The Twittering Author

I talk a lot of smack in person. I can launch serious about politics or social issues but my preferred verbal mode is to shit around and spar and goof and on just about anything that is not serious but more like verbal gymnastics. Highly enjoyable but not much insight especially in 140 character bursts. But I do post. I'm a writer and that's the way I express myself through sentences and paragraphs with a beginning middle and end. It's just the way I'm comfortable in twitter land.

Not so with other authors. They talk directly into the twitter feed. They are comfortable shooting out 140 character missives to other people and responding. I really don't think I have anything valuable to say in 140 character shots except to talk smack and who wants to hear that? But others do. Others can say what they want in a quick blip and then they are done. I guess it comes down to what kind of writer you are and how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain.

In Anne Trubeck's piece in the Sunday Times she cites authors as being in two groups, the ones that cannot let the veil down and the others who want the feedback twitter provides Also there are sales. Sales Sales Sales. Publishers don't know if twitter gets people to read books or not. The logic would go something like, well he seems like a witty tweety fellow, I wonder what his book is like. Ah, but you have to stop twittering to go get that book and for many of us twitters we are already on to the next tweet.

Social media does break down the isolation of the author and some don't care for it. The big guns tend not to twitter or if they do it is some sort of mass PR twitters. I don't know. You have to find your comfort level and do what you do. Me. I like letting people know my thoughts and maybe they get a kick out of it and maybe not. Then I go talk smack. Or write another novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic (surviving as a writer)

Getting Stupid

Whenever I finish a book I turn into a man of physical tasks and quit reading and writing and doing anything that smacks of literary life. I am a man cleaning his garage or his closet or fixing the smoke detectors or cutting the grass or raking leaves or shuttling kids or doing the million and one things that never get done. And then I start watching all the crappy television in the world. The Gold Rush. Every MSNBC show I can find, overdosing on hours of political melodrama. Then I swing to every old movie I can find and some not so old movies...How many times can a man watch Uncle Buck or Karate Kid? Too many times. Die Hard II comes in a close second.

And then I sit around and wait. Wait for the world to do something. It is this I find most boring. And yet I don't pick up a book but read the NY TIMES cover to cover and try and find authors writing about authors and take samples of Bukowski but don't finish them. I am at sea as all writers are between books. And so I float along and decide for the hundredth time to move and change my life. Or not to move and stay the same and isn't day light savings time strange the way it gets dark so early?

And then I pick up an old book. Something I would never read. I have The Marriage Plot on the Kindle but I want some relief from the mainstream fiction for a little bit and so I plunge into A.S. Byatts Passion of the Mind. That's when it happens. I realize I have become stupid again. The writing is dense and involved and I have to try and enter a world where Browning and Kipling and Russians and all those writers I should ahve read but didnt reside. I pu the book down and figure it is no longer relevant anyway. Who cares about essays on Dostoevsky or an essay on Proust or whatever A.S. Byatt decides is relevant to the world.

So I leave it and go do more physical tasks and go look for more smoke detectors without batteries or stuff more laundry into the washer or go buy salt for the softener or get the oil changed and get a brake job or  I can go read A.S. Byatt. I throw the book in my backpack...

Just in case I get tired of being stupid.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/