Answers to Some Galaktika Magazine Questions

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.

Knocked out a good 2200 words on this, which is rapidly stretching towards novelette length, plus a flash piece, and another 500 words on something that may go anywhere, not sure at all with it. Hurray for productivity! Anyhow, here you go.

There was nothing else to do but tackle what I’d put off for so long: Grandmother’s suite. It occupied a good half of the Tudor house’s second floor ““ bedroom, lavishly appointed bath, sitting room. The high ceilings might have been lovely but they also allowed her to stack the boxes even higher there.

I’d avoided this spot even though it made no sense. If there were valuables, this was the logical place for them. No, it was something else that deterred me. Elsewhere in the house I could explore and pretend that my grandmother had just stepped out for a moment. To invade her bedroom, that was a different thing.

That was to acknowledge that she was dead.

I don’t believe in glorifying the dead. I will not pretend that my grandmother was a nice woman. I will not pretend that she was a kind woman. In truth, she was self-absorbed, strong-minded to the point of being a force of nature.
But she loved me. I was her only grandchild and when I was smaller, I could have done no wrong in her eyes. That was, perhaps, one of the things that divided my mother and I. She’d tried so hard all her life for her mother’s approval while I’d gotten it without even asking.

When someone loves you like that, deeply and unconditionally, it’s very hard not to love them back. My grandmother may have coerced me into the college of her choosing, but we’d both known the truth: while she’d do plenty to hurt my mother in the long and complicated game they’d been playing all their lives, she might have threatened to keep me hostage, but it was a strategy that would have worked for either side. My mother had not used it, but I wasn’t sure through unawareness or some moral scruple. I’d never understood all the currents of emotion that ran between them.

I paused in front of the oak double doors. They weren’t original to the house ““ she’d brought them back from somewhere in Bavaria and they were carved with willow trees and Rhine maidens. The handles were brass swans. I laid my fingers on one’s neck and tried the handle: locked. I sighed and began trying keys from the vast loop of unmarked ones I’d found in the kitchen. After ten minutes of trial and error, the lock clicked and I swung the door open.

I flipped the light switch on one side back and forth, but the bulb had long ago burned out. You couldn’t see the room for all the boxes. A narrow passageway led between the stacks of cardboard cartons ““ some old liquor boxes, others from thetrical supplies. The one at eye level to my right read: White Feathers: 1 Gross. White tendrils still clung to the tape along one edge.

I pushed my way forward through that cardboard corridor, so narrow that my shoulders brushed it on either side. It went straight for a few steps then branched, one side leading towards the window and (I presumed) the bed area, the other snaking towards her sitting room.

I opted for the latter.

At the threshold between the two rooms, I sought another light switch, but it was just as fruitless. The air smelled of dust and perfume and ancient cat pee. There had always been a cat around when I was a child, but in later years, Grandmother had renounced them and turned her nurturing side to the succulents out in the courtyard.

I was using my cell phone as a flashlight by now, holding it out between my fingertips. It startled me when it rang.

I glanced at the screen. My mother. I answered, standing there in the dusty darkness that smelled like Grandmother.

“Yes?”

“I need you to pick me up at the airport at 3:23,” my mother said.

“Today?”

“Of course today! I’m about to get on the plane. I’m flying on United, flight 171. Do you need me to repeat all that so you can write it down?”

“Why are you coming?”

“So I can help you, of course.”

Suspicion seized me. “Where are you staying?”

A pause, as though my question were in some foreign language that required translation before it could be processed. “With you, of course. Aren’t you staying there at the house?”

I imagined my mother “helping” me. It made my throat tight. All my life I’d watched the two of them do battle. Now my mother had come to crow over a victory that consisted of simply having outlived the other. Or, worse, like the others ““ the agents, Eterno ““ she wanted something here but would not tell me what.

I steeled myself and said, “No, you can’t do that. I’ll find you a hotel.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why on earth can’t I stay there?”

My mind cast about for excuses. There must be some reason.

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