Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Learning to tweet

It's not as easy as some seem to think. I can post a tweet--if I can think of something that's significant enough for 140 characters. But I read some advice about Tweetdeck.com, where you can control the tweets you get and eliminate those not of interest to you. My hashtags (note how I use that term so casually) would be writers, food, mysteries, write, and I'm sure I'd add others. So I signed up for Tweetdeck, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to choose my columns, which I think means the hashtags I want to see as opposed to all those hundreds that I don't care about. My friend Sue was, I thought, a pioneer in social media, since she told me how to put my blog posts on Facebook. But she bowed out at the mention of Tweetdeck.
Twitter is supposed to be really helpful if you have a new book to promote, which I don't, so maybe it's not crucial that I learn it right now. But once I get the idea in my head, I'm determined. I hope to get some of my older fiction on Kindle and other reading devices, and I guess Twitter would be good for promoting that.
Meantime I just learned that some of my grandchildren will be here this weekend--the Frisco girls briefly for lunch, the Austin boys and Jacob in my care for Saturday night while their parents party. So I'm making groceery lists and planning ahead. I love it.
Hot in Fort Worth tonight and humid--I sat on the porch to read for a while, and there was sort of a semi-breeze but when I came in, for only the second time this spring, I turned on the air conditioner. Won't leave it on long but want it to cool the house. Two days ago it was, as a friend said on Facebook, "right airish" in Cowtown but today it's right humid.
Last night I saved a gecko--little critter had found it's way into the hall by the bathroom, and I thought I'd better rescue it before the cat discovered it. Do you know how fast those things move? I had a hard time but finally got him onto a paper towel, fortunately upside down so that he couldn't scamper off. I kept telling him gently that I'd put him outside, but I'm not at all sure he was reassured. I put him out the back door (the closest) but hope his family wasn't on the front porch (where I see lots of geckos) or if they were he'd find his way back to them. I also see them on the windows by the back door where the outdoor lights make their tiny bodies translucent. They are such fascinating little things and, as I keep telling Jacob, they are our friends.

No comments: