P.J. Fox's Blog, page 14

No New Chapters Just Yet

As some of you are aware, if you follow this blog regularly/follow me on Facebook, last week I issued a challenge re: The Black Prince.  I would have posted the chapters if we’d come close but, alas, we reached less than 10% of our goal.  However, the good news is that I’m open to doing another, similar challenge with a different book again.  So I’m asking you: which book would you most like to see offered for free and why?

The book with the most votes is the one I’ll offer.

Updates! Finally!

So there’s finally, finally something under the “elsewhere on the web” and “get advice” tabs.  Regarding the first, this might be jumping the gun a little as I’m actually in the process of adding listings to our Etsy store.  It’s not live yet (but hopefully will be later tonight).  I’ll probably post again when everything’s ready to go because I enjoy being blatantly self-aggrandizing like that.

In the meantime, on my other site, there are plenty of photographic goodies.

What’s In A Limited Edition?

pjfoxwrites:

My Etsy shop…it’s coming!

Originally posted on Right Coast Crafts:

Right now, we’re putting the finishing touches on the photographs and ad copy we need to go live.  Which will hopefully be either over the weekend or at the beginning of next week.  Considering that, six months ago, my goal was to open our shop at the beginning of August we’re actually not doing too badly!  In the meantime, by way of introduction, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about what our process is and why I like to bandy that term about so frequently, limited edition.

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Rules For Being My Friend

Friendship is hard.

These are my nine rules:

Don’t make me the butt of your joke, and expect me to laugh.  Friends don’t make friends into punchlines.  My weight, my career, whatever it is, this is an aspect of me and deserves respect.  That I expect to feel safe in your company doesn’t make me a weak link, or some one who always wants “yes men.”  But I should, for example, be able to post on Facebook about positive event in my life and feel safe that you’re going to share in my happiness rather than use this time as an opportunity for a good laugh–at my expense.
Don’t act like I’m doing something wrong, when I stand up for myself.  I have that right.  We all have that right.  A friendship where peace is dependent on someone never saying, “that hurts my feelings,” or “knock it off” isn’t a friendship but one person using another as an emotional punching bag.
Don’t disagree with me, or dismiss me, when I tell you I’m upset.  I get to decide what my perspective is.  This is not a democracy, but my feelings and my life.  Our friendship is not an invitation to you to control me.
Be happy for me, in my successes.  And if you can’t–for mine, or anyone’s–ask yourself why.  They say you find out who your friends are when you fail, but you find out who your friends are when you succeed, too.  At anything, whether it be a romantic relationship, a job, etc.  I don’t owe it to you, or to anyone, to be apologetic for gaining the things I’ve worked so hard to achieve.  Moreover, I’m not sure why I’d want to invest time and energy in anyone who didn’t want to see me succeed.
Be honest.  If you have a problem with me, say so.  Passive-aggressive bullshit is for pussies.
Don’t make me responsible for your shitty day.  This is like the rule above: tell me what’s going on, like an adult, and give me the opportunity to respond supportively.  Tearing me a new one on a pretext, because you’re having a hard time and need someone to vent on, isn’t friendship.  It’s abuse.  I don’t have any obligation whatsoever to sit there and take it because whatever reason.  When people genuinely love and care for each other–platonically, romantically, whatever–they absolutely do not expect this of each other.  Ever.  If someone ever, ever in your life tries to suggest that you owe them something in the way of being made to feel unloved, unlovable, or less because you resist being an emotional–or physical–punching bag, head for the hills.
Laugh with me, not at me.  This goes back to the first rule.  Sure, everyone needs to lighten up once in awhile.  But we don’t get to decide, for other people, what is and is not triggering.  Enjoy the lighter side, but in a way that still respects the other person’s feelings, perspective, and boundaries.  You might find a joke about someone’s sexual orientation, gender expression, racial heritage, or job or educational situation just hilarious but that doesn’t mean they will, or should, or have to.
Listen to me.  Take what I’m telling you about myself seriously.  Because if you don’t, what’s the point?
Don’t use me.  I’ve always believed in the old adage about how you have to be a friend to get a friend.  I’ve also always believed that, in life, other people will treat you as well as you let them.  Using people comes in many forms.  Trust me, speaking as a recovering doormat, I know.  Sometimes it’s asking you for money; sometimes it’s using you like free therapy.  All relationships make demands and sometimes none of us, even the strongest of us, have all that many spoons.  But the difference between a true friend, even the neediest of true friends, and a user is that true friends give back.  Maybe only by understanding; by cutting the other person some slack in turn.  Whereas, when someone expects a consistent and unending stream of time, energy, and understanding out of you while giving none of those in return–especially that last one–you’re starting to enter user territory.

