Cairn Rodrigues's Blog: The Light Stealers Song, page 11

Feathering Your Twitter Nest – How to Write Tweets People Will Read

 

 

Despite outward appearances, Twitter is not a frivolous social media site.  The media enjoys painting Twitter as a shallow place, full of vapid folk who have checked out of real life.  Perhaps they think that life’s most important moments cannot be distilled into a 140 character tweet.  If so, they are spectacularly wrong.

Crafting a good tweet takes practice, especially if you’re tweeting to advertise something or attract new followers.  There are two kinds of tweets, business and personal – and you should always endeavor to keep the ratio about 75% personal and 25% business.  Business tweets are about gain, you want people to buy your stuff or add their number to your numbers to make your numbers bigger.  Personal tweets are all about communicating, just talking without expectation of tangible gain.  The reason for my above ratio is based on the fact that people are much more likely to read a tweet with one or less blue parts.

Blue parts are generally hashtags.  Those are clickable conversations that give the casual readers an idea of your tweet topic, such as #Dogs, #Shutdown or #Chocolate.  One of the biggest misconceptions about Twitter is that each tweet needs a hashtag.  The truth is that people are much more likely to read a tweet with no hashtags at all.  It’s because our timelines are filled with hashtag laden tweets, most of them wanting to sell something, so when we see a plain tweet, we know it’s just a person talking.  

As I’ve said before, Twitter isn’t a place to sell your book, CD, Etsy shop or whatever, it’s the place to sell you.  Selling yourself, your brand, via tweets can go a long way towards increasing sales.  It’s just that you shouldn’t appear to be selling anything at all.  Whether you’re new to Twitter or an old hand who isn’t getting the response you desire from your followers, here are a few tips for writing tweets people will read.

Avoid stuffing tweets with “impressive” facts and figures.  Eyes bounce off that stuff faster than Miley Cyrus can find a new way to take her clothes off.  
Keep hashtags to a minimum.  I, personally, don’t read many that have more than one.  If there is more than one hashtag channel you want to tweet in, compose several different tweets, each with one or two hashtags.  The more you try to cram in to one little tweet, the less likely anyone is to read.
Keep #FF (follow Friday) and other follower-gaining memes personal.  Don’t bare your soul, just say something interesting, funny or insightful about yourself.  You want to attract people to you, so be a person with strengths and foibles just like everyone else.
Avoid putting links to your blog, Amazon page, Facebook page – whatever – in all of your tweets.  If you do it too often, people will think you only care about advertising to them.

Tweet real things about yourself, your pets, your adventures in your own real voice without expectation.  By doing this, you are allowing people to like you on your own merits.  Once they like you for who you are, they are much more likely to pay attention to subsequent advertisements from you.  Heck, if they really like you, they will advertise for you – and that is golden in any medium.  Word of mouth is the best sales tool ever invented.

A final thought about hashtags is that they’re not evil.  They are, in fact, very useful when used appropriately and judiciously.  Don’t discount the viability of making up your own silly hashtag just for fun because it might catch on and take on its own life.  But hashtags will not take the place of actual conversation, so don’t use them as such.

As always, I encourage people using Twitter just to talk to other people.  Let them discover you, discover that they like your voice and let them decide when or if they’re going to buy what you’re selling.

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49 Birthday Candles

 

Being a decisive person is a blade with two edges.  On the one side, there is the clarity of black and white with the ability to clear away the grey areas without hesitation.  As a decisive person, I don’t often allow the voices of self-doubt intrude on my decision making process until much later, after the decision was made.  On the other side of that is living with my quick decisions, doing or saying something without benefit of much inner discussion.  These knee jerk reactions aren’t always beneficial and sometimes I do regret them.

