Rotten Tomatoes, Via Apathy

Here's an excellent story idea: fiction writer from the past is forced to grapple with modern writing networking tools.

Hemingway would be great with Twitter's format. But he would hate its audience. The Great Gatsby would have never been published by marketing on Facebook.

Here's dangerous mettle for you...silence. Perhaps you've experienced it. You call someone, and your call is never answered. You write something, and the publisher never even bothers to reject you (an ironic form of rejection). Or, we can go more subtle...you post things on vast, virtual walls, and they are greeted by...

SILENCE.

That's been happening to me for three days. It's on par with the unkind self-assumption that others have given up on you, or are rolling their eyes at you (dumb c***, who does she think she is, doesn't she know how to do that in this age and with this kind of communication, etc), laughing at you...

By the middle of the afternoon today I had been ignored long enough. I shut off the phone and the computer. I picked up a paper book and finished it. When I turned the phone back on there was a text message for me, from a guy who had ignored my texts the first two months after I left my last workplace, someone who I thought was a friend, after all that silence. His message was simple--to sneer at me for the Giants' performance in Cincinnati. He wasn't just teasing--his message was to rub my face in a dirty diaper.

[I don't own the Giants. I love them openly, which I guess, in the words of "The Franchise," puts "a target on my back" too. Everyone hates the Giants and hates Giants fans, so I'm either going to get ignored...or insulted. That's after three days of being ignored trying to play the networking game on Twitter and Facebook. That's after trying to mingle in the "virtual cafe." I sent him back a two-word reply.

I'll let you guess what it said.]

The last three days have reminded me, very pointedly, that I need to remember why I write. I have to write for me. I have to write regardless. And I have to write quality stuff for my sake, not write just to stay in the game in hopes of keeping people interested. I don't monitor my "views" and try to increase them or weed them out. I am balls-out, accelerator to the floor. Every time I try to do that network/stats stuff I just feel like slitting my wrists. Hell, I didn't even check the stats today...I knew that NO ONE WAS READING. So I have to go back to writing stuff I would want to read, and sail back to the water in between for a while.

There was hope, though...Becky Levine, a children's author on Twitter, posted the following message to the world:

"Think. Write. Repeat and rinse."

So simple and so helpful. So I re-Tweeted it.

And she thanked me for doing that. Not everyone thinks I'm invisible...after all, she knew what I needed in the smallest of gestures--a thanks for the shout-out.

You're welcome. Write on.