Friendship is supposed to be one of the best parts of life, not one of the worst.  When a friend makes you feel terrible about yourself, for being yourself, it’s perfectly okay to reassess–whatever that person says.  Life may be a series of obligations but the person you owe the most to, is you.  Love yourself, as best as you can, and don’t tolerate anyone in your life, for even one minute, who makes you feel wrong for wanting to do so.

Your real friends might not be perfect–indeed, certainly won’t be, presuming they’re not imaginary–but they should consistently love and respect you.  They’ll slip up from time to time, as you will, but they’ll accept responsibility for what they’ve done, apologizing and learning from their mistakes, and move on.  They’ll accept your apologies, when necessary, in turn, celebrating your imperfections rather than holding them over you.

And remember: at the end of the day, who you let into your life is your choice.

I’ve Issued A Challenge…

On my Facebook page, that if we can get 1,000 people to download a (free) copy of I Look Like This Because I’m A Writer this week, during its promotional period, I’ll publish the next three chapters of The Black Prince on this site.  

The Black Prince which is, I dare say, moving along rather nicely.  The only thing holding me back from writing more, and faster, is the upcoming launch of mine and my husband’s Etsy shop.  I’m in the process of taking fancy pictures but in the meantime you can peruse terrible iPhone pictures on our shop’s Facebook page that nobody likes yet.  Which you should totally like, to be extraordinarily cool and also to get updates on what will be for sale and when.  But rest assured that when I’m not banging at metal with hammers or cleaning up the mysterious puddles of vomit I seem to keep finding around the house, I’m writing.

How To Raise A Bully

I’ve written before about the relative who encouraged her daughter to bully my son.  The other reason she refuses to come over, or to be in our lives–other than that I foolishly and spitefully insist on a no bullying policy in this house–is that I make the kids share.  She, let’s call her X, firmly believes that this is wrong and that by making kids share you teach them things that will set them up for failure, as adults, in the real world.

Yes.

You teach them to value interpersonal relationships over objects.

Is this setting them up for failure?  Well, I suppose that depends on how you define success.  If success is more, at any cost, then maybe.  But the problem with training kids to base their happiness and sense of self worth on that kind of “success” is that you set them up for a worse kind of failure: the failure of not being able to take responsibility for their own state of mind.  If, as an adult, your happiness is based on external factors, i.e. what’s in your bank account, then you’ll always suffer at the whims of the universe.  Teaching kids from an early age that happiness can come from a different source helps them to understand, conversely, that their happiness is within their control.

No, everyone has good days and bad days.  What I’m talking about, here, is happiness in the broader sense.  Satisfaction with one’s own life and, most importantly, with one’s own self.  In our house, we define success, not as numbers–on tests, in a bank account–but as the natural result of hard work.  My son might not always make the grades he wants, or make the cut for the team, or get into the college of his choice, or get the promotion he’s up for, but he can always take pride in knowing that he has the ability to use his presence in the world for good.

When you help a child to share their toys, you help them to experience the joy of lifting a friend’s spirits.  Of the deepening of friendship that comes with that first hesitantly extended trust.  Of communicating more effectively.  One of my son’s favorite Sheriff Callie episodes is about bullying; a bully steals Toby’s toy and when the truth comes out and Toby, along with Sheriff Callie, finally confronts him, Toby explains to the bully that if he’d asked, Toby would have gladly shared his toy.  The bully is shocked.  Why?  Because he had no idea that sharing was something Toby might enjoy.

X is teaching her daughter that the only way to enjoy something is to keep it for herself, thus setting her up for a lifetime of equating happiness with ownership and of solving her problems with shopping sprees.  Think I’m jumping the gun?  The last time I saw her she told me she couldn’t be happy because she didn’t have the most toys of anyone at school and that she didn’t like me, because I didn’t give her enough toys.

Too many people buy and buy, and spend and spend, and wonder why the hollow ache inside never seems to shrink.  They’re like that old commercial about the guy who’s in debt up to his eyeballs, with an expression on his face that says he’s riding that riding mower around the third circle of hell.  He wants to leave, more than anything, but doesn’t know how.

Does success diminish in the sharing?  Do you have less enjoyment in a toy, when you share it?  And, if so, why?  These are important questions; the questions that, some day, produce maturity.  Whatever one’s economic views, personal or global, whatever one’s political views, one should choose those views, actively choose them, from a place of strength.  Not a place of thrall.  I want my son to own what he owns, as an adult, whether that’s a yurt in the plains or ten Rolls Royces, not for those things to own him.

Success isn’t your bank account; success isn’t how much stuff you own.  Success is who you are as a person.  Base your success on your actions, on how you affect the world around you, and your success transcends things.

All the things that, in the final analysis, don’t matter.

Are you happy, because you’re finally successful enough, in material terms, to allow yourself to stop and smell the roses?  Or are you successful because, at the end of the day, living the life you have now–this life, this moment–makes you happy?  I chose a career as a novelist and a jewelry designer over continuing to practice law, because that made me happy.  I wasn’t thinking about my bank account; I was thinking about how I wanted to spend my remaining time, however much time that turned out to be, on earth.  We all think we get decades; some of us might die tomorrow.  We don’t know.  So that’s my bias.  I realized, a couple of years ago, that the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Are my choices the right choices for everybody?  Of course not.  But they’re choices I want my son to have the freedom to make.  I don’t want him to worry, for one minute, that he’ll be letting his parents down if he does go for that yurt.  And I want him to, if he grows up to be the next Peter Lynch and some day the stock market crashes, to wake up the next morning knowing that he still has the things that matter: a family.  Love.  The respect of his peers, based not on his wallet but on his mind and heart.

The joy of sharing with a friend is so much richer than the joy of simply amassing stuff.

I teach my child to share, not because I want to hold him back but because I want him to be empowered.  To find success and, most importantly of all, the success of happiness, within himself and with his good and ethical treatment of others.  The only source from which, ultimately, both of those things can meaningfully and lastingly come.

Thoughts?

Who Needs Yankee Candle When…

I got a special request from a reader, for a post on my gardenias.  Most people know that plants clean the air but what they might not know is a) how many plants you need to accomplish this goal and b) that selections needn’t be limited to Pothos, Dracaena, and other boring expected common houseplants.  Now don’t get me wrong; I have those, too.  In abundance.  But did you know that gardenia and jasmine are great choices, too?  My house is entirely full of plants that smell great.

For proper air cleaning, you need at least one 8″ pot’s worth of plant for each 100 square feet (or about 9.3 square meters).  Which means, potentially, that you have lots of room for great smelling flowers!  The gardenia in our dining room bloomed last night, so I snapped a few quick pictures with my phone.  Yesterday morning, these flowers were buds.  Not even open yet, or close to being open. Which got me thinking that plants are such an incredible metaphor for life in that things can change–in ways you can’t even imagine–literally before you have time to notice.

Gardenias do well in full sun to partial shade.  Mine are in hanging planters, in front of windows for more of that awesome bright, filtered sun.  Alas, they’re also limited, here, to being indoor plants because while the gardenia might be the quintessential southern plant it is not meant for the north.  The hardiest of gardenias are only hardy to USDA zone 7b.  I’ve also heard, incidentally, that gardenias make terrible houseplants but I’ve personally seen no evidence of this.

My gardenias, like most of my plants, are in self-watering planters.  I got this one from Maryland China Company and you can buy one too from Amazon.  I fertilize my gardenias with Jobe’s houseplant spikes (the same ones you can get pretty much anywhere) and also occasionally feed them old coffee grounds.  Gardenias are acid-loving plants and coffee grounds are awesome for them.  I also feed the hydrangeas outside coffee grounds.  I drink a lot of coffee, that’s no secret, and one of those obvious points I often feel compelled to make is that if you want to complete the circle of life by composting, you should grow plants that get excited about what you compost.

So that’s it for gardenias.  I’m a big fan of self-watering planters, because they all but eliminate the danger of overwatering and, with it, root rot.  They don’t solve every problem but, particularly when you have as many plants as I do, anything that helps with problem management is a good thing.

And yes, all the furniture in our home is from IKEA.

How I Grow My Orchids

Because orchids are one of those “minute to learn, lifetime to master” deals, I can’t claim in this post to cover everything and believe me, I certainly don’t know everything to cover.  I’m no gardening expert and I have limited experience growing my own orchids, most of which are from the same source (more on that later) in USDA zone 6b.

Your mileage may vary.

However, I can share a few tips, in terms of what I’ve learned from my own mistakes and what, in turn, has worked for me.

But first, before you decide whether you care, here are a few of mine taking the sun in my preferred summer writing area:

My orchid collection is an ever-growing affair.  These are the ones that, right now, are blooming.  They’ll bloom for awhile (orchid blooms tend to last a very long time) and then their blooms will fall while the plants themselves focus energy on their leaves and root systems.  They won’t bloom again for somewhere between 8 and 12 months.  Which is one of the reasons I get so excited when they do bloom, and take so many pictures.  It’s an event!

Orchid growing is, in and of itself, an event.  Orchid growing guides are all full of helpful advice like, water them too much and they die.  Water them too little and they die.  Watering them too little is better than watering them too much, but they’ll still die.  Oh, and the same thing goes for sunlight.  It can seem like, look at them too much and they die.

So, being a masochist who loves a challenge, I decided that these were the plants for me.

After a great deal of research, I decided to grow mine semi-hydroponically.  This is because most of the problems people have with orchids can be traced to the fact that an orchid really doesn’t belong in a pot in the first place.  You can’t treat it like a regular house plant; it doesn’t live in dirt and its roots, indeed, need some degree of sunlight and air exposure.  In the wild, orchids–which are symbiotic rather than parasitic–cling onto trees.  The best planting experience is the one that most closely replicates that natural environment.  Just like the best planting experience for your Marble Queen Pothos is going to involve dirt, because that’s what it grows in in the wild.

There are hydroponic kits that you can buy, but I assembled my own using three things:

A suitable pot (I tend to favor Lechuza or SWE)
Hydroponic grow rocks (I buy Plant It! because it’s the cheapest)
Water-soluble orchid food (I use Orchid Plus)

You do not need fancy brand names.  Your orchids will not know the difference.  So if you can find a pot that does what it’s supposed to do, for less, then go for it.  A Lechuza pot, at around 30–40 USD, is an investment.  But the way I see it, each orchid is going to cost you about the same as a bottle of wine.  Maybe a bottle of okay wine, maybe a bottle of really great wine.  Either way, that’s fine if you’re only buying a couple.  But if you keep buying them…that’s when the problems start.  An orchid, or any plant, really, is an investment.  And you’re going to get the most out of that investment if you start with the right tools.

Which brings me to the next issue: finding the right orchid.

Don’t be shy about where you get your orchids.  Like with a lot of things, brand name cachet can be misleading.  I get most of mine from our local Home Depot.  In our immediate environs, we have a couple of choices of where to buy plants.  One of them is a fancy garden center that advertises itself to “real” gardeners and costs the earth.  The other is humble Home Depot.  Which, unlike the aforementioned garden center, is staffed by orchid junkies.  They have such a great selection, in fact, that people drive from all over the greater Salem area to check it out.  The girl who rang me up yesterday commented on this.  My infamous purple orchid is a phalaenopsis hybrid that our Home Depot just started carrying, from a nursery I’d never heard of.

The “real” garden center doesn’t even carry orchids!

Wherever you see a good orchid, and you like that orchid, snap it up.  What matters here is the final result, which is a plant you like.  Don’t let people with their noses in the air make you feel like you don’t know enough to be a gardener.

Now, if you do know something about orchids, and you’ve seen my pictures, you’ll know that I tend to favor phalaenopsis.  Which are sometimes disparagingly referred to as “beginner orchids.”  By the same folks who like to tell you that orchid growing is “easy,” and building your own spaceship out of a Buick is easy, and they know everything.  I think phalaenopsis are pretty and, since they’re so popular, it’s much easier to find exciting hybrids (i.e. my big purple there) in even more exciting colors.  I guess it depends on what, as a gardener, you’re after.

Another advantage of phalaenopsis is that, unlike with most other orchid varieties (of which there are over 35,000), they can be repotted–very gently, and carefully–while in the midst of their bloom cycles.  Which is really necessary, I think, as the pots they tend to come in tend to be awful.  If you’ve ever been given an orchid and, despite your best efforts to care for it, it more or less immediately died, that’s probably why.

