Face Down at the Me-Pond

(My gratitude to Porter Anderson for the title of this post, which I cribbed from his essay, Social Media: ‘Sharing’ our Narcissism. For those of you unfamiliar with the original myth, Narcissus fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water, so he lay down beside the pool and stared at himself until he died.) 

 

Once upon a time, I believed, as many still do, that successful people were extra special because they had superior talent. Then I wrote a book which has actually been read by people I do not know personally. This could be viewed as a form of success (tilt you head and squint a bit) although certainly not enough to make me in any way famous. (I’m talking about being famous in a good way here. Winning a Darwin award is risky and serial-killing is both risky and messy.) Naturally, my failure to achieve fame is a terrible disappointment to me, but it does raise an interesting question: What mysterious X factor separates the famous (in a good way) from the merely talented?

Everyone has a certain amount of natural ability and the capacity to excel at something. But fame wannabes, unless we are genetically endowed with extra specialness as is the case with royalty, cannot just stand on a soapbox shouting, “I’m really, really special!” We may very well be, but who is going to believe us?

If we are serious about becoming famous, we must master and our area of expertise with demonstrable results and—here’s what I think is the X factor—acquire external accreditation. These requirements are difficult to achieve, but having attempted both, I believe that external verification requires greater investment of effort than establishing our base credentials, and is therefore the more daunting. Only those of us with an unshakeable belief in our own specialness have sufficient motivation and perseverance win the fame game.  

In general, fame makers are only accessible to the hoi polloi via ladders of increasingly influential relationships. Fame seekers must cultivate well-placed taste leaders who can focus the attention of the wider world on our specialness. This is extremely time-consuming, not to mention inherently deceitful and occasionally boring. We’re not really interested in hearing about your gall-bladder operation, we just want you to say nice things about us to your millions of followers, so we pretend to be interested. It is also somewhat risky, since exposure of such sycophantic behavior substantially reduces our chances of acquiring accolades.

But is it possible to cut out the middleperson and proceed directly to fame via the internet? Recently, there has been a great deal of speculation about this revolutionary new DIY path to mass recognition. We no longer have to suck up to a few snobby, hard-to-attract experts; we can interact directly with potential fans.

In some ways, cultivating internet relationships should  be easier. Personal appearance is no longer important. No one cares if we shower twice a day or twice a year, because all anyone ever sees of us is a cartoon avatar or an old image cropped out of a group picture and probably photo-shopped. My internet presence is three years, twenty pounds, and ten shades of grey out of date. I’ve saved a small fortune on clothes because most of my internetting is done in this ratty old bathrobe. Similarly, only the appearance of relationship matters. Just because we’re e-friends doesn’t mean I actually read the posts about your gall bladder operation. (Unless, of course, you are one of my real friends, in which case I am deeply concerned and hope you get well soon.) The important thing is slapping that “like” button, or, in cases where more personal interaction seems called for, tossing a LOL or OMG! into the comments.

There are two downsides to seeking fame on the internet:

Downside one: We’re  going to have to do some math here. If F represent fame, and n represents the number of relationships that must be cultivated to achieve F, and f represents an individual fan, and I represents a person who has influence over some number of fans greater than 1, then the following two equations are both true:  F=fn (DIY method) and  F = In (traditional method).  I have no idea how big n is, it really depends on the amount of fame required. However I’m damn sure it’s bigger in the first equation than it is in the second. I’d have to be insanely special to be worth spending that much time promoting me. 

Downside two: Finding a way to stand out from the millions of bloggers and  posters and tweeters competing for the same fan eyeballs. Some fame seekers take the direct approach. “Follow me on Twitter!” “Like my Facebook page!” While I applaud the honesty, I suspect this does not attract all that many eyeballs. Another option is to sneak a plug into the comments of some more famous person’s post. “Great post! I blogged about the same thing last week. Check it out here.” Personally, I think most eyeballs see right through this kind of blatant hijacking. A more sophisticated technique is to craft a tantalizing comment in the hope that someone will click on your ID to find out who you are. “I think we met that taxi driver’s cousin last week in Tangiers, except we ended up at a camel rodeo.  Posted by PleaseCheckMeOut at 2:56 AM” This method may attract a second glance for those who have sufficient material about their specialness to pull it off. I don’t.

Difficulty aside, have you noticed the fatal flaw in the DIY approach to fame? It’s not all that different from standing on a soapbox, is it? Shouting out that we are special, which again we may very well be, does not make us famous. For that, we still need independent verification from an accredited source. Without it, all we are doing is lying face down at the me-pond.

Which brings me to why I haven’t been spending much time on social media recently. After two years of haphazardly working the DIY approach to fame, I have come to the end of my tolerance for me. I’m just not special enough to be worth the effort of becoming famous. It’s time to turn away from the me-pond and move on to something more interesting.

When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know.

