The *right* way to attract blog followers…

Yesterday’s post, writer-friends, was thoroughly tongue-in-cheek. You all knew this, of course, but I thought I’d reiterate. The only serious things in the whole post were the nice things I said about the lady bloggers I linked, and the bit about me appreciating comments on my fiction. Everything else was complete bollocks.
But in tooling around the blogosphere these past seven months or so, I have actually discovered some of the secrets to increasing one’s readership. As with anything in online social networking, there are no guarantees, but let me offer a few tips and tricks to increasing blog traffic. (Getting lots of comments is another issue entirely, but whatever about that. On we go.)

1. Be interesting.

You, writer-friends, are clearly interesting people. You make stuff up in your heads and write it down to create stories that other people want to read. You are creative. So I know you have it in you to put fun an intriguing blog posts out there for the delectation of the masses. I thought for a while that attempting to be intellectual was a good angle for the blog. Um… not so much. People prefer fun to intellectual any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Have fun with it, and more than likely, your readers will too, and will come back for more.

2. Loosen up.

Back when I started this whole blogging journey, I adopted a stuffy, literary tone that, when I read back over it, makes me shudder a little bit. I can be stuffy and literary, sure, but most of the time I’m not that way. If I were speaking to you over a couple of martinis, I’d make jokes, be sarcastic, and occasionally lapse into real literary discussions, but I sure wouldn’t be rabbiting on about Hemingway and Faulkner all the time. Who wants that? It was when I booted pretension to the curb that people started coming by my blog more often. Let the freak flag fly, I say. You’ll feel freer, and your readers will have more fun.

3. Reach out.

This, good people, may be the single most important thing you can do as a blogger to increase your traffic. Tahereh, whose explosive blog follower growth is nothing short of astounding, has be absolutely EVERYWHERE in the blogosphere. I’ve lost track of the number of comments I’ve seen on her blog saying something like, “I love your blog! Thanks for your comment on mine!” See what happened here? She went out, left a (probably) witty and interesting comment on someone else’s blog, and that someone followed her home. She, more often than not, offers wonderfully entertaining posts, so clearly people following her back are amused, intrigued, and rushing to clicky on the Friend Connect button to become one of her new besties. (Doesn’t hurt that the Rejectionist pimped T’s blog contest a little while back. Nope. That don’t hurt at all.)

 

4. Stand out.

This one’s a bit harder, ‘cause I can’t tell you what to do to stand out. Only you can figure that one out. Me? I call ladies “good lady” and men “good sir,” and I like putting up posts with a liberal dose of sarcasm and snark, with occasional bouts of seriousness. Does this make me stand out? Who knows? I do know that Tahereh calling her followers “besties” makes her stand out, though. Also this one is NOT required. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t worry about it. You’re still an interesting, creative person, writer-friend. Don’t you forget it.

5. Participate

I posted a while back about blogfests, and why they’re good for writing bloggers. I stand by that, even though my own time for participating in blogfests suddenly seems rather limited. This is a bit sad, because they’re always fun, and often a challenge. One coming up that I have to participate in is the Bad Girl Blogfest, ‘cause, y’know, I have a wicked soft spot for Bad Girls. And look, there’s even a linky image to use! Also, bloggers are always hosting contests to celebrate follower milestones, agent signings, book sales, etc. I’d recommend jumping in and entering some. If you win, you get free publicity, and free stuff. Free stuff is good. Plus, if you manage to place in agent blog contests (Nathan Bransford and Rachelle Gardner occasionally run ‘em), you’ve just garnered yourself some publishing industry attention, haven’t you? Yes, writer-friends, you have. That’s gold, baby.

6. Respond

It’s rare, writer-friends, for me not to respond personally to everyone who comments on my posts. Could this change in the future, if I get to the point where doing it could cut severely into my family, work, or writing time? Certainly. Some of the most popular bloggers I know don’t respond individually, because they can’t. But when you’re starting out? Respond. People want to know they’ve been heard when they comment.
They also understand when you’re overwhelmed, and post a simple, “Thank you all for your comments. You’re all lovely! Jello shots all round!” As long as you make the effort to connect with people who’ve made the effort to connect with you, you’ll make bloggie friends, writer-friends.

7. Be concise.

Yeah, I just wanted to say that for the irony.

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So there we have it, people. I’m not an expert, I’m not a social media maven (I always think of that word as feminine, anyway), and I’m not promising that I have the secrets to bloggie success, ‘cause I don’t. All I’m saying is that these are a few of the things I’ve noticed successful bloggers doing.
Keep at it, writer-friends. I know you’ve got it in you to run an amazing, stupendous blog. Be you, be proud, and, above all, be nice. The blogosphere awaits your insights. :)

The Difficult Life of a Male Writing Blogger*

Yes, writer-friends, it’s tough being a male blogger in the writing world sometimes. Don’t laugh. I saw you snicker and act like you were coughing. That’s rude, you know. At least hear me out, would you? Sometimes even manly men who happily drink straight vodka need sympathy.

Look, it’s true, I’m telling you. Life is hard for us. Here I am, limping along with almost a few hundred followers, when chicks like Lisa and Laura have more’n 600. And don’t give me that guff about they started before me, and they’re hilarious, and self-deprecating, and willing to publicly humiliate themselves… I’ve heard it before. I think it’s an inherent blogospheric prejudice, quite frankly.

Oh, so how about this one, right? You may have seen that "Build your own book boyfriend" meme floating around the blogosphere recently. Y'know, where the lady bloggers post pics of man-candy under the guise of "boyfriend-building," and since ladies love pics of hot, semi-nude men, the participants' followers lists jump by 20 people. What’s up with that? I posted a pic of Simone Simons the other day (great name, though, innit?), and what did that get me? I’ve even put pics of Charlotte Wessels up… nothin’.

Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil.  This will not get me any new followers.

And don’t even get me started on that Tahereh chick. I mean, she started blogging when, like last week? And she’s already up to 300 followers? Wha…? Obviously, this has less to do with the fact that she’s funny and gifted than the fact that she’s—you guessed it—female. I’m sure you can see a pattern developing here.

Oh, whatever. So the blogosphere is dominated by women, and women want to read what other women have to say about writing and look at pics of semi-nude guys with sparkly pectoral muscles and all that jazz. 

Yeah. I get it. I’m just sayin’ that for male bloggers, we have to do things the hard way. We’re chromosomally challenged, I guess.

Yes, I know that the majority of the reading public is women. And that the publishing industry is dominated by women. And that the only person in the world who can move more books than God is Oprah (who’s a woman, if you didn’t catch what I was driving at there). So knowing all this—not that I’m resentful or anything—makes me feel like I have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition. Geez. Talk about women’s lib. Women have been libbed out the wazoo in the publishing world. It’s men that get the shaft (metaphorically speaking).

So sure, women comment on my blog, telling me they like my writing, that they think I should publish a novel, and all that stuff. And I will say that getting a bunch of positive comments on fiction that I post takes a bit of the sting out of the constant feeling of inferiority we men have to deal with in the literary blogosphere. But it doesn’t change the fact of the inequity. And inequity, writer-friends, makes me sad. I think The Rejectionist needs to step in here and set people straight.

I think I need a vodka now. And a hug. (Shut up. Even manly men need hugs sometimes.)

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* This post brought to you by the letters Sarcasm, Snark, and Silliness, and by the number Simon’sJustBeingAnIdiotToday  :)

Contests, contests, everywhere, and not a drop to drink...

Okay, that title doesn’t even make sense. It’s okay—I don’t make sense half the time. But I did want to mention some contest-type stuff today, since, y’know, I’m running one. And, now I mention it, I haven’t been completely specific about what you can win. Sure there’s a prize pool from which the winners can select stuff (see this post for details), but, just so you know I’m not lying about the Sobieski swag, check this out:

 Dude… serious loot!

