Blocking Matilda

I've done it. I've reached my dreamy goal of having ten thousand Twitter followers. Hooray! Thank you so very much.

I went into social networking hoping to sell a few of my dozen published books. You see, I've been trying all kinds of ways to get my titles out there. Without the clout and marketing budget of a major publisher, I'm pretty much stuck selling my books to my acquaintances. Sound familiar?

At first, I loved tweeting. It was great for my undiagnosed OCD. 140 characters and I was good to go on to be distracted by something else. No big investment like group blogs, which I really enjoyed until I ran out of material. But this week I've had to block three people. I've probably only blocked that many in a whole year.

I schedule my book promo posts in advance using Hootsuite. So while it looks like I am tweeting 24/7/365, I'm not. Unless I'm retweeting your tweets or bantering with you, chances are I'm out living a real life with my real friends and enemies and family.

I mention this because there are people on Twitter who do not understand. The ones with 16 followers who believe you, dear author, are their new best friend and confidant. The ones who tweet something interesting, you respond, and then it's an endless rapid fire conversation.

Honestly, I don't mean to rudely leave the virtual room, but there is a real woman here on my end. Someone with a family to tend to. And places to go. Like the potty or bed or vacation or the gym or the dermatologist.

Sometimes when I have nothing left I can possibly say, I'll just retweet you and go to bed. But you don't always accept that. I'll wake up to "I see you didn't reply to my last tweet :(". In case you don't realize it, that's creepy and makes me very uncomfortable.

Well, no I didn't respond. I have no idea when you actually finished your avalanche. It was lost in my Twitter stream with the other 10,000 people who where sending their fascinating promo, wisdom and wisecracks.

So I block you.

I don't read Direct Messages. Because they all look like spam and are a waste of time. If you have something to say to me, tweet me publically and if  I see it, I will probably respond. If I've never met you in person and we've never even tweeted, don't tweet me every hour "Check your DM". That's creepy.

I'll block you.

This last one is something every writer will encounter. When you tweet a line of your professionally edited and published novel for promo, someone will tweet "Wouldn't it be more active to reword it this way..." or "This is not grammatically correct." Umm... the first time this happened to me it was like a kick in the gut. It was by an English professor. After I got over my hurt feelings, embarrassment and gone through the feelings that I was a complete hack, I thanked her. But the second time it happened, it was from another author. And I just felt like she was trying to one-up me. What do these people want me to do? The novels are in MY VOICE. There are a thousand ways to say everything. If we all were "correct" to the "unwritten rules of the day" we would be very generically boring. So, what did I do?

I blocked you. And I will in the future if anyone else publically and unsolicitedly "corrects" my prose. It's insulting.

I'll also block people who tweet things that grossly offend me. Can't elaborate because everyone's threshold is different.

Just to put it out there, I get blocked by people to. It's shocking to me when I click on the follow button and find out I've been blocked. I have no idea who the person is or when I followed them and offended. Sorry, buddy.

Who do you block?

Follow me on Twitter. I'll probably follow you back, I'll probably retweet you and I probably won't ever block you :)