I have heard a lot of writers and editors talking about building a presence online through social networks which I tend to agree with, but one of the things that they say is not to let it over take over the actual writing. I tried to write tonight but no matter how hard I tried no words knitted together into a cohesive sentence. So I started flicking through a few blogs and re-following people on Twitter. With Twitter I tend to re-follow most of the people who follow me. The only times that I don’t is when the person has been on Twitter a long time and has never actually tweeted. Just lately I’ve un-followed a few people who don’t follow me and never tweet anything of interest. I tend to steer clear of people who use excessive bad language or are just plain nasty. I wont ask my followers to follow people who have asked me to recommend them, I’d rather re-tweet something that they wrote that was of interest. I’m on LinkedIn and Google+ as well but am still finding my feet with those two. I’ve got a MySpace which I’ve never really got into and obviously I have Facebook. The two that I use the most are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is for all, I don’t care who follows me at all, Facebook is for me. I have a few people from Twitter on Facebook but as a general rule it’s mainly for my family and close friends. Most of the people there I have met and I have photos of children who are those of friends or family. This brings me to whether I have my Facebook linked in to my blog, I’m holding off on this because I like having the separation between Facebook and Twitter. An alternative is to have a ‘like’ or fan page on Facebook, but I’ve not got anywhere yet. I’ve not even submitted anything yet so I feel a little like a fraud when I think about doing the fan page, but would it really be any different to having a Twitter account? I doubt I’m the only person in this position.
As for my writing, I finished off my Christmas story and will be editing it in the next couple of days. I need to finish the edit of another short story as well. This second one is a story that I intend to submit in the new year. Although I have written a good ten short stories in the last eighteen months most of those are part of a series that I still need to do a little work on. Mainly continuity issues but until they are put right I can’t really start sending them off for submission.
Novel wise I am still struggling with getting our main project off the ground, but I have had some inspiration on another project so I think I may crack on with that one to see where I can take it.