I’m Back, Baby!
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011That’s right, friends, I’m back! What does that mean? It means you’re not going to see me for awhile. …Wait? Is that right? Let me check my flow chart… yep, that’s right.
Confused? Not as much as me, but let’s see if we can figure this out together. 🙂
Ok, so if you’ve been following me over on Have Coffee… Will Write, a blog I used to run with friend and writing buddy, Susan Borath, you know 2 things:
(Well, hopefully you know more than these 2 things, but for argument’s sake let’s just pretend that your world revolves around us.)
Susi and I have decided to blog on our own sites and run a brand new interview/review site called “Writing on the Rocks†to go live soon nudges Eric to hurry up
I’m a cheerleader. I mean, not a real one with the pom-poms, big boobs and a tiny outfit, but a cheerleader nonetheless.
I believe in my friends, they can do anything they put their mind to and I’m always willing to put my work, time, life aside to help them in any way I can. See a problem there? I didn’t; not at first.
I love to write. It has filled a hole in me I didn’t know existed until I opened Scrivener that first time. Sometimes I would write journal-like entries, other times I would write down random snippets of dialogue that floated around in my head and kept me up at night. I even started to write another novel.
This was all before Twitter. 🙂
You all know I’m a big advocate for social networking. In my last post on HCWW I begged you all to remember that we’re people who need connections. Well, I was a writer looking for connections and boy did I find some great ones. I learned that there is so much more to writing then just writing! I learned that helping a fellow writer is not just tweeting “Hey! You can do it!†but offering to beta read, line edit and write reviews. All great ways of showing support, all great ways to spend your time not writing your own words.
Here’s something that sounds completely random, but it’s not. Did you know that not everyone uses Twitter the way I do? Every night Eric looks at me like I have two heads when I tell him about the conversations I have with people on Twitter.
“I never have conversations on Twitter. You know how we use it? We see who can write lines of code in 140 characters or less.â€
Now, it’s my turn to look at him like he has two heads.
Eric is a computer software engineer. No wait, that’s not right… he is a solutions architect. Hm, I don’t know what that means.
I know that in my context it means that there is a room in my house that looks a snake pit with all the wires running through it and that no electronic device is workable without at least two remotes. More importantly it means that he is highly intelligent and makes computers do whatever he needs them to do just by looking at them.
He’s been on Twitter for 3 years now. He has 254 followers. I have been on Twitter since January, the last time I checked I have 964 followers. Now, I know this isn’t a contest (which I would so totally win) and it doesn’t really matter the number of followers. I’m from the school of thought that it’s better to have 100 followers that I have actual conversations with than 1,000 random followers with whom I never speak with.
So, why do I bring this up? I honestly, forget. Where did I put that flow chart? Ah, yes. Connections, helping people.
Eric and I both use the platform professionally. His line of work is analytical, whereas mine is personable. We both use it to connect to people in our field, to learn with them or from them, but with me it’s so much more. It has to be. I’m a writer. I need to study people and if I can’t be with someone physically then I need to study them through their words.
But I went overboard. Twitter enabled me. I just want to help people. I want everyone to be their best and if they think I can help them achieve their goals by reading their work then I am all for it. But I took on too much.
Other than blog posts, I stopped writing. At first I was ok with it because helping other writers and feeling a part of something was magical and addicting. But over the course of the last few weeks I started getting depressed; that once filled hole was re-emerging. Since I had once filled it, I knew what was causing it, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
I had a really good talk with a great friend last night. He picked up on my mood right away and we started talking. Instead of saying ‘Just start writing, Karen! You can do it!†He asked me questions about my main character, the one I left alone so many months ago. He brought her back to me. The wheels started turning and her voice is now in my head. Oh, how I’ve missed her voice.
After talking with him I had some time to sit and think. I realized that I am but one person. I can’t do it all no matter how much I want to. I have several things on the burner right now in regards to helping other writers, beta reads and reviews that I can finish all within the next two weeks. Once I’m done with that, it’s me time.
But in order to do that I need to step away… from Twitter.
Somebody pick up Steve, I think he may have hit his head.
Not for good, mind you, what am I nuts? I still need that connection, it’s just going to be on a smaller time frame. And of course, I’m not that hard to find if you really need to talk to me. But I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for my characters. They need their story to be told and I’m the only one that can do it.
I just ask that you stick with me. Don’t forget about me and if you happen to be in #pubwrite one night, raise a pint in my name. Next time I’m in I’ll buy. 😉