This story’s still deciding whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. I suspect a little of both.
When he realized how upset his wife was, George wondered if he might have miscalculated. Normally a quiet and loving partner, she was unpacking the dishwasher with a great deal of clattering and muttering.
“It’s not as though you even ever dated her!” she said, slamming a series of mugs into the cupboard.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” he replied, watching as she swept up the basket of cutlery and began throwing it into a drawer to jangle against his nerves. “I’ve left you everything. All I did was will her a copy!”
She turned, resting her hands on her hips. “You’re leaving her a copy of your personality. Essentially yourself.”
“No,” he said. “I’m leaving that to you. You’ll have me on tape, you’ll be able to transfer me into some mechanical form to keep you company. I just thought Janice might like one too.”
“Why?” Mary’s glare said she had her own suspicions.
George refused to dignify them with a reply. He’d been faithful to her all his life. A good husband. He could be allowed his own eccentricities, and If leaving a copy of himself, a digital copy created from a barrage of tests and brain scans and gathered data, to an old friend was one of those eccentricities, then he didn’t really see where Mary had the right to say much about it. She could leave her own copy or copies to her own friends.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping
If this is all that your social media plan consists of, you may want to put more time and thought into it.Are you a writer on Twitter because you’ve been told you need to be on there? Are you trying to establish “a social media presence” while not quite sure what that involves? Relax and don’t worry. Twitter can be easy and often a lot of fun as well as useful, as long as you take the time to learn some of the basics for Twitter use.
One useful tool for making the most of Twitter is the list feature, where you can sort a subset of your followers into their own group. If you’ve never used it, you may want to start by reading through Twitter’s own basic tutorial on lists.
Twitter lists are a great feature that are worth making the most of. I’ve got a few set up for industry professionals, close friends on Twitter, members of various writing groups and organizations, former students, and people in a variety of fields. But there’s one that is more important than any of the others.
Building Your Followers
A pack of followers made up of people who followed you back because you followed them is not a particularly useful list. You want followers who retweet your content, help spread your message, and who provide interesting and useful content that you may want to share in turn. For this reason, it’s worth putting a few minutes each day into maintaining it. I use two tools to help me do this: Buffer and Justunfollow.
Buffer allows me to schedule tweets (which I also like because I can post stuff when not around and find new followers that way). When I initially post a link to a blogpost, for example, I can go ahead and set up a couple of additional mentions further on down the line. More importantly, I use Buffer when doing my daily follower check, looking to see who’s following me that I want to follow back. I look at each new follower’s tweets and usually favorite a couple or find tweets that I want to retweet, sticking them in my Buffer queue. (I should note that I am not using the free version of Buffer but the next version up, which lets me schedule roughly ten days of tweets in advance.
Who I Don’t Follow Back
I don’t follow everyone back automatically. Here’s the list that’s evolved over time of profiles I don’t bother following back:
Sell, sell, sell. Is your stream full of nothing but links to your book on Amazon? Then I’m probably not worrying about.
Nonexistent. No photo, no background info, no tweets? I’m not going to bother.
Promising me social media success. I’m not buying Twitter followers, nor am I paying for expensive seminars that tell me things that are common sense.
Hate speech. That should, I think, go without saying.
Disagree with me politically? That’s fine. I enjoy conversation. Post nothing but silly puns or kitten pictures? I’m fine with that. I’m even good with total nonsense. This sorting stage is where I build a lot of my lists, though not that crucial one I want to talk about. That one comes later.
The Interactives List
Lists are a terrifically useful feature of Twitter, allowing you to create subgroupsand view tweetstreams made up of only tweets from people on that list. Many of my lists are devoted to either a specific group like former students or players of a MUD I used to work with or an industry niche, like book reviewers or editors. And then there’s the most important list of all.
This list is top of my heap and it’s titled Interactives, for people that interact, who RT and reply and generally signal boost. I try to periodically thank people for RTing, which means running through who’s done it recently, and I add people to it at that point. The people on that list have demonstrated that they enjoy my content and want to spread my message. That’s a very good reason for working at building a relationship with them.
When I’m just poking at Twitter, looking to see what interesting conversations are happening or what content is noteworthy or a good candidate for retweeting, I go to that list first. If I’m filling up my Buffer stream with some interesting content, I can find it there, and continue to build the relationship while also giving my followers interesting and/or entertaining content.
If you’re worried about it getting too cluttered, run the tool I mentioned, Justunfollow, periodically to weed out people not following you back and inactives. That should do the trick for all but the most popular of Tweeters.
Pinterest can prove strangely addictive. Can you make that addiction part of your social network branding efforts?I’m prepping for this weekend’s class on Blogging and Social Networks and, as always, there’s lots of new stuff that I need to fold into my existing notes. Pinterest is a big one — it’s become a big deal since last time I taught the class and so I need to talk about it.
What makes Pinterest interesting?
It’s interesting partially because it’s a new way of sorting information. Some of us think in images rather than text, and this may be more accessible for them.
It’s also interesting because it’s become identified as a woman-centric social network – or at least that’s something the media has focused on, to the point where a male friend stated definitively and somewhat defiantly, “I don’t know a single man who uses Pinterest, but every woman I know does.” (Reported figures seem to actually put women at 60-82% of the users). Women adopt new social media more readily than men, which may account for some of it, but the odd tone that some of the reporting takes on makes it a phenomenon worth taking a look at.
And it’s interesting because it’s growing FAST to the point where it’s the number 3 social network.
How can writers use Pinterest?
Well, an obvious one is a board that features their book covers. For example, Stephen Hunt’s Books Worth Reading (by me) displays 24 covers, including foreign language editions. It’s a nifty way of showing one’s output.
You might choose to create a gallery of fan art as both a way of gracefully acknowledging fans while driving recognition of the stories they illustrate.
Using it isn’t difficult, not is incorporating it into your website. There are plenty of WordPress plug-ins for Pinterest already; I use one to provide additional visual interest to my website.
Why might you want to avoid Pinterest?
Plenty of questions have arisen about Pinterest and copyright, although the company has been responsive to concerns and revised its terms of service as a result. While some avoid Pinterest for these reasons, some advocate embracing it, as Trey Ratcliff does in his essay, Why Photographers Should Stop Complaining about Copyright and Embrace Pinterest, pointing out that it drives website traffic.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
This story’s still deciding whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. I suspect a little of both.