Remember when I said Sobieski’s U.S. publicist was a stand-up kind of guy? I’ll see that comment and raise it one holy-crap, Mark, you TOTALLY hooked me up with that last box-o’-stuff… SERIOUSLY! Let’s see… t-shirts, hooch, Sobieski shot glasses, flashlight keychains (they project the Sobieski logo… I know, right?). Sah-weet! Anyway, if any of my contest winners choose the vodka prize pack, I’ll send along some of this swag as well. Cool? Cool. Go enter my contest here.

Oh, and while we’re talking about my contest, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you to hop over to Summer’s blog to check out her flash fiction that she wrote for me. I’ve printed this story out and filed it under “How AWESOME Is This?” No, seriously, folks. I mean, beyond the fact that my fictional analogue got knifed in an alley while making out with, uh… this gal (or someone like her—that’s Simone Simons of Epica, btw), the way Summer’s used words is just fantastic. The alliterative combination of “condensation crying over my fingers” is worth the price of entry alone, not to mention she used my “swan neck” phrase (which I just adore), and how the hell about that image of being birthed from a crowded dance floor? Just… geez. Awesomeness of the first order, writer-friends. go read it.

And in other contest related news, here’s a couple more from around the blogosphere.

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The lovely and utterly random (or so it seems—there’s always a method to her madness, folks) Carolina Valdez Miller is running a contest in celebration of reaching the 300 followers milestone. Hop on over to her blog and sign up to win all kinds of signed book goodness. Don’t worry… I’m sure she wouldn’t rig it so that one of her CPs wins. She’s honest like that. (I think.) Ends 5/25.

Will Grayson Squared Dance Contest

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And in celebration of 150 followers, Sarahjayne Smythe (who, you may recall, was a runner up in the 100 followers contest Carol and I hosted a while back) is giving away gift cards. I like gift cards. They support my book habit. So run on over and enter that one too, huh? Ends 4/30.

