No roast this Sunday

I signed up for Twitter on Friday night before going to bed. I stuck in my e mail, chose a password, added a photo, picked ten people to follow, thought: is this it then? and went to bed.

Yesterday my membership for scribblerati came through and I got to read Lia Keyes article on why every writer should tweet. It seems to be about asking advice, promoting yourself and making connections. In the past the blog did that. I can't quite remember how, but I vaguely remember trawling through writer blogs until I found one I liked, leaving comments, going through her blogroll to find more blogs I liked and gradually I built up a readership. Which all but vanished in 2008, when the enormous time, milk and brain eater came along. It's been a bit sad realising that I had to start from scratch again, and I'm not very good at putting myself out there, but well people are dropping by, and things have changed so much in two years.

For a start there's Facebook. I get a fair amount of traffic through networked blogs. Plus, networked blogs made it easy to go through my friends blog roll and find a couple of new blogs I like. I've not been very big on the leaving comments front this time, but we'll see.

And then everyone seemed to be talking about Twitter. I wasn't at all sure about it and although Lia Keyes article made sense in terms of the why, it wasn't that easy in terms of the how. I read her article at least three times thinking:

• What are hashtags?
• What's RT?
• So how do you get people to follow you?

Thankfully, Lia's article had a bunch of links, which was a bit like following breadcrumbs in the deep, dark forest, but eventually I landed on : Help! I need a publisher, which is written by Nicola Morgan, try the link and then you can find out about her all by yourself. Alternatively, you could follow her on Twitter and see what happens. What happened to me, was that I wrote an effusive comment on Part I saying thank you for writing the idiot's guide to Twitter and by the time I was on Part II, I was being given fags, vodka and all sorts! OK, it was all virtual and that was about the moment when the Frog arched an eyebrow and said the words: waste of time, but the point is that after a little bit of research, it wasn't that hard to dip my toe in. I shall be tentatively working my way through the rest of Part II to VI, but for now, I'm going to go and write a little bit. See the thing is I have a critique group meeting on Wednesday and as the Frog has uttered those words, I have to prove to him I'm not wasting time. I've decided that he will be my Beta reader. He read a chapter in the summer and as he's French I figure he's got the reading ability of an 9-10 year old, plus he made some very pertinent points.