And So March Begins

So one of my resolutions, post-Confusion, was to be better about social networking and spreading word of my projects. Towards that end I’ve been posting scraps of the WIP on a daily basis (and plan to do so until it’s done or someone buys it), doing more writing for the SFWA blog (just finished up a review, and I’ve got interviews scheduled with authors Myke Cole and Jason Heller) as well as a series I proposed on Thomas Burnett Swann for the Tor.com blog, and — in keeping with my belief that one of the best ways to promote yourself is to promote other people — trying to mention interesting stuff on various social networks.

So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.

I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.

Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.

One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?

And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.

Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.

What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?

Enjoy this advice about social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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.

Hello folks! January has been crazy, and I have been bad about blogging. One thing I’m going to be doing going forward is scattering in some food posts, because I’m cooking a lot this year as well as working with the SFWA Cookbook Project.

BEASTS OF TABAT is coming out on March 27, 2015, at Emerald City ComicCon, which is very exciting, but also blindingly fast. If you want to get news about the book and other projects, please sign up for my mailing list:

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Meanwhile, I’m working away on two book projects, one a YA novel, the other Book 2 of the Tabat Quartet, HEARTS OF TABAT. It picks up halfway through BEASTS OF TABAT and involves three of the secondary characters. Book 3, EXILES OF TABAT, will take up the characters from BEASTS OF TABAT again at the point where BEASTS leaves off. Book 4, GODS OF TABAT, is plotted but I’m still figuring out the viewpoint stuff.

One of the viewpoint characters of HEARTS OF TABAT is Adelina, Bella’s former lover and closest friend. I’ve been writing about her this morning:

Adelina knew that in producing only one child, Emiliana had replicated the structure of the family from which she’d come. She wondered sometimes if her mother ever had, like Adelina, wished for a sister. What would it be like to have another soul that knew all the peculiar circumstances of your family existence, the conglomeration of odd relatives and circumstances and situations but more than anything, knew all the little sore spots that the world insisted on imposing, like the way her mother could, with a single look, indicate so much disapproval of an outfit.

Adelina straightened her shoulders. This was the first time she’d appeared in front of her mother wearing the cut and device of a Publisher, the open pages of a book, edged in the gold lines that indicated she was the head of a house. There were only five people in Tabat qualified to wear that device, but Emiliana refused to see any distinction in that. A house that worked in paper was lower status than one that worked in metal, let allow the heights that a banking house like the Nettlepurses were at. In Emiliana’s eyes, Adelina had stripped herself of all that, had stepped down into what was for Emiliana the equivalent of a puddle of shit when compared to the rarefied heights she had been born into.

Adelina imagined a sister standing beside her, whispering in her ear, “It’s all right. She doesn’t understand what an advantage such an outlet could be to a banking house.” A sister would have been willing to take the reins of the Nettlepurses and work together with Spinner Press, taking advantage of all that the two could offer each other.

But that was the other part of Emiliana’s disappointment. There were others who could take Adelina’s role, certainly, but they were all of distant blood, rather than her child.
And while Adelina could argue the advantages of her having formed the publishing house over and over again, she couldn’t argue with that disappointment, the real reason that underlay the look Emiliana gave Adelina as she came into the breakfast room.

But Emiliana said nothing, only offered a sharp nod of greeting, and returned her attention to the newssheets in her hands, the accounts of the morning arrivals at the docks, which ships carrying what, traveling mainly from the Southern Isles or elsewhere on the coast, but sometimes from the Old Continent or even places like the Rose Kingdom or the Winterlands.

In other news, I’ll be speaking briefly at an animated short films presentation that’s part of the Seattle Asian-American Film Festival on February 14th. See the Supernatural Seattle blog for details, and follow it on Twitter in order to get news of events and posts as they appear.