[UPDATED 05/10/2014]
Those of you who have followed me here and on my other media outlets for some time will recall how adamant I’ve been about traditional publishing. Until the end of 2013 I was absolutely convinced I would be querying agents and publishers for an indefinite period of time, collecting rejection slips like they were going out of style.
Not anymore. My thoughts on the subject have completely changed, and I’d like to tell you why.
My brothers and sisters of the Twitterverse, we’ve made some strides, but I’m afraid the disease is spreading faster than we can contain it. Hashtag Blindness is a violent and fast-moving disease that may be infecting not only your followers, but your followers’ followers as well!
Worse, the symptoms are sometimes subtle and hard to detect. In my ongoing research to cure this hideous malady, I’ve uncovered some additional signs that one or more of your followers may be infected.
Mel Massey, author of Earth’s Magick, (published by Solstice Publishing just this week!) had a difficult journey from idea to published manuscript, and she suffered from many of the same fears and failures we all do.
Mel was kind enough to accept my invitation to write “Wicked Words”, a guest article for A Writer’s Journey, and what a wonderful story and lesson she’s shared with us. Enough of me…I’ll let Mel tell her story in her own words.
Twitter changed their auto-follow policy in 2013. Those of you who’ve read my series on Using Twitter Effectively know that “auto follow” was a major tool in building a writer’s platform.
By way of reminder, “auto follow” was an option in many 3rd party tools that allowed you to automatically follow back anyone who followed you. This saved organizations and popular accounts countless hours of having to manually follow everyone.
I spent some time trying to wrap my head around the new landscape, and it was tough going at first. My numbers stalled out for quite a while. But I’ve learned some lessons along the way, and I’m now convinced that this was an excellent decision on Twitter’s part. My numbers are on the rise once more, and my following is becoming more and more engaged than ever before.
Let’s take a look at the two primary automated tools for growing your following, and how these policy changes impact their use.
If you spend any amount of time on social media, someone (or several people) will eventually target you for a verbal attack. This attack can take on various forms, from the blatant ad hominem attack, to more subtle attacks couched as criticism of your work or ideas.
Sometimes the criticism is genuine, and the point is valid, but the approach is less than friendly.
What should you do when you’re attacked? Start by listening to Mark Twain:
The title is a mouthful, but the concept is very simple. You may have the right words, but if you’re getting the word sequence wrong, you’ll leave the reader confused.
 Is your table dressed in purple robes trimmed in gold? |
A year ago, when I began posting regular writing advice on Twitter, I decided things were getting a little too serious. I mean, who wants to hear nothing but boring writing tips all the time without an ounce of humor? So I started posting…let’s call it less than good advice under the hashtag #HorribleWriteTip. A typical “horrible” writing tip would look something like this:
Commas should be, spaced evenly…every, three words, tops. The Shatner comma. #HorribleWriteTip
Obvious it’s a joke, right? WRONG! That seemingly innocent hashtag helped me uncover something insidious spreading around my beloved interwebs: Hashtag Blindness. I encourage you to read on so that together we can put an end to this soul-crushing affliction.
As a Fantasy author, the subject of World Building is near and dear to my heart. If you’re going to build a convincing fantasy world, you may be thinking about developing a magic system. In Necromancer Awakening (now available on Amazon), I went through a painstaking process to build a unique magic system involving “Life” and “Death”.
While I was constructing a magic system based on necromancy, it occurred to me (in hindsight) that there are three things a writer should know before attempting this at home:
The journey from world building to prose is a long and twisted one. We know what a specific plaza in a specific city looks like. We have all of the elements: weather, sound, objects, people, etc. But unless we put them together in some kind of rational order and present them in a logical sequence, all we have are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered on a table. We need to employ structured descriptions to allow the puzzle pieces to fall into place.