TGIF and a Contest

~~~

There we have it, writer-friends. My contest, Carol’s contest, Sarahjayne’s contest… contests. Enter away, people. Our self-esteem and eventual hope for a happy, normal life depends on you. (I’m only exaggerating a little….)

A week in the life of a social-networking writer

So Tahereh, in her blog post today, was all braggin’ on the fact that she’s, like BFFs with Janet Reid. Even though she’s agented already. (I think she’s cheating on Amy with Janet and Le R, but what business is it of mine? Not that I’m starting rumors or anything. (I am.)) And, since she implied (okay, flat out stated) that I was jealous of her arrangement with Janet, I figured I’d set the record straight.

Ms. Reid’s blog post here is where the fun started. I invited myself over to her office for lunch. (It makes sense if you read the post. Really.) Yes. Apparently they would.

As these things do, the conversation cropped up on Twitter. In response to Tahereh offering me a job at Querypolitan, I said:But, apparently, Janet doesn’t bring sushi.  Tahi fans the flames. (I can call you Tahi, right? Yknow, it’s like a contraction of T. H. Mafi. I’m clever like that.)And then Janet harumphed at me. (I didn’t know sharks could make that noise. I always assumed they were silent, or maybe just roared when they stuck their heads out of the water to eat surfers and small boats.)Clearly I’m not jealous of my good friend Tahi. On the contrary, I have a standing invitation to bring lunch to Janet’s office. And of course, reading between the lines, we can pretty much assume she wants me to bring my unfinished manuscript for her to read over sushi and scotch.

And hey, if a random, unagented flash fiction writer with his first novel still in the opening chapters can get the Query Shark to harumph at him (as opposed to the stony, disdainful silence we writers tend to expect from the monolithic juggernaut that is the publishing industry (you may assume that was hyperbole (because it was))) then perhaps there’s hope left in the world after all. I might be tearing up over here.

Or maybe *harumph* is the sound a shark makes when it bites off one of your limbs. I guess it could be that. Where’s my leg?

Friday Flash: Air Fitzhugh

Right, peeps. Since a combination of real life stuff-‘n’-stuff (and some other stuff that, were I to share it with you, would really cross over into the TMI arena) has occurred, I’m going to post a late Friday Flash entry. This one's a story I wrote last year in my Fiction Writing course, and I ran across it the other day while browsing my Writing folder. It’s not much more than a glorified anecdote, but at least it’s a fun one. See what you think!

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Most Epic Contest in the History of the Blogosphere, EVAR! Yeah. Go sign up. I got stuff to give away.

Air Fitzhugh

There was always a good supply of basketballs onboard, since so many of them tended to bounce over the side of the ship. Nobody knew who came up with the idea—though Frankie Vitasio claimed it was him—but everyone agreed that it had been a stroke of genius. The games were generally a boisterous affair, with a great deal of shoving and trash-talking, but the opportunity to blow off steam on a long voyage was priceless. At the last stateside furlough, Phil Brons had purchased an honest-to-God backboard and rim, which was now bolted to the bulkhead, and which had scored Phil more than a few rounds of shots on the last evening before sailing.

This particular night, the wind and lashing rain were making it difficult to play, but they were going at it nonetheless. Mario Ronza, the first mate, had accidentally broken the top off a bottle of Southern Comfort after dinner, and since he didn’t have a container into which to pour the contents, had decided to polish the whole thing off. Little Gene Rydell, always game for a bout of heavy drinking, insisted on joining in, and before long all but two of the off-duty crewmen had crashed the party. Someone produced a bottle of Banker’s Club vodka, and an hour and a half into the proceedings, all involved were well on their way to a good drunk.

The seas had been rough all day, and the combination of the pitching ship and a well-developed buzz made the proposition of a basketball game more than a little foolish, but as soon as Frankie V. suggested it, general acclamation broke out, and the party adjourned to the main deck. Amid much shouting and laughter, two teams of three formed, and the game began.

Twenty minutes and two lost basketballs later, Mario had just slipped in a layup over the head of Pete Damato when Captain Fitzhugh appeared on deck. “What the hell are you boys doing shooting hoops in the middle of a storm?” he shouted, and the festivities ground to a sudden halt. The captain was barely five foot six, and might have topped the scales at 140 pounds with his wet clothes on, but not a man of the crew was willing to test him. He was all bone and sinewy strength, his skin pulled tight over muscle and tendon as though three decades staring into gales had stripped away every ounce of spare flesh. In the silence following his entrance, the clank of the empty SoCo bottle rolling around the deck could be heard.

The captain bent to pick up the bottle, which had by now rolled over to where he was standing. “I guess this would explain the basketball, then,” he said, dangling the evidence between thumb and forefinger. “Vitasio, was this your idea?”

“You mean the basketball or the drinking, cap’n?” Frankie asked, trying with little success to hold back a smirk.

“Ha!” Fitzhugh barked. “Clever, Vitasio, clever.” He held his hands up. “Give it here.”

Jimmy Riley retrieved the ball and tossed it over. The captain bounced it a couple of times, eyeing the group. “You boys know that I don’t mind the occasional bender on my ship. As long as you show up for your next shift in reasonably competent shape, your free time’s your own. But this”—his gesture encompassed the net, the soaking deck, the rain cutting horizontally across the ship—“is an accident waiting to happen.” He dribbled some more. “I can’t afford one of you boys laid up in sick bay with a broken something-or-other because you decided a game of ball was a good idea after having a few. Mario, you should know better than this.”

“Sorry, cap’n,” Ronza mumbled. He scratched the back of his neck.

“Well, no harm done, boys. I still have to break up the game, though.”

Fitzhugh stood for a moment, swaying with the ship’s motion. He glanced behind him, toward the prow, paused, then grinned. Suddenly, tucking the ball under his arm, he dashed at the net. Out in front of the ship, through the driving spray, a massive roller could be seen bearing down on them. The crew turned their attention back toward the captain as he neared the bulkhead. The prow bit into the huge wave, then plowed a furrow up into the night, tilting the deck skyward. The captain leapt.

The men there that night tried to explain it to their shipmates later, but could never find the words. “It was awesome,” they’d say. “You had to see it to believe it!” Then they would shake their heads in disbelief. In their memories, it seemed to happen in slow motion. The deck beneath their feet canted upward. The captain left the deck at a dead run and arced into the air, basketball held aloft. Impossibly high he jumped, slicing through the wind and rain. Gravity took a vacation. He was silhouetted for a moment against the deck lights. Then his left hand shot up, gripped the other side of the ball, and with one explosive movement, Fitzhugh executed a perfect slam dunk.

He hung for a moment from the rim as the ship crested the wave, then dropped lightly to the deck. The crew, mouths agape, managed only to stare as the captain adjusted his jacket and bent to scoop up the still-bouncing ball. He shot a sharp bounce pass to Ronza.

“And that, boys,” he said with a grin, “is how it’s done.”

The Most Epic Contest in the History of the Blogosphere, EVAR!*

Okay, writer-friends. After much deliberation (I thought about it while I was brushing my teeth this morning), some soul-searching (seriously, I think I lost mine… has anyone seen it?), and a good bit of procrastination, I’ve decided what to do for my 250 followers contest!

I’ll wait while you run around the room unable to contain your excitement. Go ahead. I can’t see you anyway. (Some of you I can, actually. Did you know your webcam can be on without you knowing it? It’s true.**)

*waits*

Right. Now you’re back at your computer, let’s talk, shall we? (No, this isn’t an intervention. About the contest, silly.)

Now, I’m not up for any of that hard judging stuff, all right? I want to make this easy on myself. So we’re going with one of those comment/tweet/blog/sidebar/pimp/threaten thingies in which you fill out the carefully-crafted form at the bottom of the page (look how technologically proficient I am! Google Docs is awesome!) and I get to wander over to Randomizer.org after the competition closes  and let chance and fickle fortune pick the winners.
But wait! There’s more!

Now, since I’m all about challenging my fellow writers, I’m going to offer y’all a way to stack the deck in your favor. See down at the bottom of the form, there? Yeah, under the “big pointage” comment. Right. That’s where you, writer-friends, get to knock my socks off with your poetry or flash fiction skillz. Here’s the rules for that little bit of fun:

Poetry

No free verse, peeps. Why? ‘Cause I have no idea how to judge free verse poetry. I suck at poetry. What I don’t suck at? Rhyme. I’se good at rhyme. So if you want extra points for poetry, you gotta write me a poem in metered verse. The topic has to be either:

1. You, or
2. me.

What that means is that you write an ode to your own awesomeness (think: every rap song created, like, ever), or mine. I don’t care which. (Okay, perhaps I do. Odes to me would be awesome. Sarcastic ones get extra brownie points.)

Also, if you poetry-ify, it has to be in either iambic pentameter (think: Shakespeare) or anapestic tetrameter (think: Dr. Seuss). Yeah, I just made that a rule. And yes, it can be done. I’d show you how, but I don’t want to be too helpful here. Y’all have to work a bit, right?