Orchids roots aren’t meant to be submerged in water; they’re meant to be hanging out, doing their thing.  Which is why they can become waterlogged so easily, and thus why your orchid can die so easily–even if you’re watering it exactly according to whatever instructions you were given, or received with the plant.  The biggest challenge with the traditional approach is guessing, correctly, when to water.  Passive systems like hydroponics, on the other hand, take the decision out of your hands.  Orchids, like all plants, do best when they can decide how much how much of the appropriate nutrients they need and then draw on them accordingly.

So the first thing to do is to assemble your pot, if assembly is necessary, and then gather it, your orchid, and whatever hydroponic grow rocks you’re using.  Very carefully remove the orchid from its original pot and, again, very carefully dislodge any debris from around the roots.  This is a great video on distinguishing healthy roots from those afflicted with root rot, if you’re interested.

Then, sort of holding the orchid in place, hovering more or less in the place in the pot you want it, begin to fill in around the roots, carefully and by hand–i.e. not upending the bag–until the plant is secure in the pot.  You don’t want to pack the rocks in but you don’t want the orchid to be sliding around, either.  You can secure whatever supports are holding up the bloom spikes by wiggling them around a bit and gently pressing down until they become fixed in the rocks.

Water-wise, I fill each pot, according to that pot’s particular directions, with a mixture of water and orchid food.  Which is why I buy the water-soluble orchid food.  One of the reasons I favor the pots I do is that the water, once in them, is inaccessible to children and animals.  I’d like to think everyone’s smart enough not to drink strangely blue-tinted water but let’s not take chances.  Safety first.

Then, I find them a sun-filled spot to sit and let them do their thing.  Orchids don’t drink that much.  They drink a very little amount, and more or less continuously.  The biggest challenge with a system like this is trust: that it can and will work if you leave it (and your orchid) alone.  Regarding sunlight, orchids like a lot of indirect sunlight.  Mine enjoy summer living on the screen porch, where they get just that.  If you don’t have an ideal spot, you may have to move your orchid once or twice a day as the light shifts.

But keep in mind that, once an orchid starts to flower, it should always face in the same direction.  Turning the orchid around, for example, might damage the flower spike.  My general philosophy, with orchids as well as with my other plants, has always been to pick a spot that seems reasonable and hope for the best.  I only move them if I see clear signs that the plant is not happy there.  I have one hypoestes that’s unhappy everywhere.

I hope this helps!  And thank you to everyone on my Facebook page, who’s shown such an interest in my gardening adventures!  If you have any more specific questions, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Then and Now

Me when I got married:

And me now:

Getting People To Like Your Page

I’ve been considering, now that I’ve been a free agent for a little over a year, what’s worked and what hasn’t.  Life-wise, writing-wise and, most interesting to some of you, marketing-wise.  For the longest time, my Facebook page was a fairly dull place.  That was because, primarily, I wasn’t giving it that much attention.  If you remember my post about ditching Facebook in my personal life, well, not a lot has changed since then.  I do have a personal account but it’s pretty de minimis.  I’m almost certain that I have fewer friends than your grandmother (online and in real life) and that’s just the way I like it.

But Facebook’s where the action’s at and after a year of ignoring my page I started to post more.  As of this writing I have just about 2,500 fans.  And a lot of advice about what to do, and what not to do, to gain more.

First, what not to do:

“Like for like” pleas.  “Hey, I saw your page, it’s great, blah blah blah, come give mine a like.”  This seems, to some, to be a great idea.  It isn’t.  Because, put yourself in the other person’s shoes.  They’re sitting there–I’m sitting there–asking, who is this person?  If I get to know you from your comments on my page, as a fan, then I might come check out yours. But I officially “like” very few pages, as doing so is something of a formal endorsement. Unless I feel really confident in who you are and what you’re about, I’m not going to tell my fans, directly or indirectly, go check this person out.  And really, the best thing for me–and for you–is for everyone to stick to pages in which they have a genuine interest.
Request free promotion.  This is a variant on the “like for like” deal.  You see that I’m an author, that I have a reasonably good following; you come to my page and ask me to promote your book, figuring that you’ll gain the same following.  Except it doesn’t work like that.  Even if I did read your book, and like your book, enough to recommend it to people that wouldn’t necessarily translate into anything.  Highly regarded, world famous reviewers write glowing reviews of books all the time.  Books that, for the most part, nobody buys.  My Facebook page can’t do for you what The National Book Critics Circle can’t.  When was the last time you sat down to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ?  Moreover, you know nothing about me and nothing about my fan base.  You could have written the best chick lit ever and it wouldn’t matter; my fans, by and large, aren’t really your market.

