Plug out of the way, read this post: 10 things your website should have if you’re an author.
- When considering hiring a professional or even building it yourself, I’ve written this article advocating for good, standards-based design:5 Reasons Why SF/F Author Websites should be (more) standards-based
- At one time, your web presence was pretty much limited to a website and a blog. Now, we have microblogging sites such as Twitter and social networking sites such as Facebook. It behooves the serious author to maintain a presence on each one of these services–basically anywhere you might have fans, you should be. One of the things I have started doing is, rather than just building a website for an author, I attempt to develop a comprehensive online strategy for them to develop an audience and to maintain their readership. It’s about building relationships through the tools that are out there. Your website is important, but it’s no longer the only important thing.
- That may sound like a big time commitment, and it can be. A good example is Twitter, which can suck up time like nothing else. But you don’t need to post to Twitter 50 times a day to be available and accessible. Y0u need to answer questions directed at you, make a few new comments each day, and respond to direct messages. Share your work, yourself, and your interests on these services. One thing I do is make managing all these sites centrally very easy but installing plugins into the content management. No longer am I just the guy who builds the website. I also help you manage all these tools. A good designer/developer/web master will do so as well.
Remember: like any other business, you should think about what purpose a website serves, and what are your goals. Everything about your website should reflect those goals. It could be as simple as “to sell books” or it could be complicated like “to share what I know about web design, photography, and writing. Also, cool links. Also, to showcase my photography and my designs. To build readers for my fiction, but in general to make friends out there.” Okay–so that vision isn’t very coherent, and could use some focusing. I’m working on that. In the meanwhile, you’ll still get everything but the kitchen sink.
Twitter Will Murder You While You Sleep
If you are virtuous, you have have little to fear from Twitter. But if you screw up, it will cut you, man. It will cut you DEEP. I will explain how I think this can easily be avoided, but first, let’s talk about Twitter. I swore I would never make a blog post about the “power of Twitter” but this is too fascinating to pass up
In the aftermath of the #amazonfail debacle, I am only just now coming to realize the ultimate power of Twitter and just how dangerous it can be to the status quo and those in positions of power. That power remains mostly untapped and completely undirected, for now.
The scandal broke over the weekend. I won’t go into detail, but let me summarize by saying, basically, a crap-ton of books by gay authors, on GLBT themes, etc were delisted from search and from sales rankings. I was driving cross country and missed the beginning, so when I tuned in on Monday, it was a bit bewildering. I imagine that’s how Amazon’s management felt on Monday morning when they were briefed on the issue.
From my perspective, the issue was a perfect storm of issues– GLBT rights and publishing. As I move in writing/publishing circles, the last couple of days on my twitter feed have been one long angry, outraged discussion, with links, retweets, the whole deal. It continues as I type this.
Don’t mistake my detached attitude here to be one of condonement. What happened was bad for writers, bad for publishers, and as we have seen, very, very bad for Amazon. I am however ambivilent about ascribing blame or malevolence. I’ve worked in large organizations, and it’s very easy for me to believe that this entire problem was the result of a bureaucratic error.
In the information void that existed on the weekend, many intentions were invented to explain. Right-wingers had collaborated to manipulate the system via tags. Amazon had capitulated to right-wingers and dropped the titles. It was a programming error. A massive conspiracy of internet pranksters manufactured it so that they could feed on the outraged tears of twitter users. And so on.
Much like Nature abhors a vaccum, the internet ahbors an absence of information.
Amazon’s lack of immediate response allowed the controversy to build to unprecedented levels. Rarely have I seen the internet move in one angry direction so effectively. It never would have moved this quickly in the time before Twitter. Email, texts, none of them had the perfect assembly of features and usability that Twitter does.
The equation looks something like this:
(Incredibly Easy Link Sharing + Social Networking + Tagging) X Programming Error/Scandal/Gaffe = Internet Shitstorm of Epic Proportions
We’ve been seeing this with people losing jobs via Twitter as well. You tend to think, as a twitter user, that the world is small, limited to your followers. But they follow others, and others follow them, and it’s easy to resend something you said with a click, and… it’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only instead of being linked to the excellent star of such films as Footloose and Wild Things, you get fired and mocked by 30 million people.