Flash Fiction

If you don’t know what flash fiction is by now, I may have to disown you as a follower. Or perhaps just direct you here, here, or here. Or here. Either way, the deal with the flash portion of the contest is this: write me a story, 1,000 words or less, including some of my favorite things. Namely (and in no particular order):

• Symphonic metal
• Vodka
• Writing
• Cycling
• Scotland
• Tattoos
• Me

You don’t have to include all of these things, but you have to include at least two. Extra (brownie) points for people who include all the prompts.

There we go: your marching orders. :)

Prizes

Y’know what? I’m a nice guy. (And if you happen to have read my story of the same name, I’d appreciate if you didn’t comment on that, thanks.)  So all those prizes I mentioned the other day? You, writer-friends, can have your choice.

You heard me right. If you win, you can whatever you’d like. I’m going to choose (or let chance and fickle fate choose) five winners, and each of those winners gets their choice from the prize pool. Sometimes I stun myself with my generosity. Rly.

Oh, and for you ambitious types who want to write me poetry or flash fiction? Every one of you gets a prize. Except I get to choose it. But rest assured that if you put the effort in to write me something creative, I’ll reward it. Because if you do that, you’re awesome. I may even pass on the Awesomesauce award to you.

Try not to die of excitement.

And so…

Go spread the word, writer-friends! Tell your friends, your parents (okay, maybe not them), your chiropractors (okay, maybe them), and your bloggie/Twitter acquaintances. The contest is epic. The prizes are epic. Your poetry will be epic. Your flash fiction will be epic.

Do it. You know it’ll be fun.

P.S. Contest ends May 8th. Yeah, I forgot to include this in the original post. Sue me.

P.P.S. You have to follow my blog too, naturally. I forgot that in the original post as well. *facepalm*

P.P.P.S. You have to e-mail me your flash fiction or poetry at the address you can find on my Blogger profile. I apparently forgot this in the original post too. *FACEPALM*

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*It may not be the most epic contest EVAR, but it’s still pretty cool.
** I don’t actually think that’s true. Though it might be. You’re probably just paranoid.

I can haz contest?

Oh, lookit. This weekend I hit the 250 follower mark, writer-friends—at least according to Google Friend Connect. This is cause for celebration, is it not?

What a lovely group. I mean, look at ‘em!

So, in the grand tradition of pretty much every other blogger out there ever who ever got a bunch of followers and wanted to show their appreciation, I have decided to host a contest. I know! I mean, who saw that coming?

Thing is, I haven’t decided what kind of contest to run. Last time I hosted a contest (well, co-hosted, since Carol and I split the duties on that one), it turned into a whole bunch of work, man! I mean, I had to, like, read a bunch of fiction and decide which story was bestest, and that was haaarrrrd.  But there’s always the whole Randomizer.org comment/tweet/blog/etc. for points route that so many people have been taking recently…. Ach, I’ll figure it out. Stay tuned for those details.

But you could help with one thing, writer-friends: I’m not sure what to give away yet. I’ve some ideas, of course, but I’m not sure what kinds of things will entice my loyal minions followers. Let me float some suggestions—see what you think. If you were the winner, I could:

• Write you into a piece of flash fiction—your choice of subject—that I can either a) post on my blog, or b) get published somewhere, and give you props in my short bio.
• Compose a sonnet in your honor (your choice of silly or serious), and post it on my blog. I offer this as proof that yes, I actually can write a sonnet (quality not guaranteed…).
• Send you a prize pack of Sobieski vodka stuff. Yes, I have some. Yes, it’s cool. Yes, I’ll even send you a bottle if you’d like. I won’t send ice, though—you have to supply that yourself.
• Critique or line-edit 15 pages of your work in progress, manuscript, poetry chapbook, whatever. If you don’t trust me to do this, I can always bug my editor friend to help…. :)
• Send you some books and stuff. This is the boring option, though, ‘cause everyone does it.
• Send you one of the squirrels from my back yard.
• Send you a gift certificate to Amazon or Powells (independent bookstores FTW!).
• Bug the hell out of my author-friends with multiple-book contracts to name a supporting character after you. I’d totally do this for you, writer-friends. I’m shameless.

Those are a few of my ideas, but I’m sure you have others, friends. Let me know in the comment section what you think would be a cool prize, would you? (And no, I can’t send you Gerard Butler, Carol. Sorry.)

Right. Back to the regularly scheduled weekend. Hope yours is splendiferous, writer-friends. Treat yourself to a drink. You deserve it.

You are their legacy

I went to a poetry reading on Tuesday night, writer-friends. (Look at me! I’m so cosmo-pol-itan!) I’ll admit, though, that it was my first ever poetry reading, and I went at the request of my former fiction writing teacher, who was reading that night, along with one of her colleagues. (I’m not really that cosmopolitan, after all.) I feel a certain indebtedness to Miriam, since she was the first ever person ever to publish my fiction ever, in her rather successful online literary journal, Per Contra. (I say successful because she’s published a ludicrous number of fancy literary prize winners,  and, er, John Updike. He only won the Pulitzer twice, though, so how good can he really have been?) Hence my appearance at a poetry reading. I did not wear a black turtleneck.

Anyway, I met her co-editor, Bill, for the first time that night, and as we chatted, he told me something I thought you, fellow writers-in-the-trenches, might like to know. See, I was in the  middle of offering my profuse thanks for them publishing my work—I knew he hadn’t personally been thrilled about the piece they optioned, but Miriam talked him into it. I think I’d been rabbiting on about how they’ve published a Pulitzer winner, O.Henry prize winners, etc., and he cut me off before I could make a bigger fool of myself.

“Yes, that’s all good,” he said (and I paraphrase the conversation here), “but that’s not the point.”

I may have looked confused. It’s possible I looked confused. Okay, I looked confused.

“Everyone wants to publish the prize winners,” said Bill. “But the best part of running a literary magazine is finding new writers, people like you and Elizabeth,”—he pointed across the room toward a tall brunette with long hair and small, wide eyes—“who may someday be prizewinners.”

Speechlessness ensued.

“That,” he continued, “is our legacy.”

I understood, then, and it gave me hope. It gave me hope not just for myself, but for you as well, writer-friends—for all of us muddling through drafts of unpublished novels or sweating over every word of a short story, or poem. We’re the ones they’re looking for, don’t you see?

Because you’re intelligent, well-read, literate writer-friends, you read agent and editor blogs. You know the deal: the slush pile is not dead, keep sending queries, keep at it, persevere, etc., ad nauseaum. But to intellectually understand this and to hear it directly from the mouth of a fairly successful editor are two different things entirely.

We are fiction’s legacy. The words we write, the stories we tell, the tiny shards of our soul we drag out and push onto the printed or pixelated page are the art that will speak for our generation. Who else will do it?

We, writer-friends, are the voices of this digital age. Whether we write enjoyably escapist stories to remove the minds of the masses from their quiet desperation, or tales of grinding angst that offer empathy to the downtrodden, catharsis to the suffering, ours is the fiction that defines our time. The legacy is ours to create.

It’s a terrible and triumphal responsibility, friends. I’m ready for it. Are you?

Feel big or go home

I’m a tad bit down-in-the-mouth today, writer-friends, and I can’t say why. No, it’s not that I won’t say why, it’s that I can’t, because I just don’t know. Some days are like that. Perhaps I could blame it on a scanty night’s sleep last night due to tiny daughter’s teeth coming in and (you may as well know) a surfeit of Cheerios  making her constipated. Yeah. Either way, I’m low-down and cranky right now. It is what it is.

This got me to thinking, though, about writing, and about how, for me, it’s a feeling process, and if I haven’t felt a certain way myself, how the hell am I going to drag a reader down into the muck with me? There’s something to be said for examining our feelings, understanding them (if not their causes), and injecting them into our stories. I want to make my readers feel. I kid you not, writer-friends, I want to write stories that crack people’s souls. I want to make them weep, shudder, exult, sigh, tremble, squirm, and, above all,  feel.

How do I do this, if I haven’t been there myself? Sometimes I wonder if, to write truly about a thing, I need to have felt it in some part myself. It’s a working theory.

I can write heartbreak because I’ve had my heart broken.  I know what it is to wander aimlessly around the house, wondering how the hole in my center will ever be filled, stopping every now and then, perhaps unconsciously, to grit my teeth and bow my head against the pain, gasping sometimes from the sudden sting of it in my throat and behind my eyelids. It sucks. I learned from it.

I can write illness because I’ve watched friends and acquaintances die slowly from cancer, seen their families shake in shock and children carried from funerals with anger and loss stamped on their small faces. It sucks. I learned from it.

I can write love because I’ve felt the rush of infatuation, the hot physicality of new passion, the way it makes even a dirty city rain something new and refreshing. I’ve held my infant son in my arms and been struck silent by the newness of life, the baby-scent, the raw need of this tiny person—part me, part my wife, and all himself—and I understood that my life was a paltry, pale thing in comparison to this new, potential-filled being. It’s humbling. I learned from it.

