Today I have read approximately 5,678,987 tweets and pretty much everything in the blogoverse. I have stared at blank white screens in Scrivener for hours. I have thought about doing a thousand really important things, but I haven’t done any of them.

I’m not a lazy person. I approach pretty much everything from art to writing to gaming with that Type-A must-succeed-at-all-c0sts mentality. I’ll get up at the crack of dawn and work all day…unless I am paralysed with doubt and fear.

That is my big problem: that internal voice which says “you can’t,” and “you’ll fail.” I think that is why I’ve gone above and beyond in every job that I have ever had; I throw everything at a project in order to still that sneaky little voice that tells me that I’m not good enough. Never have been, never will be. Best to not even try.

I hate that voice, but sometimes it is all that I can hear.

…because sometimes we all need someone who can make us smile.

After starting my first writing project during NaNoWriMo, I started following a lot of writing-related people via Twitter and my feed reader. Some people get it very right, and it’s a joy to have a tiny vicarious window into their world. If they’re someone who writes books that I love, so much the better. But some people get it very, very wrong.

My last job was for a digital marketing agency; I headed the web team and SEO teams, and I learned a lot about building social media platforms for businesses. Social media is one of those things that everyone thinks they can do. Every man and his dog does Facebook and Twitter, amiright? How hard can it be? In truth it is very, very easy to get social media wrong and do your brand more harm than good. In fact, if you are a single person (rather than a corporation) and you think of yourself in terms of a brand, you’re probably already doing it wrong – just a guess.

There was a recent blog post that I read (as someone had linked it from Twitter, showing the importance of social media and sharing) entitled How to Network Without Networking by Nathan Bransford. One of his points was a very good one: Do Not Think of Your Network as a Network

“I don’t have a network, I have friends. And I’m really serious about this.

The thing about the word “networking” is that it has a mercenary edge to it, like we’re just going to get to know each other because of what we can get out of each other. And not only is that completely icky, it doesn’t work.

Because who wants to get to know someone else just because of what they can get out of them? How shallow is that relationship, and how is either party really motivated to help each other out when the time comes?

Find the people who you like and whose work you genuinely admire, and invest in those people. Become friends with those people. Don’t force it, don’t do it because they’re successful, do it because you like them and actually want to help them out.

Obviously when your network expands you can’t invest equally in everyone who is investing in you, but give of yourself what you can and treat people with respect and pretty soon you’ll be surrounded by amazing people that you’ll feel incredibly lucky to know.”

What he said. Treat people like people, make friends, have interesting conversations with those people. Do not push out status updates as though you were some corporate flack who had been handed the Social Media hat.

I unfollowed a writer yesterday because she had tweeted links to a post ironically entitled something like How To Build a Social Media Platform Without Pissing People Off. She posted these links every two hours or so, and I unfollowed her after six of them. How rude is that? Seriously, if you treat your posts like a sale at WalMart, why should I be forced to listen to your advertising? Be a person, post something interesting or funny or silly. Don’t be a hack.

Here are some things that I think work, and don’t work:

1. Post links to a recent post or article perhaps twice, well spaced out (for different timezone peeps). A friend said that three times is acceptable, and I would agree but say that three times during one day would make me notice it and start to get a bit irritated. Use your judgement. Any more than three times during a day is too much.

2. The same applies to Facebook status updates – don’t post the same thing over and over again. With Facebook’s recent changes it is hit or miss that people will actually see page statuses in their feeds, but still. (Facebook, yor doin it rong!).

3. Be a real boy. (Or girl, but that stretches the Pinocchio metaphor a bit.) People follow you because they want to know about the real you – be funny if you can, introspective, post links to things that you like and tell us about the stupid thing you just did. Be real – we want to know the person behind the books or the art, we want to know you. I think that Nathan Fillion is a master at this – although a very busy actor, he seems like one of the coolest, most down to earth and self-deprecating guys in the world. Captain Tightpants totally rules.

4. If you have a blog (and you should) make sure that your feed shows entire posts rather than excerpts. I generally unsubscribe to people who force me to leave the reader and go to their blog to read a post – that’s why I use a reader, folks. I read a lot of blogs and want them all in one place.

5. Have links/icons to your RSS feed, Twitter, Facebook page, etc., in a prominent place on your blog – don’t make people search for them. (I am guilty of that right now, since I can’t ftp onto the server right now.)

