by Daney
My mother steadfastly refused to have anything to do with computers. She could make her VCR (remember those?) stand on its head, programming it to record several shows at once. That implies, at least to me, that she had a technical mind.
She was amazingly resilient in some ways. After my father died, when she was 49, she lived in five different towns and cities, adapting rapidly to each one. She convinced herself, however, that computers were beyond her ken. As a result, she was bewildered by how the world worked for many years.
I promised myself I would never let myself dwell so far outside the mainstream although I fear I am hopelessly uninformed about pop culture. I was on my way to being out of the loop about social media as well until it became clear that I would have to pay attention to Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc., to do my job competently. To my amazement and delight I discovered not another layer of chores but a source of valuable information and pleasure.
One of my early advisers on the genre said, “Download Tweetdeck and follow 10 sources that interest you personally.” I did a Twitter search for Getting Published and I was off!
I discovered that literary agents have blogs crammed with helpful information. No longer do we have to purchase that big, clunky book every year and read dozens of smug profiles to try to find someone who might possibly agree to read our manuscripts. We can follow their blogs, get to know them as people and tailor our query letters to their personal tastes. (One, for example, hates the Lakers!)
Celebrities—my kind, anyway—have also taken on a new resonance. It’s really fun to read Scott Simon’s Tweets about his state of mind before a big interview (he still gets nervous) and to know that he dotes on his young daughters.
I’m not kidding myself that getting published in the virtual world will be easier. I’m pretty sure it will be different, though. At this point I’ll settle for different.