The Good News About Writer's Block

April may be the cruelest month for poets, but for novelists, the toughest month on the calendar is November, when National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as we writers awkwardly but affectionately call it, takes place. During November, writers with nothing better to do sign up to produce a 50,000 word (or more) novel in 30 days (or less). The event is misnamed for two and a half reasons:

1) No one, not Stephen King, not Nora Roberts, not even James Patterson, the world’s most prolific collaborator, can produce a novel in 30 days.

2) For many years now, this has been an international event. However the organizers—quite wisely in my opinion--resist renaming it to InNaNoWriMo.

1/2) 50,000 words do not a novel make. In the fantasy genre, they don’t even make half a novel.   

On Monday evening this week, the library hosted an information evening for local writers eager to take up the November challenge. I was reluctant to join in the creative frenzy, but forced myself to attend the meeting and listened carefully  to the lecture on freefall writing in the hope of shattering my writer’s block, which has reached a severity level that could justifiably be characterized as writer’s constipation since I ‘m not even producing crap, let alone a decent story.

Freefall writing turns out to be stream-of-consciousness writing, an excellent undertaking for those desiring to produce brilliant descriptive prose. However, brilliant descriptive prose does not a story make, unless you happen to be James Joyce. At my end of the spectrum, the end populated by impatient readers who skip over all descriptions, brilliant or otherwise, in pursuit of plot, such passages invariably induce drowsiness. Attempting to write one could put me in very real danger of lapsing into a coma.

I slumped home after the meeting in state of hopeless dejection that lasted until this morning, when, while indulging in that first and most glorious hit of caffeine and perusing other people’s blogs, I discovered how narrowly I had escaped disaster on Monday night.

The Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has recently completed a study decisively linking creativity and mental illness. Now everyone intuitively knows that the more creative a person is, the crazier that person is, and there have been any number of scientific investigations into this linkage. But two factors make the Swedish study stand out from the psychiatric herd:

1) the size of the sample (1.2 million patients)

2) the period covered by the study (forty years)

For the first time, scientists were able to perform reliable statistical analysis on the severity of insanity based on type of creativity, and this analysis has led to one inescapable and chilling conclusion.

To the layman, Vincent van Gogh was the poster-boy for artistic nuttiness, mostly based on that disgusting ear stunt. This type of flamboyance has created the impression that visual artists are the insane cream of the creative crop. But in fact, they are merely the most visible. Statistically, writers are the batshit bad boys of the gifted community. (I can almost hear my friends muttering, “Well hell. I could have told her that.”)  Writing is, quite literally, an insanely risky undertaking. We authors have the highest rates of schizophrenia, depression, anxiety syndrome and substance abuse, not to mention that we are almost twice as likely to commit suicide.

So next month, while those writers I met on Monday night are hunched over their keyboards, risking madness in pursuit of the great Canadian novel, my sanity will be absolutely secure because I have writer’s block.

Whew! That was a close one.

It’s Not Over While the Thin Lady Sings

I came home yesterday afternoon and found a bursting-with-pride email from friend Wen containing a Youtube link to this:

 

 When I clicked on it, I felt pretty damn proud myself.

I got my first guitar at 17. Within a week, I had mastered three major chords and written my first song. I can’t remember it now, but since one of my three chords was A minor, it was probably some sort of angsty adolescent lament about unrequited love, an emotional state that plagued my teenage years due to the presence in my science class of a boy who could have modeled Calvin Klein underwear, if they’d had those kind of ads back then.

My musical career would have ended there if not for the enthusiastic encouragement of my friends, none of whom had learned to play the guitar yet and therefore had no idea of how remedial my melodious efforts were.  Falling victim to their encouragement, I imagined a glorious future as the next Gordon Lightfoot. In pursuit of this goal, I learned three more chords and set out to write the great Canadian folk song.

Twelve years later, I had eight more chords, a vast repertoire of crap, four songs that seemed halfway decent, and enough money saved to make a demo tape. I hired a producer and three session musicians, primarily on the basis of their willingness to work between midnight and four in the morning, the cheapest studio rental time available. I couldn’t afford a vocalist, so sang the songs myself, which would have been a disaster if the studio technician hadn’t been a special effects wizard on the sound board.

My still supportive friends were impressed with the results, even though by then, many of them had actually learned to play the guitar and should have known better. Unfortunately, the dozens of singers and recording companies who received my demo tapes did know better. I tossed my musical ambitions into the growing pile of unfulfilled dreams at the back of my mental closet. The experience wasn’t a total loss though. All those late night studio sessions became the catalyst that ultimately led to my first divorce.

Years later during a weekend visit with Wen, her seventeen-year-old daughter, Tan, arrived home with a guitar, the same three chords I had mastered years before, and a just-written first song. “This is fabulous!” I told Tan when she finished playing it for me, in much the same way Wen had enthused over my first effort except with the added emphasis of a person somewhat qualified to know what I was talking about.

