Day Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three and Twenty Four: My Social Media Dabble

The boy cat watching the builders on Day Twenty-Three

It’s not my fault. (Well, it is kind of – I’m an adult, I invited the builders into my life). I had no idea the drilling would be so loud or the interruptions so frequent. I mean, these guys are nice too – they’re not your stereotypical grunt-at-you-and-look-at-your-tits kind of builders. My wife has gone into crazy tea / coffee / doughnut provision mode. We can’t walk up to our own front door. The cats aren’t happy.

Again, I’m writing this from a distance of about a month, but that’s why I spent a few days working on social media. Like I said, don’t blame me for procrastinating, it’s not my fault.

I discovered HootSuite and Buffer earlier this year. I had vaguely heard of them but on these noise-filled days in August, I worked out how to use them. It is easy to get quite social media obsessed by the end of it all. Or bored. There was a point where I tipped over from ‘extremely enthusiastic about the tech stuff’ into ‘wanting everyone to go away so I could write’.

Let me clarify two points there:

1. I could programme my Commodore 64 when I was a kid. There’s an alternative universe somewhere where I write computer programmes, make shed loads of money, and wear a baseball cap with ‘nerd’ on it, with pride, ALL THE TIME. So I like fiddling with computers.
2. By ‘write’ I mean finally decide how the plotting is going to work in the novel I’m trying to finish. I don’t mean that I need to generate words. That isn’t my problem right now. The need to find some silence is definitely my problem.

Anyhow, I ended up using Buffer to schedule Facebook posts and Tweets for my busy teacher ‘fans’ of the Drama Book and for people who like my author page. Yes, it bordered on the obsessional in the end, and questions of audience became rather pertinent considering some of the posts are scheduled for two years time. Given what’s happening in the world, I could have scheduled a cheerful post for two years time about how to write a Christmas short story, and War might have changed the face of the planet, and that’s not even an exaggeration.

At least the lesson about needing to find some quiet focus time to sequence my novel is getting (literally) hammered home.