Do something bad, catch the attention of Twitter, and don’t respond for several days. This is a recipe for total and utter reputation anihiliation.
So how do you avoid this? Well, nimble companies should not be threatened by Twitter’s awesome might. The faster you fill the void of information, the more quickly Twitter as a whole will move on to something else. It probably doesn’t matter what you say. All you have to do is acknowledge it. Say, “We see the problem. We don’t know what’s causing it. We’re on it. Thank you.” And then keep people updated. The lack of response is as important as the mistake.
Larger companies like Amazon face a bigger problem. I suspect Amazon can’t decide what brand of toilet paper to put in the employee bathroom without sixteen committees and massive executive oversight. The people in power in these companies tend to believe in out-dated ideas like “I shouldn’t have to work on the weekends.”
So, two things if you’re Amazon-big. One–your reputation doesn’t turn off on the weekends. You need people monitoring it at all times thanks to the internet. And Two– empower the people monitoring your reputation to manage it.
Sounds risky, huh? Only Bezos should have that power! Right? That’s the kind of thinking that will get you into an #amazonfail scale mess. Top-down management methodologies will not last in today’s climate. Twitter and the internet will eat such companies alive. If your survival depends on the decision-making of one or a few wealthy elites who can’t be bothered to check their email on Sunday, to call an emergency meeting or something, then you are, royally and truly fucked.
To summarize: pay attention, respond quickly, and for god’s sake, set up an search feed tracking your company name. If Comcast can respond to any tweet that mentions their name, so can Amazon.
Or, ya know, we can all start shopping at Barnes & Noble or Powell’s or some other smaller independent chain. We don’t really care. Twitter as a whole loves getting angry. Outrage, kittens with bad grammar, and porn are the fuels in the engines of the internet. And the internet makes it just as easy to order a book from Mom & Pop Reseller as it is AmazonCo. Brand loyalty doesn’t really count for much, and in the face of controversy, it evaporates pretty damned quickly.
Postmortem: What the hell was #futureJer?
My 3 month long experiment in 140 character fiction posts ended on Sunday. You can read my serial fiction #futureJer on the Thaumatrope website here. The premise was pretty simple: I attempted to imagine my life 2 years into the future if our economy doesn’t get any better. It’s fairly grim, but has a touch of hope to it too. The cast were barely fictional versions of my family and friends, and it takes place in rural Kansas.
The Genesis of a Twitter Serial
Back before I was actually laid off, but knew the threat was looming, I was experiencing a lot of anxiety. On a whim, I decided to imagine how bad things could get to externalize my fears, and I started twittering this in the form of #futureJer. Within a couple of days, Nathan Lilly, the editor of Thaumatrope, direct messaged me and offered to pay me to do what I was already doing, at pro rates no less. It was an easy decision to make.
Postmortem
I never had any intention of telling a story when I started out doing this, but once I was offered money, I had to give it an arc. I introduced the elements of the pregnancy and the growing violence to develop the drama. I was happiest about the project when I was simply imagining our lives as essentially subsistence farmer/hunters. I find something deeply compelling about a life without work, where you simply grow your own food, maintain your own home, and enjoy life. I think we’re hardwired more for the hunter/gatherer or farmer life more than we are for working in offices.
The tone probably got even darker when I was actually laid off at the end of January. I sat down a few days later and wrote the entire month of February in an afternoon, plotting out the remainder. I suspect the final bit felt slightly more cohesive than the bits that led up to it.
Overall, it was an interesting experiment in writing on the fly, and hopefully I didn’t screw it up too much. Also, I hope it doesn’t turn from fiction to reality, because I don’t actually know how to build or repair wind turbines or castrate bulls, although I’m willing to learn if someone wants to teach me!
I Have Joined the Twitterati
I am now on Twitter as JeremiahTolbert. Who should I be following? Who shall follow me? Assimiliate me, Twitter!
Is there a way to sync up Facebook status posts with Twitter posts? Surely there is a program that will manage both for me. I remain skeptical of the usefulness of this application, but if it alleviates the solitude of working from home a little, I’m all for it!
