Wordless Wednesday: Armchair Quarterbacking

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Facebook fan pages for writers

Several months ago, my Windy City Romance Writers group had a formal presentation on how writers can use Facebook. I remember some published authors wondering why they should go to the effort to create a fan page to promote their writing instead of using their personal profile for that purpose.

Recently, I've been helping a few Windy City writers set up fan pages, so the question has been swirling in my head.

Below are some rough thoughts on the subject. This is the same list I sent to members of my writers group. Comments are welcome.

Why create a fan page on Facebook instead of using your personal profile to promote your writing?

Your personal profile is meant to be personal. You probably have family and non-writing friends on Facebook with whom you'd like to keep in touch. Having a fan page helps you separate people you know from people you don't personally know and limit how much personal information you're potentially exposing to strangers.

Being a Facebook "friend" with someone is a two-way relationship. If I like a writer's work, but don't know the writer personally, I wouldn't presume to ask them to be a "friend". However, I wouldn't be afraid to become their "fan".

Your fans are interested in news about your writing career. That's why they became fans on Facebook. They hope to get rewarded with news about what's happening with your writing. If you have a fan page, when you post career-related news, you don't have to be afraid of inundating family and personal friends with too much self-promotion.

Fan page administrators aren't public. You can administer a fan page without revealing who you are or your personal profile information.

You can have multiple administrators for a fan page. This way, you can have someone else silently help you run your fan page and build community.

Fan pages look and act a lot like your profile page, so navigating one doesn't require much extra knowledge.

Fan page status updates stream to fans' Home pages, just like updates from their personal friends. It's hard to tell the difference when viewing your Home page.

Windy City Romance Writers on Facebook

I've started a collection of Windy City Romance Writer fan pages. Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know if I should add you to the list.

Destiny d'Otare
Grace d'Otare
Ann Macela
Jenna Petersen
Deborah Pfeiffer
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Denise Swanson
Melody Thomas
Margaret Watson

Don's Brutalist School

A friend I've written about before on this blog, Don Hammontree, just released a new video for a new song, Treason. It's catchy, but with some strong language.

As he explained it on his Facebook post:

"This is the video for "Treason," the opening song off my CD "Brutalist School." It's a protest song aimed at the corporations and fat cats who are selling the working people of this country out by sending all the jobs anywhere but here."

Don, whom I know from my days working at the newspaper, has first-hand experience with the unemployment situation in this country, as he's a victim of the ever-shrinking newspaper industry. He's also lived in some neighborhoods especially hard-hit by the economic downturn.

His CD Brutalist School is available in iTunes and from CD Baby.

A world of books to discover

"Every baby needs love, the magic of words, and the rhythms of language. A writer's baby needs that AND his own library."

That's what a friend, who writes romance novels as Lindsay Longford, wrote in a card to me this summer before Baby X's arrival.

"May your baby love books and stories and the gift of reading as much as you do."

I put the card aside, intending to write in this blog about it, because I really like the sentiment. More than six months later, I'm finally getting around to it.

And, wow, does Baby X have an impressive library. My writer friends showered him with books, one of my two baby showers had a theme of giving inscribed books instead of cards, and another good friend passed along her children's library, which they'd outgrown. Remarkably, of all the books given, only four were duplicates. These were either exchanged or are awaiting re-gifting so another child can experience the joy.


We're already having fun reading board books to him, such as Barnyard Dance! and Guess How Much I Love You.

My husband and I can't wait to read the rest of Baby X's books to him over and over as he grows. It'll be an education for me, too, since I've never read a lot of the classics, or have forgotten them, or they became classic long after I grew up.

Fish!

So I made you wait more than a day for the answer. Sorry.

What do "yesterday's" two objects (homeless stuffed animals and a pile of gravel) have in common?

Anyone who has visited my home in the past TEN YEARS or read this previous blog post should have guessed the answer: A fish tank.



Specifically, it's a 65-gallon fish tank that we emptied back in 2000 when we moved to San Francisco (then back to Chicago). It got filled with stuffed animals during the move, and the stuffed animals didn't leave it again until four weeks ago. Frankly, the jokes about it needing a crane arm to look like one of those arcade games never got old.

But now that joke is so 2009, because the fish tank is a proper fish tank again.

See?



We tested it first to make sure it held water after almost 10 years of being dry. Success.

Then we called in Cousin Bob, who is our experienced aquarium man in the family, and he helped us buy a new filter and get the gravel clean and all the fun stuff.

Here's Cousin Bob on gravel duty (remember this photo is four weeks old, the Christmas tree is down by now):



And here's my husband assembling the filter:



Then we put in half a dozen hearty starter fish (zebra danios) and let the tank cycle for a month to get the bacteria on track.



This coming weekend we'll get the water tested and -- voila! -- add fish!

But not this kind of fish. This is Baby X. We do know the difference. :)