Christa is…

[Christa Faust]

Christa is…

I’ve been resisting the trend of microblogging a la twitter/facebook/myspace/etc for a variety of reasons. First of all, while I may be wildly extroverted in some ways, I’m actually a very private person in many others. I don’t mind sharing my opinions, my writing process and some occasional bits of more personal ephemera with my readers in a structured essay-like form like this. However, I have no desire to share an ongoing play by play broadcast of the daily mundane details of my existence with a billion virtual strangers.

Besides, if I’m not busy writing (or handling the business of writing), I’m usually not at my desk. With the exception of the few blogs I read regularly, I’m not a person who spends endless hours goofing around on the internet. I spend so much time at this damn desk every day that I have no desire to spend my rare leisure time here too. Even if I had some newfangled portable gadget that would allow me to be on the internet all the time everywhere I went, I would still rather be reading, playing with my dogs, hitting the heavy bag, having sex or any damn thing that doesn’t involve announcing to the universe exactly what I’m doing at any given moment. In fact, I wonder how anyone has time to actually live their lives when they’re so busy mircoblogging about it.

I guess I also find the trend disturbing because it’s yet another example of how impossible it is to get anyone under 40 to read more than five words in a row. Me, I like reading the blogs of authors whose work I enjoy. It’s almost like DVD supplements to their books, little extra bits of writing that I get as a free bonus for being a fan. I derive no such enjoyment out of single truncated, in-jokey textspeak non-sentences, no matter how much talent the author may possesses.

On the other hand, if I did do that sort of obsessive status update, here’s what it would probably look like:

9:47 am: Christa is writing.
11:06 am: Christa is writing.
2:13 pm: Christa is writing.
5:51 pm: Christa is staring at the blinking curser.
7:32pm: Christa is writing.

So what do you guys think? Writers, do you find mircoblogging to be a useful promotional tool? Readers, do you follow these kinds of feeds or status updates from your favorite authors and do you feel more connected to authors that microblog vs. authors that don’t? Am I just a curmudgeonly old fart? Discuss.

[Josephine Damian]

Twitter is where it's at! It helps drive traffic to your blog, and it's a great replacement for email. I can cut way back on blogging and myspace now that I twitter. Twitter is the light, easy way to communicate - the wave of the future as blogger and myspace - the much bigger time drains - fall off, IMO.

Twitter is all about converstation, and not blatant self promote of your books. It's also not a reality show of your life/day, either, although some treat it that way. Come ascross as interesting and people will automatically be interested in reading your books.

[Peery]

Our MySpace has proven to be an AMAZING promotional/networking tool.

[Seth Harwood]

You're missing the point. Sure, some people use it to suck away their time, but you won't use it that way. You'll use it how you want to, WHEN you want to, and you'll get something good out of it that way.

[Pepper Smith]

There seem to be a lot of people doing it, but maybe that's because it's the latest new technology. I can't say I'm interested in following stuff like that. I'm certainly not interested in doing it. I'd rather concentrate on writing my stories instead.

Sometimes it seems like society has become far too voyeuristic...