Free-For-All Fridays

It’s Not Rocket Science—Just Read the Directions!

I had this experience in elementary school, and I bet some of you did, too (then, or at some other point in your life). My teacher passed out a quiz/assignment. The first thing it said was, “Read everything before doing anything.” It then proceeded to list a number of random tasks, from writing your favorite color in the right margin to hopping around the room on one foot.

The very last item said, “Write your name at the top of the paper and do none of the items listed here.”

A good chunk of the class got through some of the sillier tasks before catching on.

Okay, that was third grade or something. Kids are still learning that whole follow-directions concept, right? By the time we’re adults, it’s a no-brainer, right?

Not right.

I see it with my teenage students. Student: “What am I supposed to do for #13?” Me: “What do the directions say?” Student: “Umm …” Me: “Maybe you should read them, huh?”

But teenagers aren’t adults yet, right? By the time we’re old enough to legally drink, smoke, and otherwise shorten our lifespan, we know better, right?

Still not right.

If you follow agent @SaraMegibow on Twitter, you’ve probably seen her weekly #10queriesin10tweets. She goes through ten random queries in her inbox and tweets whether she’s passing on it or requesting, and a quick reason why.

Guess what one of the most common reasons for a pass is? Wrong genre. You can find Ms. Megibow’s fair-game genres easily, on AgentQuery, QueryTracker, the agency’s website, or her page on Publishers Marketplace.

Yet people still query her with thrillers and non-fiction and who-knows-what-else.

Want to look smart? Be one of the few who doesn’t go hopping around the room on one foot. We’ll have plenty of time to make ourselves look like idiots later, in slightly more intelligent ways. (Yes, let’s aspire to be intelligent idiots.)

What directions do you find people not reading when they really ought to know better? Want to confess to your own “shoulda paid more attention” faux pas?

Speak up:

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Hey, Whiners, Cut It Out! (But Not Too Much)

During my tenure in social media (particularly Twitter and Facebook), I’ve observed a lot of whining, complaining, and overall negativity. I confess, I’ve been known to gripe now and then. Everyone needs to vent sometimes. But I try to keep the public venting reasonable and infrequent, while the more everyday venting gets handled in private by my friends. (Love you, friends!)

There are mega-extremes, of course. Those people who reply to agents’ form rejections with F-bombs and C-words. Most of us aren’t that far gone. (And those who are kind of scare me.)

But there are the little things, consistently and constantly griping, that actually annoy me more. The expletive-spouting writers I can assume are crazy. Others are just negative to the point it affects the image they portray to the world at large—especially the professional image for my fellow aspiring writers.

People with spouses, boyfriends, etc. who never do anything but complain about them. (Ladies, I have to say, I’ve yet to see a guy trash-talk his wife on Twitter. Husband-bashing, however, is rampant.) People with children and/or jobs who whine about those, too.

I’m pretty sure there are people out there who wish they could find a romantic partner, who wish they had kids, who wish they could earn enough money to make a living. Can we have a little gratitude for what we have?

But wait…

Going to the other extreme annoys me, too. People who never stop gushing about how they have the best. Husband. EVER. Or how adorable and wonderful their kids are. Ugh.

I don’t believe we need to be sunshine and happiness all the time. Let’s keep it real. When we don’t approve of something, it’s okay to speak negatively of it. When we’re excited, there’s nothing wrong with showing enthusiasm. But real people have both highs and lows, likes and dislikes, good days and Mondays.

Share the whole spectrum. Keep it balanced. If you find your tweet-stream (or timeline, or whatever) is full of negativity, take a minute to evaluate. What can you do to get yourself to a more emotionally healthy place? Maybe some things are better shared privately with those who will help you get over life’s speed bumps. That’s not the same as putting “Pity me!” attention-seekers out on social media.

On the other hand, if you’re constantly raving about how thoroughly awesome your life is … stop rubbing it in to the rest of us poor saps. 😉

Speak up:

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Tweet Me Like You Mean It

Everyone has their list of Twitter pet-peeves, right? So I figured I’d add mine, knowing that the offenders are little-likely to see it.

Of course, this is all just my opinion. What bugs me may be fine for another person.

