My editing schedule is clear enough; I’m just not sticking to it. Instead of doing a read-aloud pass of Suffocation, Monday through Thursday, I’ve been doing copyedits on the series bible, a task that occurs on Fridays. Why edit it at all? The series bible will be free to all visitors of the Femitokon patreon, so edits are a requirement. If there’s misspelled words, and bad grammar there, why would readers subscribe to reading the series?
Twitter weighs me down. Again.
When I first started on twitter I had hundreds of followers–most of them were yaoi readers, people that read my comics, or industry types I considered friends. I shut that Twitter down over three years ago and began again with a new one, last year. BL readers don’t care about what I’m writing now because there’s nothing to interest them. I tell myself this, though it’s cheating those readers by assuming they have no interests outside of yaoi/BL. Shame on me.
The twitter I have now is about link-sharing writerly-things. My real job requires an on-call meeting every morning. The producer doesn’t like trust the showrunner, and we all (the entire writing team and script team) must suffer for it. I spend these calls reading various writing articles on whatever interests me. If I like it, I share it on Twitter. People that find my shares interesting either RT, or add me to a list, or follow me. It’s cool. It’s easier than doing “my writing process 101” blog posts all the time. I follow some great online magazines on Twitter, other writers whose work interests me, and some close friends.
I know that Twitter is supposed to be about gaining a following but the thing is, I did the online brand thing when I was writing comics. Small publishers expected it (and needed it), and I hated it. I don’t like the person I am when I’m a Twitter handle or a blog-site. I think it stinks that agents and publishers look to sort of online presence as a condition to representation or publishing. I get it, though. Readers today are different. The author is as important as the what they’re writing.
I’d love to live in a world where my work speaks for itself, where my fiction is my brand–but if I’ve nothing out there, so who am I do desire anything?