Trying to be interesting

Well this week I decided to put the first ten chapters of my novel on line and see what happened. It’s being read but the silence is deafening. Is this good or bad? Hopefully no news is good news. I was delighted when one kind person did take the time to write a review of The Battles are the Best Bits and was extremely complimentary. I cannot complain if I don’t get much feedback. After all, I had never felt the need to post feedback on the internet about anything before, but now I am on the receiving end I understand how important it is when you are putting something out into the world to get some sort of response other than numbers sold or numbers read, as this tells you nothing.
I read some good advice at the start of the week about using social networking as a writer which I have been trying to put into practice. In a nutshell it advised the shy and awkward new writer taking their first uncertain steps into the online jungle not to feel that they had to constantly come up with clever things to say in order to bombard their followers with prompts to look at their work. This is how I approached things at first and I have since seen more blatant examples of this approach in action and it annoys me too. Instead the blog advised the new networker to get out into the world, see what other people are doing and writing, engage with it and share it.
Taking this approach suddenly made the whole exercise more enjoyable and fulfilling, instead of the chore it had been. That has been my lesson this week: If I am interested in interesting things, people hopefully will be more interested in me. If on the other hand I simply bore on about myself, I will turn people off.
With all this in mind I fired up my twitter this morning ready to go in search of tweetable morsels but was taken aback when I learned of the death of Neil Armstrong. What a sad thought that the first man on the moon is no longer among us. How strange it will be, in my lifetime, when no-one is alive who was part of that incredible era of ground-breaking exploration.
It was also a noteworthy moment in that this was the first time that I had learned of a major development in the world via twitter, rather than TV news or the newspaper. I expect that will become a more frequent occurrence for me.
They have yet to invent the waterproof tablet PC however so I’m off now to have a bath and read an old fashioned book with pages just to keep it real. SBJ
The Battles are the Best Bits