I can write fear because I’ve held that same son in my arms, listening to his breath grow shorter, knowing his lungs are constricting the way mine did when I was younger, silently begging the doctors to come soon, to save the thing most precious to me because there’s not a goddamn thing I can do but wait and hope and—tortured agnostic that I am—pray. It sucks. I learned from it.

God, writer-friends, get out there and bloody well feel something! There is no substitute for living. None. You can imagine and empathize, and that will take you far; but for the love of all that’s holy, feel. Feel the joy, the pain, the love, the lust, the million tiny, excruciating heartbreaks that are part of being alive. Sometimes it’ll make you want to scale the nearest mountain; at other times it’ll make you want to curl into a hole and sleep forever. But, by hell, you will have something to say when you write.

Live it. Feel it. Write it. Make the reader feel it too. Drag them unwilling into sensation. You can create beautiful things, my friends; the world needs beautiful things. Even ugliness can be made beautiful and true if we write it well enough.

Feel big. It will show in your fiction. Write big. Your readers will love you for it.

Cheaters never prosper… Iambic Pentameter Style

So remember last Monday, when I said I was going to convert my No-Kiss Blogfest entry into iambic pentameter? Well, I did. And I gotta tell you, writer-friends, it warn’t no easy matter. I had to sweat a bit for it. But, since a free book was at stake, I soldiered on through and cranked out the sonnet-ish version of the story.

Now, since Livia Blackburne’s the one who wanted this done, and who put up a book as payment for the deed, my iambic pentameter conversion is going up on her blog today. Wander on over, then, writer-friends, and take a look see. You can find the post here: http://blog.liviablackburne.com/2010/04/iambic-pentameter-challenge.html.

In the meantime, I’m reposting my flash fiction here, with some nominal edits, for your edification and delight. (And also because I’m sure some of my new followers aren’t quite aware yet what a strange and twisted brain I have. I wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression of me, now would I?) So without further ado, I present to you Cheaters Never Prosper, a No-Kiss Blogfest entry:

* * * * *

She was coming again. I heard the click of her hard-heeled boots on the flagstones long before the bolt rattled in the lock and the door creaked open to reveal her silhouette. She had just bathed—her scent slid sinuous across the cell and swam in my nostrils. Her long hair was loose, cascading over her shoulders, the way I had always liked it. I gritted my teeth and tensed against the chains clamping me to the wall.

“You’re awake.” She had been drinking again, her voice blurred at the edges. “Good.”

She walked slowly toward me, each heel-stroke shivering up my spine, and stopped with her face inches from mine. I could smell the wine on her breath, the sweet incense of her still-damp hair. The light from the open door limned the curl of her lips. Her eyes were deep in shadow, dark as night.

“How have you been?” she asked in a throaty whisper. She moved closer, our lips a hairsbreadth apart now, her head tilted, nose grazing against mine.

My jaw began to ache with tension. The muscles of my face were taut, my shoulders rigid. She placed a cool palm against my cheek. With the fingers of her other hand, she began to trace soft patterns on my leg. Against my will, my breathing quickened.

“You’re predictable, darling,” she whispered in my ear. “You never could resist that.” She ran her tongue down my jaw, then broke away with a short laugh.

Her hands continued to move on me, and I leaned my head back against the cold stone, squeezed my eyes shut, thought of anything other than the exquisite touch of her fingers, the intoxicating scent of her hair, the warmth I felt radiating from her body.

She brought her face close again, licked the tip of my nose. “Was she worth it?” she breathed.

Her arms snaked across my back, up and over my shoulders, as she pressed herself full-length against me. Her heat scalded my aching flesh. Her mouth hovered near mine. I felt the barest touch of her tongue as she flicked it across her lips. “Was she worth it?” she asked again.

No! I wanted to scream. Never! She was nothing to me. Nothing! I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry!

I said nothing. My throat burned from choking back the words.

She released me and stepped back suddenly. She took a long, shuddering breath. My knees buckled and I sagged in my restraints. The manacles cut into my wrists, but I welcomed the pain, the distraction, the sensation that—for the briefest of moments—erased the clutching, nauseating guilt. I felt her turn away, heard the spike of her bootheels on stone as she strode to the door.

She paused. I looked up. The torchlight flickered against her face, danced in the hollows of her neck, glittered in the drops of moisture on her cheek. “Perhaps my father will have you tortured tomorrow,” she said, then was gone.

In the renewed darkness of my cell, the chill of her absence quenching the fire she had sparked in my veins, I thought that her father’s kind of torture might be a welcome change. Maybe somewhere in the untrammeled agony of the rack I could find the release I’d been seeking these past weeks—freedom from the sickening self-loathing, the too-late tendrils of remorse that wrapped tight around my chest, the regret that filled my nostrils, through the long dark of my imprisoned days, with the stench of my own weakness.

Punctuation is my bitch…

…and she needs to be yours too, writer-friends. I ain’t even joking.

Look, writing is our business, right? Even if it’s not our business, it’s our business. We’re here to string words together into  pretty sentences, string sentences together into pretty paragraphs, and string paragraphs together into pretty books. We want to write the stories that rock the agents’ socks (and the public’s)—if Janet Reid, Barbara Poelle, and Nate Bransford aren’t signing up to cage-fight over my novel, I haven’t done my job right. And I can’t, can’t, CAN’T do my job right if I don’t know how to wield punctuation effectively.

You don’t have to be fancy with punctuation either. Really, if all you know how to use correctly is the period and the comma, you’re farther ahead than some, for sure. You’re missing out on the shades of meaning and variety that other punctuation marks allow, but as long as you use what you know well, you’ll do good, friend. Good, I tell ya. Don’t comma splice, and don’t inappropriately, separate words in a phrase, also you might want to avoid too many commas in one sentence. And if that last sentence looked wrong, it’s because it WAS and if you didn’t think it was wrong we’re having a talk in the hallway, writer-friend!

You know what else was wrong? The last sentence of the last paragraph. I should’ve put a comma after the WAS, but didn’t. Why? Because I wanted that sentence to run on a bit, to be read all in one breath, so to speak. I did this for effect, to mimic, somewhat, the run-on nature of shouted argument. I did it deliberately, and with the full knowledge that it was wrong. I broke the rules, but in order to do so, I first needed to KNOW the rules.

I’m not going to bother with a lesson here, writer-friends. There are plenty of resources online that would simply love to educate you on the beauties of the em-dash and the en-dash, the colon and the semicolon, the ellipsis and the exclamation point. It’s terribly dull going, a lot of the time, but the fact is that proper punctuation can enliven your writing. Use the em-dash to drag your reader from one thought to another related thought with more momentum than a semicolon. Use ellipses for dialogue that trails off, or to let people on Twitter know you’re being sarcastic…. You see what I’m saying.

Point being, you need to know the rules of punctuation so you can break them for maximum effect. Virginia Woolf knew all the rules, and wielded punctuation so effectively that her prose is enough to bring you to your knees some nights. Faulkner’s long sentences and fractured, stream-of-consciousness narration were conscious prose choices made to mirror the internal world of his characters, but he could have punctuated properly if he’d wanted to. These writers made punctuation their bitch. They made punctuation tap dance for them, and occasionally call them “Daddy” (yes, even Virginia—I hear she was a bit freaky like that).

So do not neglect punctuation writer-friends. You cannot fake a semicolon. Learn the rules, know the rules, apply the rules, and know when to break the rules into tiny, little punctuation-pieces for effect. Make punctuation your bitch. She’'ll do right by you.

Janet Reid's going to buy me lunch.

Sho nuff, writer-friends. She so is. Why, you may be asking? Because Sarah Wylie (who, incidentally, I’m probably very distantly related to since that name crops up in my family tree) is hosting a contest to celebrate the sale of her book which is awesome and isn’t it the coolest to see bloggie-friends have success like this and now maybe we can do it too ‘cause someone we know (at least online) has done it?

Yup.

Anyway, one of the prizes is lunch with Janet Reid and Suzie Townsend. I want this. I don’t need query critiques or partial critiques or Twizzlers (gack!), but I do want to hang out with a couple of agents and BS about writing, publishing, and how many vodka martinis are appropriate during a business lunch.

Okay, Sarah didn’t say Janet was buying—I went ahead and assumed that. You know she would.

My point is, don’t bother entering Sarah’s contest. ‘Cause I’m going to win it, and, quite frankly, I don’t want you to get your hopes up. I’m always thinking of you, writer-friends. I’m nice like that.

Murder Scene & Bar Scene Blogfests – A Twofer!

