Submissions, writer's block, and Twitter

Last week I mentioned that I was holding off submitting my typescript, Mr. Gunn and Dr. Bohemia, until I heard back from Harper Voyager (or not) about whether they were interested (or not) in two manuscripts that I'd sent to them in October.

Having said that in the blog, the very next day I talked it over with Kate and then I changed my mind; Gunn & Bohemia has now been submitted to a publisher. I should get a response before the end of January, and if they accept it I will post here and send out a tweet, and then quite likely spontaneously combust.

As for the current WiP, that's going slowly at the moment. I'm in the process of developing the story and I've hit a bit of a wall. I have two characters converging on a particular place to locate a particular item, and I'm not sure who should arrive first, and then what should happen. Will they fight, or become untrusting allies? Sounds a bit trivial, I know, but whatever happens has to unfold in a way that's believable given what I've established about these guys' characters.

We all hear about writer's block. Well, this is how I experience it. It always happens during these earlier parts of developing a story, when I'm still getting my head around the ways each character is most likely to react to a given situation and how multiple characters are likely to interact when they're together. Once I'm past that part and I have a complete storyline I don't get blocked again because I have a process - I break the story down into scenes in the form of a storyboard, then once that's done and I've reviewed it for problems I can start the actual writing of the first draft (there's actually a bit more to it than that, but I don't need to go into too much detail). By that time I know what's going to happen in each scene, so I've left behind the strategy of building a story and I'm into the tactics of telling the story.

It'll probably be a couple of weeks at least before I have the WiP to the point where I can consider the story done and I can start storyboarding. With Christmas coming up, it's looking like I won't reach that point until the new year. Well, we'll see.

On to a completely different subject: Twitter. Can someone please tell me why some people think it's so important to gain vast numbers of followers? Sure, it must be nice, but is it worth going to the extremes, such as even paying for followers?

A while ago I read a "Twitter For Dummies" blog post that explained How To Use Twitter: follow a boatload of people you don't know; wait a couple of days; get rid of the ones that don't follow you back; rinse and repeat. Maybe once a day, do a huge burst of retweets, and occasionally throw in an original tweet of your own.

Note that doing things this way you're not following people because you care about what they're saying - there's no way you could be, following that many. The object of the exercise is purely to get followers. Some of the people following me in the past (and possibly even now; I haven't looked recently) follow twenty, thirty, forty thousand other people. Anything that I say, or that any one of those tens of thousand of people says, is lost in the noise. I don't see the point, so if someone could explain that to me I'd appreciate it. For what it's worth, I follow people with something interesting to say, and I don't follow so many that I can't read most if not all of their tweets. If that means I don't have that many followers, I don't sweat it.

Until next week...