6. Don’t use Livejournal, ever. Those days are long over. Use a more modern, open system such as WordPress or even Blogger (although I am not a fan of Blogger – go WordPress if you’re smart). Even Tumblr is ok for short posts and pics.

Mainly what is comes down to is just having respect for your followers and readers. Talk to them, don’t broadcast or advertise. Remember that you are a person and not a brand.

Examples of people who do it right:

• Neil Gaiman
• Steven Lewis
• Felicia Day
• Nathan Fillion
• Laurell K. Hamilton
• Will Wheaton
• Gazimoff
• Chuck Wendig

I read a post tonight about Alice in Wonderland by C. M. Rubin, which someone had retweeted. It made an interesting point regarding the reader’s imagination and illustrated books.

“The other thing that we have actually focused a lot on in the exhibition is that when the original manuscript was created, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) included pictures. The pictures were an integral part of the story. There aren’t actually a lot of descriptions of the book’s characters including Alice. Instead, on the first page of the original manuscript, there is a picture of Alice. It doesn’t tell us that Alice wears this kind of a dress or has this kind of hair. It leaves it very open for generation after generation to reinvent Alice. In our exhibition there are Alices from the 1930’s, Alices from the 1960’s, and even more contemporary Alices. Each generation has been able to reinvent Alice in the style of that generation. This says something about the richness of the book too. Each generation finds it appealing and wants to contribute something new.”

This is an interesting point for me personally, since the project that I am currently working on is a re-working of a turn-of-the-century children’s story. The original (or at least the version that I have) was illustrated by Herbert Paus in a watercolour Art Deco-ish style – lovely, but a bit dated for today, and the illustrations were essential for the story.  I know that there may not be a market for illustrated books today (at least you know in advance that you are greatly stacking the deck against yourself if you are trying to market one), but it really needs the art to accompany the story. What I would really love to do is slightly animated panels done with HTML5, where trees and grass and clouds move. Perhaps one day I’ll do it – I would love to see see it on an iPad. :)

But anyway – back to the article. Since I’ve taken a children’s book and updated it to an alternative-reality Victorian London, with other fairy tales woven into the original story and all of the scary or disturbing bits emphasised more than you could have done for Victorian-era children, I’m very much in favour of updating old tales while remaining true to the essence of the story. That was the most difficult thing during the bulk of what I wrote, actually – keeping true to the core story while twisting it. I’d fallen in love with it as a child, and I didn’t want to show it disrespect in my rendition of the tale. Time will tell if I succeeded, I suppose.

Is the little girl with the blonde bob in 1913 still the same girl that lives in my story, even though she is now several years older, of mixed race, and quite capable of defending herself against anything from rough men on London streets to giant black wolves and the Queen of the Unseelie Court? I very much hope so.

Since we don’t have a lot of disposable cash this Christmas, I’ve been trying to think of more “creative” ways to approach gift giving. One of the things that I’ve been playing with are handmade journals for writing, art, scrapbooking, etc.

Originally I’d thought of doing these to sell, but after doing the first one it was completely obvious that the time and expense involved in creating them would mean that it would be impossible to price them anywhere near what someone might actually pay – which I would imagine is a problem with most handmade crafts. So, the completed ones became gifts. The images below are a steampunk-themed journal, and I have one for my daughter which is mermaid-themed. My neice and nephew on this side of the pond are going to get Harry Potter-esque spellbooks.

I purchased art sketchbooks with good heavy paper, took them apart, stained all the pages wither either coffee or tea (tea is lighter and smells nicer, coffee is darker and has an odd smell). After they were completely dry and flattened out again, I printed each page with either borders or artwork, and gilded the edges with gold paint. Marbled paper is glued to the inside cover, and then it is all laced up with black cord or velvet ribbon (the velvet doesn’t work as well, as opening and closing the books becomes a bit fiddly). Glue the main artwork on the covers, decorate as needed. I’d taken apart a lot of old costume jewellery for the velvet bookmarks and cover decorations.

The mermaid book that I made for my daughter has a painted clay seaweed frame on the cover, but that is relatively fragile and I also discovered that I have no talent at all for sculpture. *sad face*

And there you have it! I’ll have to post pictures of the spellbooks after I get them done, as those should be a lot of fun.

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