I’m cheating. Yes, oh yes, I’m cheating, and I ain’t even going to apologize for it. See, I’m a fan of blogfests, right? And I do like to participate, except Anne Riley’s Murder Scene Blogfest and Tara Fout’s Bar Scene Blogfest fall on the same weekend. This would be a dilemma, were it not for the fact that my idea ended up being for a murder scene that takes place in a bar. You see where this is going.

It’s a bit long (I blame that on it being an entry for two blogfests at once), so I’ll truncate my usual rambling preamble and get to the story. But I will say that I haven’t edited this one as much as I’d like to, and will give completely irredeemable bonus points to the first commenter who picks the two words I feel I’ve overused. Onward!

* * * * *

“Put that fucking phone down, Frank,” I said.

Frank froze with the phone halfway to his ear, finger hovering over the keypad. He placed the handset back on the cradle. I turned to the rest of the bar, waving the .38 for emphasis.

“That goes for the rest of you too. Phones down. Now!”

Stunned stares ricocheted away from my face as I glared around the room, but I was beyond caring. The skin at my temples was taut, my eyes wide. I felt the breath hissing in my lungs. Something had gone terribly wrong, and it was too late now to stop it. My thoughts felt frayed at the edges.

On the floor at my feet, the crackhead moaned and cradled his broken face. Blood and spit had started to pool beneath his head; his ratty sneakers scuffed the floor as he curled himself repeatedly into a fetal position.

“Phones down,” I said again. “On the floor. Slide them to me.”

The clatter of plastic on wood filled the room. Cell phones skittered across the stained floorboards toward me, and I bent to pick them up, dropping them one by one into the sink just behind the bar. One man in the corner—suit, tie, thick glasses and expensive cufflinks—hesitated with his iPhone suspended in mid-air. I walked toward him, the gun swinging at my side. He blinked up at me from behind custom bifocals as I leaned down to look him in the eye.

“Want to give me that?” I said quietly.

I heard the click in his throat as he swallowed and nodded. I took the phone from his outstretched hand and deposited it in the sink with the rest. For good measure, I stepped behind the bar, dropped the house phone in the sink as well. Frank stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Lock the door, Frank. Shut the place down.”

He stumbled to the door, pushed the bolt home. A few flicks of his wrist later, and the exterior lights were off.

“Inside lights too.”

And then it was dark, but for the muted shine of the neon beer advertisements that glowed on the fake cherry-wood bar, the smoke-ravaged walls, the whites of thirty frightened eyes, and Sandra’s scattered, platinum hair where she lay unmoving on the floor.

I kneeled by her side. Her eyes were still open—blue, blue as sky after storm with shades of angry-ocean green, eyes that had sparked and flamed with passion when we made love in the afternoon, and that were now dull and unseeing. With trembling fingers I reached to shutter her eyelids. The hole in her throat—her lovely, swan neck!—had ceased to spurt blood when her heart had stopped. Now it was just a wound, a ragged chasm from which everything good in my life had leaked. My insides lurched—

she died oh my God she died I watched her last breath the last trickle of blood from her mouth her neck and she looked at me she held my hand and the fear in her eyes I couldn’t do anything but watch her go still her hand going slack in mine and everything white in my mind and nothing but the pain and the whiteness and the rushing in my ears and the sudden impact shivering my arms again and again and the white the rushing and the slow return of sight and then I had been standing over the bleeding crackhead with his blood trickling between my knuckles, his gun suddenly in my hand and shocked silence pressing on my ears.

I looked up. Something tickled my cheek, and I brushed it away. I glanced down, surprised for a moment by the moisture on the back of my palm, clear, smearing the drying blood. I didn’t know I had been crying.

The crackhead whimpered on the floor behind me, and I turned. Pain and rage vibrated in my stomach, a wild wind of feeling that tightened my muscles and drove thought from my mind. I stood and stalked toward the prostrate figure. Someone whispered something in the far corner of the bar. I ignored it. There was nothing now for me but the curled form on the floor and the hot weight of the pistol in my hand. I leaned down and held the barrel sideways next to the man’s ear.

The snap of the pistol died quickly in the stale air. The bullet spat splinters from the floorboards, and the crackhead screamed, clasping a hand to his shattered eardrum. I watched him writhe for a moment, leaned down again.

My fist in his shirt brought him to a sitting position. I clenched my hand in the soiled fabric and dragged him to his feet, pressed the point of the .38 against his chin. His eyes, bloodshot, twitching, looked everywhere but at me. Blood trickled from beneath the hand pressed to his ear. I felt my lip curling.

Fucking junkie. He might have been a man once. Now he was just human trash, driven by drugs to rob, to steal, to impress his profligate need on anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. I measured his lifespan in minutes, now.

Stiff-armed, I propelled him backward to the wall opposite the bar. His back slapped against the wainscot; a coathook spiked the back of his neck. He cried out and twisted away from the pressure. I punched him in the face with the butt of the gun, and his knees buckled. I let him fall.

He sat now facing the place where Sandra lay, his hands clamped to his mouth, his ear. I kneeled in front of him.

“Look at her,” I said.

He groaned and turned his face away. Fury flaming in my chest, I vised my fingers on his cheeks and forced his head back. “Look at her!” The words ripped raw from my throat. I fought the urge to cough.

The twitching eyes jerked around the room, looking at the bar, the lights, the frozen, silent patrons, the puddled beer on the floor and finally, reluctantly, at the still, empty form of the woman I loved. He blinked blearily, focusing. I watched, waiting. Nothing.

No regret. No shame. Sandra was dead, and this human refuse stared at her corpse with no more feeling than a man who had stepped on a roach. I gritted my teeth. The whiteness crept into the edges of my vision again. I felt my breath coming faster. My fingers on the junkie’s face clamped tighter, trembling with the strain.

The blinking, bloodshot eyes turned back to me. Fear. There was fear, but also something else. He didn’t care about me, didn’t care about Sandra. There was nothing for him now but the next fix. His were the eyes of a child who feigned remorse to lessen the lecture, then returned to the wrongdoing as soon as the parent’s back was turned. I placed the gun against his belly.

The report was muffled by fabric and skin. The crackhead screamed and bent double around the hole in his stomach. I stood and turned away.

The gun clattered on the bar as I levered myself onto a barstool. I looked at my hands. Blood ran red across my knuckles and between my fingers. Behind me, the junkie wept and writhed around the acid burn in his middle. It was only a matter of time now.

“Vodka, Frank.” I was very tired.

I glanced up. Frank hadn’t moved. He was staring at the squirming heap against the far wall. I saw his throat convulse as he swallowed.

“Frank,” I said, louder. He looked at me, startled. “Vodka. Rocks.” I rapped my knuckles on the bar. The .38, still in my hand, thudded against the wood.

The top of the bottle shuddered against the glass as Frank poured the drink. The crying, coughing wreck behind me filled the silence with his dying. I didn’t know how long it would take for him to die, but it might be a while. I took a slow sip of vodka.

“Anyone wants a drink now, Frank, it’s on me,” I said. “Go ahead.”

I spun on the barstool and took another long drink. The pain scraped against my insides, mixed with slow-cooling rage and a deep weariness. I drank my vodka and watched the blood pooling beneath the dying man, trickling in the cracks between the floorboards.

After a while, I took the vodka bottle and went to sit on the floor by Sandra. Holding her cooling hand, I drank, and watched, and waited for it to be over.

Unsun can help your fiction. Rly.

Yes. Yes, I will compare fiction writing to a symphonic metal song, and I will feel no shame whatsoever doing so, because art has no boundaries, and neither does awesome. So here goes, writer-friends… feast your ears on Unsun’s The Other Side:

A slow intro… fade in to the guitar with arpeggiated upward notes, steadily getting louder until full volume hits and the drums crash in. This is your opening scene, with tension inherent in the first few words, building, building, until the full force of your imagination crashes against the reader like double-time drumbeats. You can ease them in, slow-like, or you can grab them by the ears, crack your forehead against theirs, and scream, “Look at my story, you poor, unsuspecting sap! Read my opening paragraphs and despair of ever surfacing again until you’ve finished the whole g*ddamn thing!”  But however you do it, you’d better damn well grab the reader right up front and make them believe that awesomeness of the first order is about to beat them about the head and shoulders.

And then we get to the end of the intro, and what do we have? It feels like it’s let up a bit, but no! The guitar pulls back from the wicked-fast arpeggio and goes right into a driving rock riff, underpinned by a straight-ahead one-two, one-one-two drum line, and the lyrics soar above with Aya Stefanowicz’s vocals smacking you directly in the face. This is where you back off from the initial, interest-piquing scenes and realize that you’re into the book proper, now, but you must, must, MUST keep the tension going. Keep that rocking beat pulsing beneath your plot and move the story along, and don’t even think about letting up on the tension and making your reader skip ahead, or Mauser will find you and beat you in the head with his guitar!