Shortly afterward, Tan moved to Vancouver and became a street busker. I felt guilty about this and wondered if was my appreciation that inspired such a risky career move. Would Wen blame me for her daughter’s tragic spiral into a heartbroken bag lady living under a bridge? But my fears were groundless, because unlike my muse, Tan’s was made of sterner stuff.

Tan paid her musical dues on the mean streets. She learned many more chords than I had ever aspired to and developed a unique musical style along with a supportive circle of musician friends who were much more qualified to assess her talent than my friends had been. When her first CD didn’t rocket her to the top of the charts, she didn’t fold like a dying camel the way I had. Although she had less time to devote to music when she started her own family, she kept her dreams rainbow bright by performing at open mic events.

Tan is just not the kind of woman to make piles of unfulfilled dreams, which is why I felt so proud when I clicked on that link. I’m not responsible for Tan’s talent. She was born talented. I’m not responsible for Tan’s courage and persistence. She had those long before she picked up a guitar. But I am, in my own small way, responsible for at least one of the little sparkly bits on Tan’s first rainbow of hope.

I no longer see my musical career as a failure. It has served its purpose in the grand scheme of creative achievement. It can never be over while the thin lady sings.    

Bring on the Mustard!

When I was a kid, my parents had an LP* of country and western music, and one of the songs on it was titled: Too Old to Cut the Mustard. Mustard being an extremely soft substance, I imagined anyone too old to cut it must be very, very old and frail indeed. However, I have recently learned that:

a) the “mustard” in question was most likely derived from a slang cowboy expression, the proper mustard, meaning the genuine article, which is in itself a bastardization of the military phrase passing muster indicating achievement of a certain standard

and

b) the word “cut” was used in the sense of to cut a fine figure or to cut a dash, another slang term dating back to the Georgian era, meaning: to have an attractive appearance.

A re-examination of the song lyrics indicates they were probably intended as a lament to the waning sexual attractiveness of the singer.

I like my juvenile interpretation better, but cannot deny, as I myself descend into the increasingly challenging depths of senior status, that the original etymology gives the saying too old to cut the mustard a dreadful ring of truth. Since it is impossible to turn back the clock (a lovely analogue idiom, soon to become, in the digital age, as quaintly incomprehensible as mustard cutting), I have resorted to the next best strategy in my fight against decrepitude: preserving a inner fiction of youth by ignoring the outward signs of aging. In other words, I’m putting all my ego eggs into the you’re-as-old-as-you-feel basket.

Although the ratio of grey to brown has long since tipped decisively in favor of grey, my hair still appears fairly dark when it’s wet, so as long as I only look in the mirror to comb my hair immediately after my morning shower, I can ignore the dry reality. Fortunately I’m quite short-sighted, allowing me to avoid noticing my wrinkles by the simple expedient of not putting on my glasses until after I’ve combed my hair. Gravity is taking its inevitable toll on fatty tissues—with which I have become annoyingly well-endowed—but wearing loose, oversized clothing makes me feel deliciously petite. Best of all, a summer of extreme walking has proven that while ballerina fluidity is well beyond my abilities, doddering won’t be a problem for a few years yet. I’ll never fold myself back into the yogic pretzels I achieved in my youth, but a sprightly step goes a long way toward creating an internal illusion of flexibility.

Of course, that’s all it can be, right? Just an illusion, precariously maintained by avoiding confrontation with the truth. Maybe so. But in light of my experience last Wednesday, maybe not.

I was leaving the library at the end of my volunteer shift when Kelly, who co-ordinates children’s programs, flagged me down. She stood just outside the double doors of the auditorium, her gorgeous cascade of dark curls topped by a tilting cluster of gaudy paper flowers. Her cheekbones were flushed with exertion. Behind her, a throng of pint-sized party-ers dashed, screaming and squealing, around the knees of a few supervising adults. Just looking into that whirlwind of activity was exhausting.

“Hey Brenda!” Kelly shouted over the soprano babble of over-stimulated toddlers. “Are you busy?”

Having just spent half an hour complaining to the library technicians manning the information desk about the dearth of activities lined up for my afternoon amusement, I could hardly claim to be otherwise engaged. “No-o-o,” I drew out the syllable with a long, hesitant vowel. “Do you need some help?”

“Fantastic!” Kelly turned and pointed to the far side of the auditorium where a line-up of carnival style games had been assembled. “Could you take over for Colleen? Just for an hour or so? Please?”

Well of course I could, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. One of the primary ploys in maintaining the illusion of youth is never placing oneself in a position of comparison. But taking note of Kelly’s slightly desperate expression, I mastered my reluctance. “Sure,” I said weakly and waded into the swirling melee of energetic urchins.

Colleen made no attempt to hide her relief as she handed me a plastic pail full of Ping-Pong balls. She thanked me profusely, then pointed to an arrangement of red and blue plastic tumblers glued to a cardboard platform. “Each kid,” she instructed me, “picks a color, then gets three chances to toss a ball into a cup of the same color. Prizes are in the bowl.” She indicated a container on the floor at her feet filled with brightly colored somethings. “Make the kids pick up the balls, or your back will be killing you,” she warned as she waved good-bye.