The Bait-and-Switch Follow. Have any of you caught people at this? You get a notification that someone’s followed you. You take a look at their feed and decide sure, you’ll follow back. A day or so later, you get another notification that they’ve followed you. So they followed you, unfollowed, and waited to see if you would follow back before committing to following you. (Do you follow?) The new Twitter interface shows “Follows You” prominently on people’s profiles, so it seems that practice has trailed off for me, but it still happened the other day. Maybe there’s a lag?

The Super “Welcoming” Auto-Tweet. I think this one is pretty specialized to people like writers who are trying to sell something. You follow someone and immediately get a tweet—usually a direct message—with something along the lines of, “Thanks for following! Check out my blog/book/butterific-bacon-buns (insert link).” I’ve limited my reaction to rolling my eyes at such tactics (and have never once clicked the link), but it’s happening so much now, I think I’m going to automatically unfollow anyone who does it.

The Feed-Flooder. First of all, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have enough free time to tweet upwards of 100 times a day. (I know it doesn’t always mean the tweeter is actually tweeting … see below.) I only have so much time to devote to checking in with Twitter. I like to find relevant industry links/news, interesting conversations, and a little silliness with tweeps I know fairly well. If someone is filling my feed by retweeting everything in sight, pushing the Tweet This! button on every blog in the universe, and otherwise just making noise, I have to make it go away. Remember, when everything is special, nothing is.

The Robo-Tweet. I haven’t confirmed this—it’s just a suspicion. There are a lot of tweeting utilities out there to manage your social media experience. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, I don’t even know how many others. I think I’ve spotted at least one that will auto-tweet random “ice-breaker question” tweets from your account on a scheduled basis … like every half-hour. Does this actually work for people? What happened to authentic engagement?

The Deja-Tweet. Another one that’s particularly prevalent in the writer-world. Send out a little promo-blurb tweet when your book comes out, or when some particular milestone is reached. That’s fine. I’m even okay with you doing it twice that day—once for the morning crowd, then later for the evening. But when I see the same blurb (or even a small rotating set of them) day after day after day … yeah, even among all the tweets in my feed, I spot ’em.

You know what I like best? Stumbling across people through mutual Twitter-acquaintances, having a little interaction, and then following.

I could probably come up with more nuisances if I tried, but I’m sure I’ve whined enough for now. It’s your turn! What Twitter behavior drives you up the wall? Am I out of line on any of those I’ve listed above?

Speak up:

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Deceptive Appearances

My lovely friend Tracy Jorgensen has beta-read two of my manuscripts for me (so far), and both times has included fan-art sketches with her feedback. I won’t post the one for Significantly Other because it’s slightly spoilerish (kinda-sorta). More recently, she did this sketch for Fingerprints, my much beloved ms #1.

There are the twins, Taz on the left, Raina on the right. Taz has a bowl of yummy, fudgy goodness. Raina (poor thing) got a stinky pile of dog poop.

Think about it. From a distance (and especially from an image so your nose isn’t involved), the two might look kind of similar, right? Tracy had a whole analogy about the ms to go with it. Maybe I’ll share it sometime.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your interpretation. What are two things that look very similar on the surface, but upon closer inspection, one is awesome and the other … not so much?

Come on, creative types! What’s the best you can come up with? (Or maybe just a silly caption for the picture?)

Speak up:

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The Springing of Spring

Yes, I know the “official” start of spring isn’t for a few more weeks, but spring weather has definitely arrived. And by that I mean, the insane meteorological roller coaster has launched at full speed.

That wonderful time of year when I’m freezing as I walk from the parking lot to the school in the morning … and the air conditioner kicks on my classroom in the afternoon. (It’s still only low-to-mid 50s outside … but my room appears to share some characteristics with a solar-powered brick oven.) This is great, because during the same class, Student X will think it’s a refrigerator while Student Y thinks it’s a sauna.

The commute home nearly every day this week has made me think, “There’s no way Chicago has more wind than this. If they’re the Windy City, we’re the Windier STATE.”

And you know what? This state is full of something else: SAND. Wind plus sand. Do the math.

Spring also brings about that characteristic rise in the hormone levels of my teenage students. Oh, boy.

Speaking of which (yeah, that’s a smooth segue), there’s one good thing about spring. Several of my writer-friends have put together an anthology of short stories titled Spring Fevers. (I don’t have a story in there, but I did the formatting—yay, tech-head!) It’s available for free on Smashwords in a variety of electronic formats, or for 99 cents at Amazon. (Any proceeds from sales on Amazon will go to charity.) The stories are all about relationships in some form, with wide variety in topic and tone. If you like short stories, take a look and see what you think.