We hit the chorus  now, and we’re back to the rising notes on the guitar—with the keyboard adding subplot-style complexity—injecting adrenaline into the base of your spine, the drums dropping back into double-time, and HOLY CRAP HOW DOES VAAVER DRAMOWICZ HIT THE FRAGGIN’ DRUMS THAT FAST? This is you grabbing the reader again because you just raised the stakes in your novel, making things more interesting and more tense and more I can’t put this down and I don’t care if I have to be at work in the morning just one more chapter!

And then we’re back to the verse, and the driving beat, and don’t let that tension flag remember the Mauser-beating and you keep things going and now instead of the chorus, we have a bridge, and things get a tiny bit slower, and Aya’s vocals get ethereal, and this is where maybe, just maybe, you can consider letting the reader off the hook because they probably need to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water by now, and anyway the good bits are coming up and they might need a bon-bon or some peanut-butter toast to get through what’s coming.

But now! Now is the lead-up to the climax, and we’ve got exactly the same rising notes on the guitar—just so damn fast!—and it looks like it’s the same as all the other riffs, and maybe that’s what your reader thinks, but then, just when you think it’s nothing but the same-old, same-old, the guitar jumps an octave and keeps on going up and HOLY CRAP DID HE REALLY JUST TAKE THAT F*CKING SOLO TO THE NEXT LEVEL OH MY HELL HE DID AND THAT IS THE MOST EPIC FRAGGIN’ THING IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE… 

This is your climax, writer-friends. This is where you wrap all the tension-filled threads of your story or novel together and drag your reader screaming into the absolute apex of fiction, the part where their jaw drops and they jump out of their chair and say, “Holy sh*t, I didn’t see that coming BUT THAT IS THE MOST EPIC FRAGGIN’ THING IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE!!!”  Yes. Yes it is that, because you’re just that good. And if you don’t flay the skin from your reader’s face with your guitar solo climax you have not done your job you lazy, lazy writer now get back in there and get to peeling some fraggin’ skin!

And then? Ah… you might think you have it easy, but you don’t. You’ve written the climax, the action has come to a head, but you still have to finish the story, folks. Don’t you dare make the mistake of assuming you can relax, because those weak endings anger intelligent readers and make them want to find you and beat you with their paperback copies of your work, and you don’t want that. So keep that driving beat going, and going, and string that tension along until the very last minute…. and then, at the bitter end, perhaps you can thrown in a few desultory chords that resonate with the rest of the song novel but leave your reader wrung out and panting absolutely panting and drooling like Pavlov’s dogs for your next novel. Oh, yeah.

That, writer-friends, is how it’s done. Don’t f*ck with Unsun.

Oh, and don’t f*ck with your readers—they won’t appreciate it.

Oh, and symphonic metal FTW. That is all.

Aya is not the only reason I like Unsun. I promise.

Twitter Tips (Real ones this time. I promise.)

Okay, before I go on and give you some actual, real, bona fide tips on how to use Twitter, writer-friends, let me update you with some yesterday’s-post-related news. Delain first:

What I said…

  What she said…

Those x’s stand for smooches, right? Right. (Don’t disabuse me of that notion.) Virtual kisses from Charlotte Wessels—I’m checking that off my life-goal list.

And then there’s Sobieski Vodka, whom I never told about this post, but who found it via the magic of Google Alerts (and presumably they’ll find this one too… hey, Mark!):

What they said…

I  was, needless to say, rather amused, and gratified. Mark, their U.S. publicist, is a stand-up guy, I must say. (Unless he overindulges in the vodka, in which case he may be a lie-down guy. I understand this kind of thing.)

* * * * *

Right. On to the actual tips. Told you I’d get to them eventually, and here they are.

 Twitter Tip #1: Use Hashtags

What are hashtags, you ask? Well, I’ve been using them for a couple days now, and Frankie keeps asking me why I haven’t mentioned them. With good reason, I guess, since they’re both useful and fun to abuse. They’re just ways to put a searchable tag on your post, is all. So if you use the #amwriting tag, you can then plug this into the Twitter search box, or Google, and see who’s using the tag. This allows you to find other writers, natch. See also the #writing #amwritingparty #writegoal, and #writetip tags. Automatic community-finding, see?

You can also abuse hashtags for your own amusement, of course. Some recent examples I’ve run across, or made up myself: #nopants, #girlcrush, #notsorry, #fml, #lying, #Ihatesynopses, #wtf, and #totallynotsurprised. Really, you can use hashtags for whatever you want, even blog comments (*cough* Frankie *cough*). Oh, but you never, ever, EVER want to search on the #random tag. It’s… just… don’t do it. You have been warned.

Twitter Tip #2: Retweet

You know what’s nice? When I tweet a link to a new blog post of mine, then one of my Twitter-friends retweets it. Retweeting is simply passing on the tweet, with your name in front of it, and buttons to do this are available on Twitter and every platform that uses the API (Tweetdeck, TwitterGadget, etc.). It’s good Twittiquette (is that a neologism?) to pass on interesting links and tweets to your followers. They, in turn may do this with your tweets. It’s a lovely little mutual admiration society kind of thing. If you pass on interesting enough things, people will find you and like you and follow you and your life will be complete and you won’t have to drink yourself to sleep anymore. See how nice retweeting is?

Oh, and saying “Thank you” for retweets is nice too. Niceness goes a long way on Twitter. And on the internet in general. Truth.

 Twitter Tip #3: Wait and See

We’ve all had those followers show up in our Inbox, right? Someone like BritneyBot128754 is following your tweets, and you have no idea who that is. You check their stats, and see they’ve got 23 followers, and are following 399 people. Don’t follow these people. Just wait a bit, let that e-mail sit in your Inbox. A day or so later, click on the link in the e-mail to see this lovely screen:

 

This means the account you’re looking for was spamming, over-following, and generally annoying people. It got flagged, and now it’s gone.

Now, sometimes it’s just a n00b mistake to follow too many people at once. This is why I wait and see. If the person’s actually serious about the account, and simply made a mistake, they’ll figure it out soon enough, and you can check in on them a day or two later and see what they have to say. The spammers will be weeded out by the waiting.

 Twitter Tip #4: Engage

Last tip, folks, ‘cause this is running long. It’s this: jump on in. Find interesting people to follow, and watch how they use the service. Notice how annoyed you are by people who only use Twitter to promote themselves, and don’t do that. Follow people who specialize in randomly amusing comments, like @harleymaywrites and @lukeromyn. Join in the discussions at scheduled times, like #writechat, #litchat, and #yalitchat. You’ll meet tons of other writers.

Check in now and then, see what people are saying. If something’s interesting, why not respond, or retweet? Stalk other people’s discussions when they’re talking about something that piques your interest. There’s always some kind of conversation going on in the Twitterverse. Some are fun, some are silly, and some are educational. What have you got to lose?

Okay, you could lose time. A lot. A whole lot. But you’ll make friends. Possibly critique partners. You’ll find people whose books you want to read when they get published. You’ll find people whose books are published and whom you want to read because they’re talented. And you know what? Those people will find you too.

Jump on in the Twitterstream, writer-friends. The water’s shark-infested spambot-filled addicting time-sucking warm!

You may as well know…

The Joy of Twitter…

Like any other social media platform, writer-friends, Twitter is exactly as much or as little as you put into it. To be clear, I ain’t an expert on social media. I Facebook irregularly, I signed up for Goodreads a month or two ago and haven’t touched it since, and, now I’m thinking of it, what the hell is Google Buzz all about other than one more thing to clog up my Gmail account? Still haven’t figured that one out…. Point being, I suppose, that you get out of it what you put in.

What have I put into Twitter, then? I’m not quite sure, other than sarcasm and snark. Whatever. It seems to be working for me. And y’know what? ‘Cause I’m nice like that, I’ll give you a few examples of my Twitter shenanigans these past months. You can take these as cautionary tales or inspiration… either way, you’ll get a bit of an idea of what kind of community you can find out there in the Twitterverse.

So. First example: the PG Love Scene Blogfest. I won’t relate the story again here, ‘cause I already did it here, but that raht thar is a classic case of the kind of trouble one can get into on Twitter. Poke fun at someone one time too many and it may bite you in the ass, is all I’m sayin’. Anyway, it didn’t turn out all bad, because 40 whole people (as opposed to half people) signed up for the ‘fest, and my li’l ol’ blog had its highest day of traffic evar. Yeah. On a day I posted a love scene from the point of view of a teenaged bride. Grand.

Okaayyy… moving right along. Try this one on for size: I got free alcohol from Twitter. I kid you not. The story? Right. so a while back I was enjoying a glass of chilled vodka, as is my wont, and I tweeted something to the effect of, “Ah, Sobieski vodka, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways….” And it turns out that Sobieski’s U.S. marketer has a Twitter account, and followed me the next day. Amusement ensued.