To the left of my pitch, one of the library pages was supervising a game involving the dropping of old-fashioned wooden clothespins into milk bottles. To the right, a game played by tossing rolls of bathroom tissue through a toilet seat mounted vertically on stand was in progress. Ahead of me, stretched a line of waist-high contestants, eager to try their pudgy hands at tossing Ping-Pong balls into colored tumblers.

 “Step right up, ladies and gentleman,” I began my patter, then stopped to duck as a poorly aimed roll bounced off the edge of the toilet seat and came flying directly at my head, eliciting a shower of giggles from my audience. “Three balls! Three chances to win! Who wants to try?”

 “Me! Me! Me!” A frilly pink rug-rat at the front of the line waved her sparkly wand in the air.

I handed her a Ping-Pong ball and asked her to pick red or blue.

“Wed” she said decisively and made her first throw in a clumsy but exuberant overhand that caused the ball to bounce off the floor, sail over the tumblers, ricochet off the back wall, and hit me on the hip before it rolled off toward the center of the room.  Completely forgetting Colleen’s advice, I scrambled to pick up the ball before some unwary child stepped on it and turned an ankle. The girl’s next throw, delivered in an identical manner, took a freakish bounce off the back wall and miraculously landed in a red tumbler. “Yay!” she squealed, waving her wand with eye-endangering enthusiasm as she grabbed a prize from the bowl.

And so it began. I squatted to get on eye-level with diminutive contestants as I explained the rules. I chased errant Ping-Pong balls around the floor, but soon gave up on even attempting to dodge flying rolls of toilet paper, much to the amusement of the children waiting to take their turns. I celebrated with the victors as they chose their prizes and  commiserated with the defeated, encouraging them to come back later and try again. Which many of them did. A trio of tiara’d princess wannabes giggled their way through the line several times to collect a complete set of press on tattoos from the prize bowl. Another of my regulars was a laconic grade-schooler whose destiny in the major leagues was clearly foreshadowed by his uncanny ability to pitch his Ping-Pong balls into the same blue tumbler on every throw. One of the youngest participants, more interested in chasing than throwing, toddled precariously around behind the pitch, pouncing on balls that missed the tumblers and returning them triumphantly to the pail.

Kelly eventually sent over my relief, but by that time I was infected with the excitement of the party and waived him away.

Children normally view the elderly with a kind of detached politeness, as though we are too frail, or possibly too boring, to play with. But during my two hour stint as a Carney, the kids treated me like the best part of the game. They taught me all the names of the trading cards in the prize bowl (now forgotten) and we performed a (not very scientific) experiment to prove the superiority of the underhand toss, during the course of which we identified a miraculously lucky Ping-Pong ball that dropped into a cup with amazing frequency (although not every successful toss resulted in a prize, since the ball appeared to be colorblind). They talked to me the way they talked to each other, proudly showing off art projects, buttons and prizes, inviting me to admire their sparkly dresses or spiffy running shoes. I felt accepted, like an over-sized member of the gang.

Then suddenly, the party was over. Children coagulated around their parents and drifted toward the auditorium doors, chattering and laughing like parakeets as they moved on to the afternoon’s next adventure. I stood alone at my pitch, clutching the pail of Ping-Pong balls, feeling strangely elated. I thought: Okay, so I’m grey.  And flabby. And by now, my wrinkles probably have their own wrinkles. But when it comes to playing with a bunch of kids, by golly, I can still cut the mustard.

As the last of the children left the room, the library staff hauled out big, black garbage bags and began the herculean task of returning the auditorium to a pristine state. I watched them for a few seconds, then followed my playmates out the door. Cleanup is what grownups do.

*

*Those of you born in the final decades of the last century will be unfamiliar with the term LP. It stands for long-playing microgroove recording, an antique form of analog sound reproduction that fell into disuse in the late 1970’s when cassette tapes, which produced better quality sound, became universally available. A cassette tape is a … oh forget it.

Caveat Pedestris

Disclaimer: This post contains extremely strong language. In consideration of my readers with delicate sensibilities, I have asterisked out most of the letters in all cuss words involving sexual acts or organs. Hopefully enough consonants remain to give you at least a flavor of the conversation described below.  

I’m a fairly timid person when it comes to physical danger. You’ll never catch me bouncing  around at the end of a bungee cord, or leaping out of an airplane with a few square yards of thin silk between me and certain death, or scaling a sheer rock face with a couple of crampons and a bag of chalk. I go to great lengths to keep my exercise safe and sedate. Never run when you can walk, that’s my motto. Or at least it was until yesterday. Now I know that even walking can be a life-threatening activity.

Ambling along the main road into town yesterday, I came to a small side street just as a cherry red half ton truck approached the intersection on my left. It was a two way stop. Expecting the truck to at least slow down at the corner, I stepped confidently off the curb, then leapt quickly back up to the safety of the sidewalk when it became apparent the driver had either not seen the stop sign or had decided the instruction on it did not apply to him.

