Michelle and social networks

[msagara]

I've been absent. I've been productively absent, but I've been absent. I'm also staring at a spider doing a little air dance six inches above my keyboard as I type, which is not as alarming as it sounds, because it's a very tiny spider. I've been trying to read LJ--often in catch up mode, so I miss things--but I haven't been writing very much.

So this is possibly not the right post to put up after such a long absence. But, ummm.



1. Twitter. I have grown to like Twitter because I use it more or less the way I would use Facebook, absent messages and the hundred millions of apps postings (yes, I've turned them off in Facebook. No, it doesn't help because there are always new apps.)

I follow some people on Twitter. Most of those people will be writers I know, or people I know in real life; some will be people I don't know in real life, but who are posting about things I read when I'm ideally supposed to be working. Nathan Fillion is of course an exception, but, ummm. Funny. And he posts maybe three times a day on a busy day. I sometimes follow publishers in the hope that I will find out more information about books that are not yet published, but will be in future (like, say, Megan Whalen Turner's CONSPIRACY OF KINGS).

Some of the people I don't follow are active, friendly, very nice people -- but they post so often, or they RT so often, or they ask me to follow people I don't know and have never heard of so often that my entire Twitter homepage would be nothing but. I feel slightly guilty about this, but if I 'follow' everyone, I will essentially end up reading none of them, because people Tweet far, far more than they update their status on Facebook.

2. Facebook. I don't have a personal Facebook account in any meaningful sense of the word. If you friend me on Facebook, I'll respond to the request. I post similar things to Facebook and Twitter, but I tend to post different things to either place because it's only a sentence. Or two. Or three. I try to keep up with Facebook postings, but this is actually harder than keeping up with Twitter.

3. LiveJournal, which I've neglected posting to for ages, for which I apologize! I friend people I'm reading, or who I think I'll read or be able to contribute to in the future. I like reading reviews of books, I (obviously) like some writing process discussions, and I have an irrational fondness for people who've done the bookstore slog, or are doing it now.

In theory, I read more people on LJ than on Twitter. In practice, many of those people post very infrequently.

I understand that much of what I say will be of little interest to other people; conversely, much of what they say might be of little interest to me. It doesn't reflect on them, or hopefully on me. I occasionally feel that having an obsessive compulsion toward writing, while also writing for a living, means I think of nothing else. Sadly, this is mostly true.

I am happy to be friended on LJ, because it means that people are interested in what I'm writing at the moment; I don't assume that it means more than that, and there is no way to offend me by friending or unfriending me.

------

I am happy, in any of the venues I frequent (and frequent is a very loose word when the writing deadlines are a bit more pressing), to have people comment, ask questions, introduce themselves, etc. I sort of think it's the point of being on-line at all. I try to be reasoned in my responses.

Comments

Nice to get a lifesign here too, not just on your website blog

[estara.livejournal.com]

seconding, thirding and fourthing manga_crow, sartorias and la_marquise_de