And then a few weeks later, I (being an ornery sort) poked at Sobieski, asking how many times I needed to tweet about them to get a coupon. And wouldn’t you know, they DMed me and said, “Thanks for promoting us. We’ll send you a free bottle.” WIN! Dying of amusement ensued. Best believe when I go to the liquor store for vodka nowadays, I buy Sobieski. Brand loyalty, baby!

This last one is my current favorite, mainly because it happened so recently. It’s probably no secret to my regular readers that I hold a special place in my usually cold and frozen heart for rock chicks (I give you Exhibits A and B). My wife, of course, knows this (Hi, honey! Love you!), but if she’s allowed to lust after appreciate Daniel Craig and Bono, I’m allowed to lust after appreciate rock chicks (and Kate Beckinsale). It’s an arrangement. Don’t judge.

Anyway, recalling Exhibit A above, you can see I kinda like Delain, and, of course, Charlotte Wessels. So when I checked my e-mail last Friday to find that @delainmusic had followed me on Twitter, I was understandably amused and (I confess) excited. I did the usual DM thank you thing, mentioning I’d just been listening to their Lucidity album the night before, and got a DM back from none other than Ms. Wessels. Cue the awesomeness-induced death. Srsly… wouldn’t you, too? I mean… look!

 Maybe it’s the hair…

So there we have it: Twitter fun. Would I have had this much fun with it if I didn’t muck around with it too much? Probably not. Like I said, it is what you make of it. Not every day (or week, or month) will give you blogfest ideas, free vodka, or follows from @delainmusic, but you never know what’ll happen, right?

And maybe tomorrow I’ll actually have something helpful to say about Twitter. We can always hope.

Twitter: A Half-Assed Guide for Writers

I admit, when I first got on Twitter, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I figured it was one of those things that aspiring authors needed to have to promote their “brand” (whatever that is—I’m still trying to figure that one out), and so I signed on up, and tweeted my first tweet, which in retrospect was awfully damn pretentious.

I tooled around for a bit, searched on the Hemingway to find my first few follows, read a few blog posts about how to go about tweeting effectively, and that was about that. It really wasn’t until I ran across the #writechat and #amwritingparty hashtags that things began to take off on Twitter for me. Now all of a sudden I was finding other writers, and they were interesting and supportive, and if I posted a #writegoal, they’d cheer me on from thousands of miles away. This, needless to say, was pretty cool.

So now I’ve crossed the 1,000 follower threshold (not through any particular effort, funnily enough), and thought perhaps now would be a good time to share my hard-won knowledge. Here, then, is what Twitter is good for, writer-friends:

Networking

Yup, that’s what we’re all on there for, isn’t it? We’ve heard about the benefits of social media, and think maybe we should jump on in, and that way when we have a novel or story published, we can tweet it to our legions of followers and they’ll go read and buy and send us cash gifts in the mail. Yes, indeedy.

Okay, maybe that won’t happen. But you certainly will find other like-minded folk there—the writing community on Twitter is extensive, and awfully embracing. Try searching on the #writing or #amwriting hashtags. There are a few crazies that use the #amwritingparty hashtag too (you know who you are), so if you’re feeling brave, try that one. You’ll find other people trying to put one word after another, just like you.

Not to mention that agents are on Twitter too. Nathan Bransford? Check. Rachelle Gardner? Check. Janet Reid? Check. A buncha other agents? Check. Sure, they may not pay much attention to you, but you can follow ‘em and see what they’re saying. They might even give a #querytip now and then.

Support

Sometimes you’re stuck, the words won’t come, and you just need to bitch about it. Sometimes you’re bored of your WIP and need a new idea (then someone will suggest alcoholic cats, and away you go…). Sometimes you need a word, or a particular line’s bugging you, and you want feedback but your crit group doesn’t meet but once every two months… just ask your writer-friends on Twitter; they’re happy to help.

Critiques

This happens with blog-friends a lot, but don’t overlook Twitter as a source of critique partners. I know I’ve critiqued at least one query letter after someone asked for help on Twitter. Yeah. I’m nice like that. (Though if I critiqued for you, you might not agree with that statement….) Still, if you’re lacking for CPs, you could put the word out on Twitter. Writers are usually nice, y’know. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

Stalking

Yes, you too can hang around your favorite celebrities, bask in the glow of their famousness, and tell your friends you sent so-and-so a DM on Twitter. Yup. Hey, so what if Neil Gaiman has 1.5 million followers? Mention him in a tweet. He’ll totally notice you, and perhaps ask if he can come over to your house for cocktails. (I don’t recommend this unless you’re saying something clever or funny, incidentally. Fanboy/fangirl squeees are usually ignored.)

Flirting

What? Don’t even act like you haven’t done it. We’re all (hopefully) adults here, and mild flirting via teh internets seems to be de rigeur in these public fora. Just, er… do keep it appropriate, huh? If you’re posting Twitpics of yourself in boxers/lingerie/bodypaint/beanies/nothing, you will lose writer-friends. But on the plus side, you’ll gain an army of spambot/pornbot followers, and you can all tweet merrily away and be shunned by the community at large. Hey, if that’s your thing…

* * * * *

You know what? I think I’ll rabbit on about Twitter again tomorrow. There’s much more fun to be had on that little time-leeching microblogging platform, and you all need to know about it. Yessirree, you do.

Till then, writer-friends…

Iambic Pentameter Monday

No, I’m not going to write a blog post in iambic pentameter (yet). You can all heave a sigh of relief now. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Right. You didn’t have to sound quite that relieved, though, y’know. You’re going to give me a complex. Now where was I? Oh, yes… iambic pentameter.

Now I know I’ve mentioned before about my #NovelChallenge with Mercedes Yardley. I have to write 5K a week on my novel, she has to write one chapter a week, whoever loses has to submit to the other’s evil, wicked demands. So far I’ve lost twice. The first time all she wanted was a photo of my tattoo. Fine. Easily done. She put it up on her blog and of course there were calls for the full monty in the comment section. Uh… yeah. Methinks the wife would have something to say about that.

Anyway, I lost again a week or so ago, due to work deadlines and family vacations, and this time Merc thought she would be epically evil by making me write an ode to her in sonnet form. Now, that would be evil, were it not for the fact that I’m rather facile with verse. Ha! Underhanded win for me!

So do pop over to her blog to see me wax rhapsodic about Mercedes in sonnet form. Also, she calls me a pretty boy, which amuses me no end, since I can count on no hands the number of times I’ve been called pretty, but might need the hands and feet of the population of Mexico City in order to count the number of times I’ve been called geek or jackass. I’ll take pretty over those any day….

And then there’s everyone’s favorite mad brain scientist, Livia Blackburne. I didn’t make her Alternate Version Blogfest this past week, and apologized via e-mail. She was oh-so gracious, but said she did want to see me do my No-Kiss Blogfest entry Jane Austen-style. And I said, “Jane Austen? Honey, iambic pentameter would be easier!” And she said, “I’d pay good money to see that in iambic pentameter.” And I thought, ‘Huh.’

So then I said, “If you pony up a book of my choice, I’ll write that scene in iambic pentameter.” And she said, “You’re on!” And I said, “Cool!”

And that’s how it went. So next week, perhaps on Wednesday, I’ll post an iambic pentameter version of my No-Kiss Blogfest entry on her blog, and maybe I’ll repost the original here just for fun, and y’all can bounce between the blogs and enjoy the fruits of my labor and I get a Neil Gaiman book or something out of the deal. Cool? Cool.

Thus endeth iambic pentameter Monday. And because I feel like I should, I shall leave you with a tiny verse.

A win! Mercedes thought she had me beat,

but no—the sonnet form ain’t hard for me.

And so she got an ode, it’s rather neat,

although it may be just a wee bit twee.

And now? The No-Kiss Blogfest entry? What?

You want it done in verse? Iambic’ly?

Okay, good lady, duck this one I’ll not.

My prize? I think I’d like the OED.

Laurel’s Eleventy-One Followers Contest Ending Soon!

Hi, folks. Just a quick reminder that my friend and critique partner Laurel’s contest celebrating eleventy-one blog followers ends tomorrow night. The deadline is midnight, which is good, because I haven’t written anything for her yet, and really intend to. I work best under deadlines anyway.

All you have to do is submit a piece of original fiction (not previously published), up to 700 words. It can be flash fiction or a scene from an existing WIP that works as a stand-alone scene. (No erotica, horror, or R-rated language, though.) Your scene or story must be dialogue-driven and show an instance of negotiation (give-and-take conflict) and persuasion.

Do include your name, e-mail and postal addresses with your submission, and send your submission via e-mail as inline text to laurels (dot) leaves (at) gmail (dot) com.

The grand prize is a critique or copyedit from Laurel of 15 pages of anything you’d like, and believe me, she’s good at it. It’s what she does for a living, folks. Runners up can choose from some interesting books, or a shorter critique.

Either way, polish up a scene, or write a new one, and send your entries in before midnight, April 4th. Details and other stuff I may have missed can be found here.

Happy writing, and happy Easter to everyone!