The truck sped out of the side street and crossed three (miraculously empty) traffic lanes on the main road before veering sharply to avoid colliding with a low-slung black sports car traveling in the fourth lane. Both drivers slammed on their brakes and powered down their windows.

“F***k**g freak!” yelled the old man in the truck, his face as red the paint on vehicle.

“What the f**k is wrong with you, man?” shouted the young man in the sports car.

Clearly unsatisfied with this response to his opening remark, and perhaps believing he was protected by the size of his truck and his advanced age, the old man upped the expletive ante. “Get off your g**d**n phone when you’re f***k**g driving, you f***k**g c**t!!”

The young man opened the door of his sports car and unfolded approximately six-and-a-half feet of Rambo-style muscle, formidably displayed in spandex bicycle shorts and a cutoff T-shirt, from the driver’s seat. Still clutching his cell phone, his jaw pushed forward with belligerence, he strode toward the truck bellowing, “You senile old fart! You could have killed me!”

My sentiments exactly, I thought.

Color faded from the old man’s face. Apparently deciding that neither his truck nor the birth date on his driver’s license constituted adequate protection from an angry giant, he stomped down on the gas pedal and peeled off down the main road. Still watching the young man in his side mirror, he ran a red light at the next intersection, causing a massive cacophony of horns and squealing brakes, but (miraculously) no actual collisions.

As he walked back to his sports car, the young man pressed his phone to his ear and began excitedly describing his near-death experience to the person on the other end of the line. Still talking, he folded himself back into his car. Steering with one hand while he continued to talk into his phone, he swerved across the three (miraculously still empty) traffic lanes and entered the side street I was once again attempting to cross.

I leapt back up onto the curb as the sports car whooshed by, missing me with inches to spare, then waited until there were absolutely no cars anywhere in sight before scurrying across the street.

I Want To Be Like The Dalai Lama

I have been avoiding Twitter. As a writer, I feel anything worth saying needs more than 140 characters to be said properly; attested by the length of this sentence which, with the addition of this final clause, is 204 characters long. As a reader, I find other people’s attempts to squeeze meaning into such a severely compressed medium utterly confusing. Then last week, while conversing with two friends who recently took a social networking course, I realized my Twitterphobia has led me to the brink of what could be an irreversible mistake.

When I started programming back in the dark ages, computers were so simplistic that universities did not bother to offer degrees in the subject. Most of my early co-workers picked up rudimentary programming skills while obtaining a degree in physics, or mathematics, or in one case, while taking a first in Classics at Cambridge. They then proceeded to learn whatever else was needed while on the job. Nowadays, it is impossible to get a position as an Application Engineer without a degree in Computing, and that’s a good thing, because the technology is well on its way to joining particle physics and neurosurgery in the category of subjects so complex they require the equivalent of a PhD just to wrap one’s head around the terminology.

As I listened to my friends expound enthusiastically on the topic of Twitter, I realized social networking is rapidly approaching a similar complexity barrier that will make acquisition of its fundamental concepts impossible for the untutored. Concerned that if I waited much longer to acquire the basics, I’d be so far behind the curve I’d need to acquire a bachelor’s degree in social media just to tweet (and such a degree already exists at one online university), I reactivated my four year old Twitter account, with the intention of developing my remedial social networking skills in the same way I learned to program computers: by copying the techniques of the pioneers who had gone before.

The first step in any learning process is to define one’s motivation. When I learned to program, it was because I’d watched the programmers where I worked hanging around yakking in each other’s cubicles while drinking coffee, and I thought, That’s the job for me! - a misunderstanding that was only corrected when it was too late to back out. Similarly, it wasn’t until, halfway through the initial draft, I realized my first novel was complete crap and decided to study writing. So, why would I want to social network?

First, I considered the social aspect. Merriam Webster defines social as: marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with friends or associates. I only have two friends/associates on Twitter right now, and if I want to talk to either of them I can just walk down the street. Even if more of my friends join in future, I know their phone numbers and email addresses, and quite frankly, I find those mediums much more pleasant than learning to decipher cryptic messages full of hash tags and at signs.

That left me with the networking aspect. Merriam Webster defines networking as: the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions; specifically: the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business. Now this made more sense. As a novelist, which is a very solitary occupation, I could easily see the benefit of cultivating productive relationships to exchange information.

I signed up to follow my publisher, an industry publication called Publisher’s Weekly, and few writers and industry pundits I admire. Immediately my Twitter screen filled up with obscurities such as:

RT @IGN Arrested Development: Season 4 began filming today and @BatemanJason provides the first photo from production! http://go.ign.com/N0BJ9D

"Broken Harbor got started because my husband & I had mice." #TanaFrench talks inspiration & thriller #writing: http://bit.ly/NohSMp.

