Picking Up Things Instead of my Pen

This post is not endorsed by facebook. Nor twitter. Though it is because of twitter I’m writing it. Just noticed I’m up to about 7100 tweets. So I did what any rational dude would do: opened my calculator app, multiplied “7100” by a guessed-at average tweet-length of 120 characters. Where that gets me is: 852,000 characters. So what I did then was open the latest novel I’ve written, which I’ve now pared down to 97K words or so, and did a character count on that: And that’s not counting spaces, as I was trying to be generous—also, I was trying not to get suddenly despondent. Still, the numbers don’t lie: since November 2010 (gulp), I’ve written nearly two novels’ worth of words just in tweets. But, yeah, let’s say retweets are counted in that total, and chip a big chunk of characters off such that I’ve now just written one fairly long novel’s worth of characters, that add up to words, that add up to sentences and paragraphs and scenes . . . involving characters, which, to me, are people. Not just exactly thrilled with that: I’m losing people, here. And, before you get nervous, no, I don’t want to be one of those users who logs onto social media to badtalk social media. Social media serves whatever its purpose is, which I think this pretty much explains: I’m one of the ones eating those donuts, I mean. Yes, I’m the farm animal in this pretty terrifying meme (it conjures “Bloodchild” for me): But, too? It’s fun  . . . → → →

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