(My birthday’s in spring. I guess that’s another good thing. But not until next month.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, all that dust and sand in the air means I need to do some sneezing.

Speak up:

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Lessons Learned from Shasta

Warning: This post is uncharacteristically sentimental. If you’re as much a cynic as I usually am, you may want to avert your eyes. And if you’ve ever said of a pet, “It’s just an animal,” and meant it, you might as well navigate away from this page right now.

In Fall 1997, my family got our first (and so far only) dog, a lab-husky mix we named Shasta. At over fourteen years old, her health had been deteriorating recently, and this past Tuesday, we made the decision to let her go.

As I reflected on our time with Shasta, I realized there are a lot of things we should learn from her. I’ll share a few of them here.

With ears like that, how could she NOT listen?

#1 How you start is only a small hint of how you’ll end up.

The day we got Shasta, we had to go to PetSmart to get some particular supplies, so we brought her along. I could cuddle her to my chest with one hand. Hard to believe her puppy size was smaller than her adult-sized head.

#2 Listening is a skill that must be learned.

As first-time dog owners, training Shasta had a bit of a learning curve. She didn’t really want to listen at first. When she wanted to do something, she wanted to do it, whether we told her differently or not. Eventually, though, she figured it out. She wasn’t perfect, but most of the time she did all right.

#3 Sometimes you lead; sometimes you follow.

Related to training/learning … When she was young, Shasta really lived up to her husky nature during walks. She wanted to PULL you along the whole way. (We often wondered what would happen if we strapped on a pair of rollerblades and took her out, but decided it would be unwise.) Usually, she’d settle down a bit partway through the walk and stay at our side. As she got older, we were the ones coaxing her along.

Miracle: Not Shasta tolerating Chia, but Chia tolerating the dog.

#4 Don’t believe all the stereotypes.

Shasta grew up in a house full of cats. She got along with all of them (although they didn’t all get along with her). To Shasta, the cats of the family were friends. On the other hand, she did chase any cat that wandered into the backyard.

#5 There are some things you just can’t be.

Shasta really, really wanted to be a lap-dog. It was apparent for all of us, but especially with my dad. She wanted to climb right up there and get cozy. But considering her size (60+ lbs), it wasn’t going to happen. Likewise, I’ll never be a supermodel. And that’s okay.

Sadie and her dog. Or Shasta and her kitty.

#6 Don’t be afraid of unusual types. You might be best friends. (Sidenote: Remember you’re setting an example.)

Remember the cats of the family? Sadie is the only one who came along after Shasta, so she grew up with a dog around. They loved each other. Sadie would get up on her hind legs to rub up against Shasta’s chest (Shasta being MUCH taller than she is.) Related to the sidenote, I swear Sadie copied Shasta’s walk.

#7 Do your own thing; it’s okay if a few others think you’re crazy.

Again showing her husky blood ran deep, Shasta loved the snow. When there were a few fresh inches of powder out in the yard, she’d bound through it, burrow her nose under it and fling it in the air. Then she’d curl up in it like it was the comfiest bed ever.

I could never look that peaceful while lying on snow.

#8 We all have faults.

Shasta’s fur looked short, but it was thick, and it shed like you wouldn’t believe. Not her fault—she obviously couldn’t help it—but my family really should have bought stock in lint-removal devices of all types years ago. Between her and the cats, it was hopeless.

That’s apparently only half the fur from one brushing session.

#9 Dream big.

You’ve all seen a sleeping dog dream, right? Their paws twitch like they’re running, their little yips. You get the feeling they’re living that dream.

#10 Sometimes you resist things that end up being good for you.

When we first got Shasta, she wasn’t crazy about her leash. We’d be trying to get her safely across the street, and she’d twist around to grab the leash in her mouth and play tug-o-war with us. Not good.

This one had a flip-side from the human angle, too. My sister wanted a dog all growing up, but Dad said no because we didn’t have a fenced-in backyard. In ’97, we moved, and had the fenced-in yard. So Dad had to (grudgingly) give in.

In the end, no one loved Shasta like Dad, and it was mutual.

We’ll miss her.

Speak up:

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