Getting into Twitter

I’m typing this at seven in the morning on a campsite in Suffolk. I’ve already been for a walk and seen a hare, a shrew and three muntjac deer!  Yesterday we went for a cycle to nearby Southwold on the coast, a beautiful town with a lovely pier and the most unusual arcade I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never been, go to the ‘Under the Pier Show’ at Southwold.

Fail confession time: It might be Saturday morning, but I’m not going to be able to upload this until Tuesday. I had hoped to be uploading this post via my mobile, but that is a little beyond me at the moment. I’ll practise when I’m at home and I have some leisure, not when I’ve run out of time and am up against my self-imposed writing deadline. That’s one of the problems I have with the whole online world in a nutshell: in order to be efficient you have to put in the time, as with any other new skill, and I find nothing more frustrating than putting in time attempting something new and not quite managing it. It feels as if I’ve just dribbled away more precious minutes on the internet, minutes when I could have been writing or feeding the cat or washing-up or something, anything else, and it drives me MAD.

But enough moaning. It’s been a good week. During the half-hour drive into the mountains every day this week (still weeding Himalayan balsam – picture coming soon!) I’ve been listening on Twitter. And I’ve become far more relaxed about it. It seems to me like a vast room full of people talking, calling across each other to throw a comment into a conversation heard at the next table, a few tables away, or on the other side of the room. Some Twitter users, or Tweeps (get me!) are also putting up noticeboards while they converse, like the ‘read all about it’ boards outside newsagents. Some do nothing else; their feeds are like great scrolling billboards around the walls of the room, on the supporting pillars, across the great arch of the ceiling. It’s a place where someone like me can wander, virtual mug of tea in hand, reading the scrolling news and the endless quotes, eavesdropping on the ordinary conversations, stopping to listen to the more local news and to read the littler noticeboards. I’m getting the hand of how hashtags work. (Muntjac brings up three random entries.)

I’ve tweeted a couple of times, just ‘Hello! I’m here!’ and that sort of thing. It does feel a bit odd, throwing utterances out into the world with no expectation of their being noticed as yet, let a lone getting a response. But is that so very different from how we all start off as writers anyway, casting our thoughts, the products of our imagination, onto the page, with the hope of them being noticed a secondary and more distant goal?

I haven’t said hello to anyone yet – that’s for next week. But already the Twittersphere is beguiling me, and seems a far friendlier place than I had imagined. My statement in the About This Blog page, where I said I didn’t particularly want to be best friends with every reader of my books, now looks like old-fashioned  humbug. I do want to be friends with them all! I can see how time could dribble away there, but so far restricting myself to Twitter in the car has worked.

On the writing side I've been enjoying Notecard Plotting this week, an exercise in Holly Lisle’s Mugging the Muse. Plot is something I struggle with: the two novels I’ve started have foundered because of characters wandering around not really getting anywhere. This exercise has thrown up some themes that were lurking at the bottom of my mind and has been a real help with maintaining my interest and momentum. You can read more about Holly Lisle’s books here.

I’m off to the Gig In The Park in Halesworth now. The big draw today is the Fun Lovin’ Criminals, but there are loads of local musicians playing as well. And the sun is shining AGAIN! In August! Who’d have guessed it?