WLT 2010 Agents Conference

First I would like to say thank you so much to Doug for his help this weekend. I am typically not a very social person and have to work hard to make myself speak to people in one on one engagements like cocktail parties. He really took me under his wing and showed me the ropes during the Conference. His presence alone boosted my confidence, just having a friend there with me. So thank you very much.

Also, thanks goes out to Shennandoah for her encouragement throughout the weekend as well.

I really did learn a lot of great things at the conference. Met a lot of new people, handed out and collected a lot of business cards. Of course the goal of the conference is to make connections with agents and I made two really good connections.

Folks, if you have never been to one of these conferences and you are serious about writing, I HIGHLY recommend you sign up for next year ASAP.

Peace.

Technology Tip: Spredfast

Finding it difficult to keep up with all of your social media? Are you trying to manage multiple aliases or personas? Spredfast may be able to help you. This fee based service lets you coordinate ALL of your social media--youtube, blogs, twitter, facebook, flickr, and more--right from one dashboard. You can pre-schedule everything from tweets to blogs, track feedback, respond to replies and comments, calculate the reach of your efforts all from one spot!  You can also generate reports and create google analytic friendly breakdowns of click-throughs and links.

It truly makes managing your social media and interacting with your followers so much easier. For thos of you who collaborate with other authors, it lets you add multiple users per "voice," making it easy for multiple people to contribute should you choose.

Technology Tip: Twitterfeed

Have you been trying to keep up with your twitter and finding it almost impossible? Here's a free and handy tool to help you keep your tweets current and frequent. Twitterfeed lets you automatically post blog posts and RSS feeds from your blogs and any of your favorite ones you follow right to your twitter and facebook! Its extremely easy to set up. I have my blogs and some of my favorite agents and industry insiders automatically updated to my social media every day. It updates every hour so its always current.

More technology tips soon to come . . .

A DETOUR ON MY TRIP

My journey is supposed to end in publication of at least one mystery novel. To that end, I've sought publication for my mystery stories. A few have popped up in my head that are not mysteries, however. One was SHIPWRECK. It's been accepted by an epub called Dark Valentine Magazine, a place, they say, where dark fiction rules. http://darkvalentine.net/

The first issue is out today! Several of my friends have stories in this issue, but mine will be in issue #2 in September. This volume is 121 pages packed with 19 dark stories. Try it out! Click on the ISSUES tab (the cover will not get you there) and enter a nightmare realm.

Hey, have fun!

Yay Mary Ann!!

Finalists have been announced for the Writers' League of Texas manuscript contest, and look at this!

Children's Young Adult
"CeeGee's Gift" by Joy Selak
"Peter Englebright Preparatory Academy" by Holly Green "Alacran Turf" by Tim Crow
"The Good Life by Demery Bader-Saye
"Bayou Myths" Mary Ann Loesch

That's OUR Mary Ann!

BALANCE: How do YOU do it?

I'm back to posting after being away most of May. If I said I'm rejuvenated and ready to jump in that would be, um, not right. I've had to catch up on so many blogs and emails. Piles and piles.

I've read a few articles and blogs lately about social networking and its takeover. One article said that all the energy and brain power you put into posting on blogs, email lists, Facebook, and whatever takes away from the energy and brain power a writer needs for writing. I think it does remove focus, or at least fragment it, scatter it.

Does reading blogs and posts keep you from writing? Does writing them do it? Is there a good way to balance these things?

Once a writer is published, it's imperative that he/she promote. The time spent promoting is time NOT spent writing, but--hey--you have to do it. (Although someone recently blogged about the lack of connection between promotion and sales. But the blogger does admit you have to do it, even if there's no correlation. I thought this was Tess Gerritsen, but I can't find it on her blog.)


Should one spend an hour or two networking every day, or should one set aside a day of the week for it? I know what one shouldn't do--one shouldn't keep one's email program open all the time and click over there to see what's come in every few minutes. I've tried that and it doesn't work well. I wish someone had a wise solution!