I'm not anywhere near focused enough today to edit. It's a rebound issue from being trapped in the house for a week--you want popcorn kittens, I got 'em big time. I went out to lunch today! Because I could! And I went for a walk! Because I could! (And saw two otters--wow, I wasn't expecting to be able to do that.) I'm going to go buy a pizza for dinner! Because I can! Maybe I'll invent an errand and run it later! Because I can!

Yeah, it's B project time, and Lindsay Buroker's many, many posts on using social media convinced me--well, they didn't convince me that I wasn't using social media to its full potential, because I already knew that, but they did convince me that I could better utilize social media without having it be this huge, time-consuming pain in the butt that distracts me from actually writing books.

One thing she recommended with Twitter was to use TweetDeck, because that way you can follow a gazillion people and still have a vague handle on the resulting flood of tweets. So I downloaded it, and promptly discovered that someone had put some of my blog posts in a newsletter--the person had very considerately notified me of this fact via Twitter, and Twitter never told me because I wasn't following them already! Oy, vey. I'm sure following them now!

What's also funny is that one reason Buroker thinks it's worthwhile to become something of a Twitter ho is that if someone with a lot more followers than you likes one of your tweets, they'll retweet it to all their followers. And I decided to follow Buroker, and she liked one of my tweets, and...let's just say she puts her money where her mouth is, and I'm getting more followers and retweets as a result. So that was nice--I don't think it's necessarily going to get me a ton of new fans of Trang or anything, but I do think it is important to get the word out about how self-publishing works and what to avoid.

I also set up a Facebook fan page (for myself. That's not egocentric or anything) and linked it to Twitter, so when I tweet my blog posts, the links should also show up there, too. (ETA: Argh. I thought it went from Twitter to the Facebook page, but it actually goes the other way. OK, I can make that work, too.) It's just another way that people can follow what's going on here (with, you know, the all-important minimal effort on my part).

OK--gotta go get some pizza! Because I can! (And I've got the kid tomorrow--this may shock you, but we're probably going to go out--so don't expect meaningful output until Wednesday....)