Yesterday, something completely horrific passed through my Facebook wall.  It was a set of pictures of a dog being disgustingly abused with a plea to identify the man in the picture.  I shared it to my timeline with an angry comment about the man deserving some very physical violence to his person.  I did think about not sharing, about shutting my eyes tightly, clicking my ruby heels together and pleading, “There’s no place like home”.  But it felt like the act of a coward not to share.

Because I’m human, it was my first instinct, my gut reaction, to answer violence with violence.  Probably 99% of the people who saw the picture had the same reaction, and we can’t all be wrong, right?  Predictably, those pictures stayed with me all day, as did my response to them.  Unease nibbled at my brain all day, where it could find room amid the overwhelming sadness at such an ugly world.  By late afternoon, I completely regretted my comment on the pictures and prayed for the man, asking God to bless him with the gift and curse of self-awareness.

My version of prayer involves a lot of swearing and zero bowing/scraping.  Like Joliet Jake Blues, I’m of the belief that me and the lord have an understanding.

Violence doesn’t cure violence.  Hatred doesn’t mitigate hatred.  Cruelty doesn’t stop cruelty.  Evolution has made us a violent and war-like species and I’m not questioning the necessity for violence.  Clearly, our war-like natures are crucial to our survival.  But we are much more than the sum of our parts, our brains evolved too, reason is as much a part of our nature as war.

Reason is quiet and difficult to wrestle with as it forces us to answer the hard questions about life.  It’s so much easier to fight, to be angry and seek retribution, than to conciliate.  But retribution can’t carry any of us very far, it doesn’t solve anything and it is not the road to peace.  The road to peace is paved with peace, love is the only thing that can cure hatred and only acts of kindness can mitigate cruelty.

Often, I feel like a solitary candle in the unceasing darkness.  My little flame spits and sputters, wondering if the feeble light can do anything against the wall of darkness closing in around me.  My 49th birthday is on Wednesday and like most people in the double digits, my cake usually has one or two birthday candles to stand in for all the others.  I think this year there will be 49 tiny birthday candles on my cake, each one placed with a wish of forgiveness, love and hope for all the ugliness of life.  

49 opportunities to wish for peace, it might be my best birthday ever.

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Harry and the Otters

Many years ago, before the reign of Blue the dog, there was another dog.  His name was Harry, we adopted him from the SPCA in south Sacramento shortly after getting married.  Even though he was still a young pup, Harry never forgot where he came from and was always filled with gratitude.  

We moved several times during Harry’s life, but he liked best the places that offered easy access to natural spaces.  I think he liked living a block from the bay in Vallejo the most, there were several vacant lots and one really nice field not far away.

He enjoyed exploring the natural world and we indulged him whenever possible.  Even a grassy lot of no great consequence can yield a treasure of sniffings and possibly birds to flush.  He meant no harm to anyone, man or beast, mostly he wanted to play – frolic and cavorting were also welcome.

After Vallejo, we came back to West Sac and lived in kind of a dump just a few blocks from the river.  If time and weather permitted, Harry and I would go to the river twice a day, there’s a park on my side of the river.  The other side is the touristy Old Sacramento with its paddle boat taking up a big chunk of the view.  A stone’s throw upriver is Discovery Park, where the American joins the Sacramento River and it’s a popular waterway for recreational boaters.

But on our side, the riverbank is a small strip of untamed wilderness, always changing with what the river brings forth.  When the water is low enough, small sandy beaches dot the strip and those micro beaches were Harry’s premier choice.  He always wanted to get down to the river’s edge, to run in the  water chasing sticks or butterflies.  He loved it when the wakes of passing boats broke over the beach, Harry would try to bite the little waves, try to catch them as he ran along.  But for all his trying, my boy never caught a single wavelet.  It never dimmed his love of the chase though, and the sheer joy of splashing through the water.

As much as he loved morning walks (or late-morning or afternoon or…), the evening walk was always the best.  That walk included my husband and that meant rougher terrain could be trod.  They would leap over driftwood and clamber past muddy outcroppings as I picked a slightly cleaner path for myself.  Harry would always keep an eye on me though, he always knew where I was and never got too far ahead that I was left unprotected in the wilds.  

