I often dream of the time when I become a famous novelist who lives entirely off of her earnings from creative endeavours*, and how I will have an amazing assistant whose life is made better simply by being in mine.
The general dream is that this assistant will be exactly like me except bad at writing, so that she won't pull an Eve Harrington on me (don't worry if you don't get this reference; my assistant will explain it to you!). I would pay her an exceptionally high salary for an assistant, which would make her like me, and would allow her to borrow outfits from my lavishly stylish closet whenever she chooses, which would make her love me, and she would constantly be telling people what a great employer I am. In exchange, she would be really good at all the things I am not good at, such as making coffee, cooking omelettes that remain in omelette form, finding good music to write to, preventing me from writing in marking pen all over my body, walking in high-heeled shoes without having ankle pain (a tip she'd pass on to me, of course) and understanding how twitter works.
This last requirement came to me only an hour ago, when I joined twitter and realized that it is a foreign world that I don't understand am not entirely sure I like. I joined because I have been told by several people that I'd be good at it, and generally if I'm told I'd be good at something, I eventually try my hand at it. But I don't get this thing. First off, there are these weird little "#" things that are supposed to do something, I'm sure of it, but I don't know what and I can't be bothered to find out currently. Secondly, I'm not quite sure what one is supposed to post on twitter. A quick little post outlining how I lost my bra in the vegetable garden this morning? A comment about the oatmeal cookies I tried to make this afternoon? A complaint about how my foot hurts right now? Isn't this what facebook is for?
And then, how often am I supposed to update this thing? Right now, I have a measly 3 posts, all made within an hour of each other. Any more in an hour seems a bit excessive to me, but 3 is a very sad number in the social networking world. Having only 3 of something generally indicates that you fail at life. 3 facebook friends, 3 blog posts, 3 subscribers**...yep, 3 is a number of insignificance online. So this assistant of mine would explain to me the finer points of Twitter etiquette. Then, I'd give her my hilarious notes about the day and she'd actually manage to fit them into 140-character posts without having to experience the pain of cutting words like "extensive conversation" down to "convo" for brevity's sake.
*including but not limited to: writing novels, keeping up a humour column, blogging, and sewing cute little dresses.
**speaking of, I have 10 subscribers now! Exciting! This would be more exciting if I hadn't had 12 subscribers a week ago. Where did the other 2 go? Jerks.
I recently read that J K Rowling has thousands of people following her on Twitter, but has only posted (made/broadcast/whatever) 6 tweets in the last however many years Twitter has existed.
ReplyDeleteSo, if you want to follow in her footsteps in that way, you're halfway there.
-Al
Thanks for the encouragement! I will consider myself amongst the Literary Greats* from now on.
ReplyDelete*and by that I mean the Children's Fantasy Literary Greats.