.@bestbuy do u sell falcons or any other birds of prey?

I'm getting a pack of #MOO cards because I've got Klout - thanks to @overheardatmoo! You can too, just click here: [redacted in the interests of preserving your eyeballs]

WAKE is only $4.50 for 3 hours on Amazon! Hurry! RT like the wind!! http://www.amazon.com/

And the only tweet I initially understood:

I feel about a million times better than I did yesterday. Word to the wise: Don't accidentally eat bad clams the night before starting a tour

Believing I’d misunderstood the concept of “productive relationships”, I began clicking on all the blue stuff to find out what was going on. It soon became apparent that my definition of “productive” was correct, but my definition of “relationships” was too broad. All but one of the links I followed quickly devolved into an attempt to sell me something. While the relationships were clearly productive for the tweeter, productivity for the tweetee seemed conspicuously absent.  The one exception was the advice on clam consumption, which I fully intend to follow should I ever go on tour.

After scrolling through fifteen screens filled with similarly thinly disguised marketing ploys interspersed with the occasional informational tweet like the one about the intestinal side effects of bad shellfish, it became apparent that unless I was willing to invest endless hours in building a following and devising ancillary content to trick my followers into buying my books, social networking, at least on Twitter, was not worth the learning curve for me. Then I thought about His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a dude so cool and spiritually enlightened he would never dabble in something as commercial as online marketing.

HHDL, as he affectionately refers to himself in the third person, is on Twitter. He tweets once every two or three days, for a lifetime total of 812 vaguely inspiring messages about things like the importance of affection, the futility of violence and the posting of his latest webcast. He has 4,849,913 followers to date (which seems a bit paltry, given the number of practicing Buddhists in Thailand alone) and follows no one himself, making his Twitter presence more like a platform building exercise than any serious attempt to develop relationships.

Compare HHDL’s stats to those of the highly commercialized Yoko Ono at the opposite end of the Twitter spectrum. She tweets three to fifteen times a day, giving her a much higher tweet count than HHDL, although to be fair, most of her tweets are retweets or picture postings and have a mechanical quality that suggests some form of automation, which doesn’t indicate any actual intent to develop relationships either. At the time of this writing, Yoko has 2,772,660 followers and follows 871,440(!) people herself—including Bob Smith, “just a random guy from a random town”, who joined Twitter 18 hours before I began researching Yoko to promote an app called Rage Of Bahamut.

Here are my conclusions about social networking so far:

1.    The name is misleading.

2.    It is a lousy informational tool for me because I haven’t the patience scroll through pages of cryptic marketing tweets for the occasional gem of advice.

3.    It is a lousy marketing tool for me because I haven’t the patience to follow thousands of people in the hopes they will follow me back, then develop ancillary material to convince them to buy one of my books. 

To my mind the only tweeter worth emulating is the Dalai Lama. One obscure tweet every two or three days? No problem. I can handle that. Now all I need is a topic to pontificate on.

What was that you said? Motivation? Oh yeah. That too.

July is Blog Touring Month

The Elusive Mr. McCoy released on July 3^rd, and as a result, I'm blog touring this month.

While not quite as glamorous as a real book tour—no first class air travel, no five-star hotels, no minibars stocked with twenty-five-year-old scotch, no gauntlets of adoring fans stretching pleading hands across the linked arms of buff police officers lining the sidewalk between my limo and the entrance to…

Oh sorry! Got a tad distracted there. Where was I? Okay, I remember. Take two:

While not quite as glamorous as a real book tour, blog touring has two advantages:  

1)   I will have opportunities to use all kinds of material I could not put into the book.

2)   I will meet people from all over the world and none of us have to get out of our jammies.

It is, however, much more demanding than my normal lackadaisical, whenever-I-feel-like-it approach to blogging, so this is the last post you’ll see here until August, by which time I should be recovered. If you really have a need-to-read, the tour schedule is posted on my webpage, and links will go up on my Facebook page as the tour blogs come out.

Until August.     

   

And The Winners Are…

Today was a special day for two reasons:

1.    Summer solstice

2.    Giveaway day for advance copies of The Elusive Mr. McCoy.

The drawing of the winners was done at lunchtime by Wen, my long-suffering life-long friend. We normally go to the Asian buffet, but due to record-breaking heat and humidity, we opted for Ricky’s Diner, a venue famous for its Antarctic air conditioning—which happened to be broken today.

Long ago, Wen had heatstroke and the experience left an indelible impression on her psyche. Because of this, I would not have objected had she balked at the restaurant door and suggested we have our drawing lunch on another, hopefully cooler day. But knowing you were anxiously awaiting the results of the drawing, Wen, with selfless stoicism, followed the hostess to a booth and ordered a glass of water with extra ice cubes which she fished from the glass and ran across the back of her neck as we read the menu.