But many evenings were extra special, if we timed it so we got to the river just as the twilight lost its last gleaming and the soft darkness began to close in, Harry’s best friends would come out to play.  The river’s edge is a temporary home for many creatures and a family of river otters carved out a place for themselves.  Night after night, it was always the same, Harry always knew where to find them and they weren’t shy about making themselves known.  After a flurry of noise and splashes upon our arrival, all would get quiet.  Then, a few feet downriver, one of them would surface and get Harry’s attention.  The otter would splash and chitter in the dark, making sure it kept the dog looking that way.

Harry would lean and pull, trying to get further into the water as the otter stayed far enough away to tease him.  This gave all the other otters the chance to circle back around and take up positions behind the dog.  Once some super-secret otter signal was given, the whole lot of them would jump up out of the water behind Harry, all of them splashing and making noise.  He would then happily bark and splash around futilely trying to catch one until everything got ominously quiet again.

And then, just a little bit downriver, an otter would pop up and get Harry’s full attention all over again.

There are many special moments with Harry in my memory, he was my most special guy and I still miss him.  But lately the memory of Harry and the otters has been on my mind.  Maybe it’s because everything seems so dark and awful right now because of my father’s illness, Blue’s illness.  Maybe remembering that, keeping that front and center is my lifeline to myself, to remind me that there is never darkness without light.  Life is hard, but life is also sweet.  Life is full of bad surprises and pain, but it also offers up the occasional otter and makes it all worthwhile.

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Find Your Smile

A telemarketer called me at 6 A.M. today, woke me up don’t ya know.  Couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up to find hubby left the back door open all night and it was freezing in the house.  Oh, and Facebook was down so I couldn’t post a grumble about my misadventures.

Yep, this day is starting out on a cracking good note.

I’m taking my dad for an MRI today, to see if the cancer has spread to his brain.  We’ve just finished a grueling round of radiation treatments and are on the brink of chemotherapy, the prognosis is still no better than it was before we started.

I could cry, I could be snarly and bitchy.  Perhaps I even should be.  However, it’s just not my nature.  Mom always said that I was born on the sunny side of the street, always finding a reason to be happy.  It could be a defense mechanism, but I would rather laugh than cry.

It’s pretty easy to find my smile, even when it’s hiding in a deep, dark place.  My sense of humor resides in that well of blackness and my smile occasionally seeks solace there.  But it doesn’t stay away for long, it’s irrepressible.  It’s undeniable.  My smile is a force of nature.

Being smiley isn’t for everybody.  Being a non-smiley person doesn’t mean you’re less happy.  But have you considered that you may have misplaced your smile recently?  I’m just saying, if you have one handy, won’t you please share?

PEACE, LOVE, GOOD HEALTH AND BIG SMILES FOR ALL!

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The Dead Line

Everybody has a deadline to meet of some sort.  It could be as simple as getting a contest entry in on time or as complex as shepherding a group of people towards a common goal at work.  Recently, someone I love very much gave me a deadline, the literal kind, and I will move Heaven, Earth and Perdition to meet it.

 

 

My 83-year old father found out recently he has stage 3 lung cancer.  There is a large mass in his left lung that collapsed part of the lung, he has started radiation treatments to try and shrink the mass so the lung can re-inflate.  At his age and with all his other health problems, surgery and chemotherapy are too invasive.  So we are doing what we can do.  

It all happened really fast too.  They found the mass and the biopsy was just three weeks ago.  His lung collapsed before we got the biopsy results, he was hospitalized for several days and then we went right into radiation treatments.