You’re not going to build a following, on Facebook or anywhere else, trying to poach fans from other authors.  With or without their cooperation.  Everyone who decides to like your page, or not, is doing so–regardless of how they found your page–because something about it appeals to them.  So, although it may sound obvious, it’s really not: you have to have appealing content.  Not in the sense of mindless, endless advertising (this may be appealing to you, in the sense that you’re hoping it’ll sell something), but in the sense of, well…actual content.

Think about the pages you like.  What do they share?  What do you wish they’d share less of?

The goal here isn’t to repost everything George Takei shares because you like George Takei but to recognize what’s individual in, for example, his page as a means of recognizing what’s individual–or can be–in yours.  Takei is successful, ultimately, because he’s being himself.  Yes, he (and presumably his admins) shares more than a few cutesy animal pictures but he also calls out Clarence Thomas as an Uncle Tom.  There’s a living, breathing human being behind that page and you can tell.

Decide what you stand for and what you don’t.  It can help sometimes to write a comments policy, even if you never post it.  What kind of interactions do you encourage?  What do you outright ban?  At the end of the day, what kind of page are you trying to create?  Speaking for myself, I try to encourage discussion of my books (for those who read them; not all of my Facebook fans do), history, and various Pagan-interest topics.  I do lose fans, when they realize I’m not Christian, or not strictly straight, but that’s okay.  I’m not trying to appeal to everyone.  And neither should you, because it’s impossible.  All you’ll do is drive yourself–and everyone else–crazy with boredom.

So, keeping all that in mind, here are a few concrete suggestions:

Make interesting memes, and put your (page) name on them.  Got a favorite quote, that you consider your life’s motto?  Find something really funny?  Memes are sound bites in shareable form.  A meme gets shared when a blog post length status doesn’t.  Why?  Because the latter takes real investment to read.  Which is great, for any hardcore fans who want to take the time and indeed have the time available.  But for the rest of the world, time commitments should be optional.  People want content they can digest now.  And that content is what gets liked, and what gets shared.  And, in turn, the more likes and shares you get, the broader your page reach becomes.
Share links to your blog.  Let people know what the article is about, preferably in one (funny) sentence or less.  This is where your in depth content should be.  Not on Facebook.  Seriously, when was the last time you turned to Facebook because you felt like reading a 5,000 word article over lunch?
Get personal, but not too personal.  People want to know about you.  They don’t want to hear the gritty pathos of your last encounter with Aunt Emerald.  Unless it’s funny.  And even then, be careful.  There’s a line between your internet persona and your real life.  Only you can decide where that line is, and how much of yourself–your real self–you want to give away.  But if you’re not careful, things can get really creepy, and even downright scary, really quickly.
Learn to say no.  To fans.  To the randos who want money, or want you to like their page.  Boundaries are everything, when your career involves the internet.
Don’t boss your fans around.  Yes, if someone’s being outright horrible, ban them or do whatever you need to do to maintain a safe environment.  But I remember, years ago, I was on a page that I actually really liked but had to leave simply because the page owner–and she loved to remind everyone that she was the page owner–literally would not let anyone have a conversation.  Every other post was her telling people she “didn’t want drama,” etc etc etc, and calling people out for doing the internet version of looking at her funny, when in truth she was the only one creating drama.  I’ve seen that a fair bit since, and it’s just never a good thing.  Nobody needs to know how much you hate someone else on another page.  Nobody needs mindless, endless vaguebooking.  Calling on your fans to secretly hate, actively troll, and outright cast evil spells on (yes, I’ve seen all of this with my own two eyes) someone is the worst kind of middle school twaddle.

Decide what you stand for, online and off, and then stand for it all the time.  Focus, to the extent necessary, on why you wanted a page in the first place and on what you hoped it would accomplish.  Spend less time trolling other people’s pages for more fans and more time interacting with the fans you do have.  If you wait until you have ten thousand fans to give a shit about them, trust me: you’ll never have more than about ten.