In order to ensure absolute impartiality in selecting the winners, I used numbers instead of names on the little slips of paper I prepared for Wen to draw.  I scrunched the little slips of paper into little balls of paper, and placed the little balls of paper into a black velvet bag that once held a bottle of perfume  purchased at the duty free shop in Stockholm airport.

After Wen ordered the Philly steak and I ordered the Cajun cream shrimp, I pulled the black velvet bag from my purse and handed it to her. With solemnity appropriate to the momentous nature of the occasion, Wen grinned at me as she reached into the bag. One by one, she extracted five paper balls. She unfolded the last one, said, “Seven,” and looked at me inquiringly.

This was the exact moment when I realized Wen's selection was even more impartial than I'd originally intended. “I don’t know who that is,” I confessed. and went on to explain that I had made up the little paper balls based on the number of people who had entered, but hadn't actually assigned the numbers to any names yet. 

Wen said nothing, just gave me the you-idiot look she patented at age 16 when she tried to teach me how to drive and I crashed her mother’s car into a telephone pole.

After Wen drove me home, I created a spreadsheet of all the entrants, reverse sorted it by date and time of entry, and sequentially assigned numbers to the resulting list. At which point I discovered that one of the winners lives close enough for hand delivery. This savings on postage allowed me to pull an additional number from the black velvet bag, which is why I am delighted to announce the names of the SIX people who will soon be receiving advance copies of The Elusive Mr. McCoy:

Polly

Steve

Vanessa

Veronika

Charlene

Helen

Congratulations to the winners. I’ll be sending you all an email as soon as I finish this post.

And many thanks to everyone for playing along.

Another First on the Writer’s Road

No one likes change. It’s unnerving, embarrassing, sometimes downright painful. But the truth is, if we want to achieve our dreams, every once in a while we must at least dip our toes into the waters of the unknown. Just such an opportunity has presented itself, and I have decided to seize it, ever so gingerly, with the tips of the fingernails on my right thumb and forefinger.

As part of my publishing contract, I am entitled to receive a few free copies of my books. The freebies for my second book arrived yesterday in a box that was only slightly ripped (which probably happened in customs) and minimally water damaged (which probably happened during the torrential rains we had earlier this week). Now I wrote this book, so I already know how it ends and don’t need to read it. Even if I did need to read it, one copy would be more than sufficient for this purpose. Which raises the question of what to do with the rest of them.

Some will go to my beta readers and critique buddies with the usual eternal-gratitude scribblings defacing the title page. Others are committed to a silent auction being held in support of the Gather the Women convention taking place at a nearby university this summer. A few of them are destined for local reviewers.

But this still leaves me with several copies of a book I’m not going to read. I considered binding them with duct tape to make door stops for some of the folks on this year’s Christmas list. I thought about using one as a paperweight, and perhaps putting a couple more in the outhouse as emergency supplies. However, I’m fairly certain the publisher will strongly object to these usages and may never send me another freebie again.  

So instead, I’ve decided to plunk my miniscule marketing budget into snail-mail, and am delighted to announce my first ever contest* in which I will be giving away copies of… (drum roll  please)...

to five lucky people whose names will be randomly drawn on June 20^th by the hand of my oldest friend and treasured beta-reader, Wen, who will be completely impartial because she got her free copy today. Wen and I have lunch together every Wednesday and the drawing will give us something to do while gnawing on sweet-and-sour spare ribs at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

The winners will be announced on this blog, and perhaps on Facebook, since I’m always scrounging around for content that is more interesting than, “6PM and still sober. Yay me!”  I will contact the winners for snail mail addresses. If they reply promptly, and the postal gods smile upon them, they may receive their loot before July 3^rd, which is when the book appears on bookstore shelves.

If you’d like to enter the contest:

a)   Leave your email address in the comments

OR

b)   Send an email to author@brendalbaker.com

OR

c)    Send a message, or post a comment on my Facebook page.

For a guaranteed win:

a)   deposit a whack of cash in a numbered Swiss bank account and send me the password

OR

b)   get George Clooney to do any of the above.  

*The Inevitable Disclaimers

I wasn’t kidding when I said the marketing budget is miniscule, which is why I can only ship to Canada or the USA and why only five books are on offer.

I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, that I will use any contact information provided for the sole purpose of contacting the winners. Your email and snail-mail addresses are safe with me. (Unless, of course, you are George Clooney, in which case I will be making a personal delivery.) However, I feel compelled to point out that this is a public blog and who knows what kind of depraved spammers are out there trolling for the email addresses of unwary commenters.

Beta-readers and critiquers are not eligible since they don’t need two copies of the book. Actually, they don’t even need one. They know how it ends as well.

What Would Netiquette Nelly Say?

A few mornings ago, I found an e. e. cummings style message on my professional Facebook page. Below is the complete and unabridged text of this message. Only the email and IM addresses have been redacted.