The man that I call Dad is actually my stepfather.  He married my mom right after I left high school and I’m pretty much the only one of my mother’s children that views him as a father.  I’m the youngest and I lived with them for several years after they got married, so it’s not like my siblings just refused to acknowledge him or anything.  But Andy and I got each other right off the bat.  We share a similar life view in that life is dark and often humorless so it’s up to us to bring the light and the mirth.  Neither of us is afraid to get up in anybody’s grill and we both prefer to yell first and ask questions later.  It makes for a tempestuous relationship to be sure.

Andy has supported all of my ventures enthusiastically.  He’s always loved to eat and was totally on board with both culinary school and buying the Cafe 455.  My dad was a familiar sight at the cafe, he came in once a week for lunch and held court at his favorite table.  The ladies in our building just loved him, he’s an incorrigible flirt, and he rarely sat alone at his table.  Usually, there was a string of people stopping to chat with him and letting him boast about my skills.

After the cafe was wrenched from my arms, he was the one I turned to for advice.  I know for a fact that it was much harder for him to see me in such pain than for me to actually experience it, it’s a familiar thing for parents.  Every high and low that I’ve had since Andy came into my life, I went through with him.  He is my champion, my harshest critic and most loyal supporter.

And now, he is dying.

I can’t think about that though.  The idea of not having him anymore is something I can’t come to grips with yet.  Right now, I keep myself busy taking care of him.  We drive to a nearby city everyday for radiation treatments, I take care of all his phone calls, cook his meals and watch reruns of CSI with him.  And we talk, about everything, about life and death and all the stuff in between.  He’s a man who can easily see the end of his life, it’s a rare perspective and it serves to give important things a new sense of urgency.

Almost two years ago, I decided to write a story.  It was completely different than any other thing I’ve done with my life and many people in my orbit were either patronizing or completely indifferent about my endeavor.  Not Andy, as usual, he had absolute faith that I could do whatever I set out to do.  He never once said it was a foolish notion or that I should be concentrating my energies on something more common.  Instead, he told me to keep going, to keep pushing ahead and not get steered off course.

The Last Prospector is done, it’s awaiting publication.  Since it’s going to be self-pubbed, Prospector is waiting for me.  In July of this year, my husband decided he didn’t want to be alive anymore and my world exploded.  Since then, nothing has been right for me.  My husband has gotten help, but the repercussions of his actions have hurt me terribly.  Finding out that my beloved Blue dog has terminal cancer was another huge blow, and now my Dad is dying.  Nobody blames me for not moving more quickly on publication, not even I blame me and that’s saying something.

But this isn’t about blame, this is about something much bigger, much more important.  Andy is worried about my future after he dies, he wants to know that I will be okay.  He’s read The Last Prospector, he knows it’s a good story and he wants the world to know too.  My dad wants Prospector out before he dies, he wants to know that I am following my dreams before his dream ends and I won’t deny him that.

Andy has set me a deadline, a literal one.  I need to make this happen before he dies, it is the VERY LEAST thing I can do for him.  There is very little else that matters right now, when I’m not taking care of him, I will be getting the manuscript published.  So now it is a full on, balls to the wall, sprint to the finish line.  This bus is pulling out of the station, so get on it or go under it, but either way, this bus is going the distance.

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Synchronicity and Other Junk

It’s #BlogCrawl Saturday and, wouldn’t you know it, a crowd showed up and I was late.  Oh well, I got there and the night’s topic was already set.  I suspect it was Holly J. who thought this up:  Synchronicity featuring skinny dipping and a proud life moment that’s not family related.

Uhhhhhhh…..hmmmm.  That sounds like a lot of thinking and I gave my brain the night off.  So here’s the Synchronicity (2).

 

 

As for the skinny dipping, I did it once and scraped the heck out of my tender flesh.  Of course, I was a little tipsy and it was the middle of the night at the Cosumnes River.  I don’t know how it is now, but back then there were a lot of vandalized newspaper machines in that river.

