Social Media And Glue

As a heads up, my blog will be experiencing some down time the next three or four days. I’m having it revamped to better the user experience, not to mention give me some more creative liberty. The theme we’re using right now is fun, but it’s also very restrictive. I’ll be posting the new version of it and everything the moment it is completed.

But today we’re talking about social media and glue. Fun stuff, right?

I spend a decent amount of time on social media, whether it’s Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or whatever. That isn’t to say that I spend all my time on there wisely. Realistically, I should probably be saying wise author-like things or promoting other authors or myself or reviewing books or whatever every time I login. I know that. I don’t do it, though. Why? No idea. I’d cite time, but then I’m already on the social media, so that’s a pretty lame excuse.

What I do pretty well on social media, however, is people watch. I’m a people watching champion from way back when. Just ask anyone. Have a few medals to prove it. They’re sharp and poky and I don’t wear them anymore, so you can’t see them. And every social media platform has its own special brand of people watching: on Facebook I get to see people rant, on Instagram I get to see, umm, people, and on Twitter I get to see off-the-cuff, almost guaranteed honest reactions to the world.

The most interesting of them, for the purposes of this post, is Twitter. Mostly because tons of authors congregate on there. What’s more, authors tweet. A lot. And it’s usually pretty entertaining.

Here’s where social media and writing tie-in together. Twitter, in its oh so brazen world, has bonded authors and writers together in a way that I don’t think has ever been done before. And, if it has, then it’s been kept on the DL.

Lemme’ explain myself.

I know diddly shit about history (I was a history major, by the way). To my knowledge, authors sat around writing, drinking copious amounts of liquor, and basically doing their own thing. Yeah, I know there were great friendships and relationships between authors, but, to my knowledge, it wasn’t anything as vast as it is today.

After booting up the ole’ Twitter feed just a second ago (do things still get booted up?), I ran a quick scan down its length. Taking up approximately 70% of my page is Sam Sykes and his Otis obsession, followed by Robert Bennett from City of Blades, then Brian Staveley, Patrick Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie and his wife, Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch’s jealousy inducing long hair, and Brian McClellan playing with his Legos. Pretty well-known, respected authors in the fantasy community, eh?

Here’s the cool thing. They’re all, to one degree or another, in communication with one another. Some more than others, as can be found with the consistently ludicrous (but wildly entertaining) stories exchanged by Skyes and Bennett, to a different author commenting on Mclellan’s new Lego cabin, etc.

In effect, social media is bonding these authors together in a way that has never been done before. It is, in many ways, the glue of these relationships. Twitter’s speed of posting, its ease of reading, and host of other features make these relationships easy to obtain.

Now only that, but it allows other writers to get in touch with these authors. And out of those writers, some of them will eventually become well-known/famous in their own right, so in fifteen or twenty years, we very probably will have an entire network of fantasy writers that know each other, not only professionally, but on a personal level.

That’s pretty cool, in my opinion.

Now, it’s not all sunshine and daises. I prefer storms anyway. Eventually, if this does happen, cliques are going to end up forming. Not everyone is going to get along. There are going to be differences of opinions, alternate takes on subject matter, arguments about the validity of a sword-wand, and all the other normal factors that go into making people enemies. This probably already happens to a degree, but with authors being more in touch than ever before – publicly – so too will these cliques form in the eyes of readers. Possibly. I’m just throwing out hypotheticals.

I, for one, am looking forward to this. Not necessarily the cliques, but the vast network of authors communicating with one another. And why not? The more people talking, the more ideas get shared. And the more ideas get shared, the better possibility there is of something extraordinary getting written. Ideas are meant to be for all, not cravenly held close to one’s chest and petted at night and whispered about. Twitter and the other social medias will help this spread organically, and it will better the fantasy genre.

It almost hurts me to say this, but long live social media.

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