“It's has been a great deal for me to see such a cutie like you here on this site i liked your profile very much..you sounded sweet and it was nice reading it.when i joined this place i never expected to meet a woman of your type, because you so adorable and cute.i really would love to meet u in person. i really don't mean to force u into things dear but i will be happy if i meet such a wonderful woman like you are . i don't like to play head games....i'm a kind hearted man who wants to please everyone ..make you laugh till it hurts..lol.i would want us to get going so if u are such a person then lets chat cutei.i'm one of the nice man and want to meet a lady like you would like and want to meet... and hope is the same with you...well... who knows if it's the will of God that we could succed or something better can come out of this letter that i am sending you then Baby..i will be the happiest man in this world....if not then the saddest man . i hope u will take your time and think about it and let as get to know each other some more. i would love YOU to tell me more about you.. and would like us to trade yahoo id's so we can chat via messenger ID or better still you also can ask and i surely will let you have mine. Till then take care and bye [redacted]   or [redacted]    im [redacted] i will be removing my profile very soon be cos i don't get anyone since i have been here.....thanks and hope to hear from u soon..”

The man who sent this message, let’s call him Freddie to protect the potentially innocent, has placed me in an awkward social networking position.

There is no rule that says con artists must be Rhodes scholars, so despite the lack of Nigerian dictators or Spanish prisoners, I thought it reasonable to assume Freddie’s intentions were fraudulent. To me it seemed obvious that the clumsy, artless prose and the sprinkling of unwelcome (and occasionally misspelled) endearments from a complete stranger were intended to winnow out all but the truly stupid and/or desperate respondent. I particularly enjoyed Freddie’s assertion he did not like head games and his naïvely mistaken conviction that I’m a wonderful woman.  I also thought his disappointment at not getting anyone nice with his profile added an amusing touch of bathos to his plea.

Being extremely hard-hearted and neither desperate nor stupid, I decided to delete the message. But before doing so, I checked out the disappointing Facebook profile, which Freddie foolishly left set to public, hoping for more grammar giggles at his expense. Instead I found confusion, because Freddie only has one friend, and her name is the same as mine.

So you see my netiquette dilemma here.

Did Freddie really intend to message his Facebook friend Brenda and somehow messaged me instead? I checked out her profile. Admittedly she and I are both overweight and we both wear glasses, but other than those two points of similarity, I didn’t see much resemblance between us. Of course Freddie could be extremely near-sighted, or even blind and working with text-to-speech software. To test this theory, I logged into Facebook with a fake email address created specifically for the purpose and performed a search for Brenda Baker. The results were inconclusive. My professional page came up sixth on the list of possible Brenda Bakers, but my picture was the first one showing a chubby female wearing glasses. As for Freddie’s friend Brenda, after scanning about thirty screens of Brenda Bakers, I gave up looking for her.

Another puzzle was the striking difference between the grammar in Freddie’s message and the grammar in his profile on Facebook.

“I am distinguished looking, blue eyes, black hair, 5'10" or 178cms and my weight is 185lbs or 84kg.. I am intelligent, passionate, and optimistic about life in general. I have a good education and a good job. I have a wonderful passion for writing. I'm kinda good in poetry, and am very ambitious. My friends will tell you that I am honest, have a sense of humor and care deeply for family. I believe in fate, real love and God Almighty because I was born and raised to love God and share this love with others in divers ways, in any case I respect other people's world view. I am not into smoking or drugs, but will drink a little on rare occasions. In my leisure time I enjoy movies, music, festivals, concerts, the beach, visiting parks, working out, barbecues, boating, and any experience that creates great memories.”

Did he have a stroke and lose the ability to punctuate between setting up his profile and writing the message? If he really understood proper punctuation, why would he send such a sloppy message—especially from one writer to another? Of course, if he thought I was his friend Brenda, he wouldn’t know he was writing to a writer, but even so, the motive for this grammatical disparity remained unfathomable. I could give no credit to his assertion that he has a good job, since he listed his profession as self-employed; his profile picture showed his hair to be grey, assuming it really was his picture; and finally, the only item Freddie had listed under “Interests” was “women”.

So what should I do?

Should I write to Freddie and tell him he contacted the wrong Brenda? I don’t want to do this because, while it’s possible Freddie is a simple-minded social media noob who has mistaken Facebook for PlentyOfFish, it seems much more likely he really is a con artist trolling for marks, in which case he couldn’t possibly have contacted the wrong Brenda because there is no right Brenda. Any Brenda will do and I have no intention of encouraging Freddie to believe I’m the any Brenda of his dreams.

Should I write to the other Brenda and tell her my theory of mistaken identity? The con artist caveat would still be in effect, with the added difficulty that she is unlikely to be pleased with Freddie when she learns he can’t tell the difference between her and someone at least twenty years older with one tenth the amount of hair.

Should I just ignore the message? But what if Freddie and Brenda really are destined for one another? I can’t be responsible for destroying their future happiness. I can barely take responsibility for destroying my own.

What the internet really needs is an e-version of Emily Post , an e-xpert to guide us through these awkward social media situations. Netiquette Nelly, where are you? I need you desperately.