 

The Cosumnes River

 

Proud, non-family related moment goes back to my culinary school days.  I lived in the dorm at the beginning in a seedy old building in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.  My two friends Gordon and Brad lived a couple floors above me and theirs was widely regarded as the party room.  Usually there were plenty of bodies crammed in there but one afternoon when I knocked, it was just the two guys.  The room had a bunk and a single bed crammed inside, the bottom bunk bed was packed with boxes, clothes and god only knows what else.  Brad dropped something behind the dresser that was squeezed in the corner, the dresser was piled high with junk, so he was trying to fish out his whatever from the top bunk bed.  

I sat on Gordon’s bed and watched for several long minutes as Brad tried this and that, stretched, made a crappy tool from a wire hanger and swore a lot.  It was amusing, so I let him.  But I get bored easily, so I asked the guys why they just didn’t remove some stuff from the bottom bunk and go in from the side.

They stared at each other and me with very pleased expressions and Gordon said, “Look at the big brain on Cairn!”

After that, it was well known that I can solve many of life’s trickier problems with ease.  I’m pretty proud of that.

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Compassionate Canine Care – Medical Marijuana

When your dog is in pain, when it’s suffering, what  wouldn’t you do to relieve the suffering?  Most people feel like their pets are their children, I know I do.  In the vast panoply of human despair, the most difficult thing for most people to witness is their child in pain.

We would do anything to stop the crying, pay with money we don’t have to remove that pleading look in their eyes.

My dog, Blue, has cancer.  He has rapidly growing tumors and a bleak prognosis.  We have chosen to not pursue aggressive medical treatment for many reasons, primarily because they won’t work that well.  We can’t justify putting Blue through the trauma of the treatments when there isn’t much chance of them curing his disease.  He doesn’t handle change well, he doesn’t like to be away from home and he’s not all that keen on strangers poking at him.

 

 

Instead, we chose to make his remaining days as filled with love and happiness as possible.  The veterinarian prescribed him some painkillers, for a few weeks they worked fairly well.  The pills made him sleepy though and it was clear that they were really only taking the edge off his discomfort when he wasn’t asleep.  Recently, the pills weren’t working at all, last Friday I gave him a total of 8 pills in 24 hours instead of the prescribed 6.  Blue was more miserable with each passing hour, I genuinely thought we would have to put him down before the weekend was over.

That look in his eyes was like a dagger in my heart, every single time.  There was always that question in them, why aren’t you making me better?

Blue woke up with that look in his eyes Saturday morning and I needed to alleviate his pain.  No matter what.  I gave my dog medical marijuana and it helped.  No, it did more than help, it gave my dog his life back.

Pot did not/is not curing my dog of his cancer, it is curing him of his symptoms and that is more than good enough for me.  Quality of life counts more than quantity in my book, 30 minutes after Blue ingested a small amount of marijuana, he was finally able to relax.  That look was gone, replaced by the relieved look of one who has set down a heavy burden.  

 

Blue got a new toy!

 

Blue’s only had 3 pain pills in the last 7 days.  He’s moving around a lot, playing more than he has in years and resting very comfortably when he sleeps.  Blue is dying, but he is not suffering, and that is all down to marijuana.  He gets 3 doses a day, but it’s a very small amount in total.  Mix 1 teaspoon of crushed marijuana buds (indica strains for their analgesic properties) with 3/4 cup of peanut butter, stir well and let stand at least an hour before using.  If you plan to try this, please think about the size of your dog and start small.  Blue is a big guy, around 85 pounds, so there is about 1 tablespoon of peanut butter per dosage.  Spread the peanut butter on a bit of bread, fold it over to sandwich a pill if needed, and administer an hour before meals or snacks.  

I don’t know how long this will work, but it gives us more time with him and more quality to that time.  Blue is not thrilled about the swelling tumors around his anus, but most of the time he’s too busy playing and running around to pay them much mind.

He’s out playing and running around right now, that makes me a very relieved mom.

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Another one bites the dust

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