learned some years ago that Lenore had a great power. She made people smile. Almost everyone who looks at a photo of her smiles, and I am not sure why this is so. It is just her gift. Many people have gone into surgery with Lenore’s photo waiting for them in the recovery room wall. She adorns the walls of many offices, she is a smile genie. Lenore can make anybody smile, and that is important, it is a great gift. Try it, if you are down or frustrated just stare at this photo for a bit and you will smile.
I spent the afternoon at Mannix Marketing, my Web Designer, and now, my Facebook and social media consultants as well. I had lunch with Chris Archibee and we talked about my blog and the technological needs of the new writer, I met with Toby Dawes, the mad genius who knows how things work, and then Amberly Rendell, who told me all of the things that are right and wrong with my Facebook and other social media. It was good stuff, a lot to absorb, and it was very productive and useful for me.
Toby got my podcast up and on Itunes and showed me how to work my new digital MP3 recorder, so I cam record the podcasts from anywhere. I’d like to start using Skype to talk to some you at the end of each podcast. I was very comfortable doing the podcast, a natural forum for me and I want to focus sharply on content and style. Another way to tell me story. One person said I sounded like Howard Stern, that made me gulp (I don’t think so, myself.) Amberly showed me how to make my Facebook page more effective. She did a Google analytic on my website – I got 121,000 visits in the last 30 days. I love the blog and work hard on it, and it is paying off for me. More people come to the blog directly than come through Facebook, the blog is the engine that drives the enterprise. But my Facebook presence is growing rapidly and so is Pinterest and Instagram.
Kimberly talk about replies and site activity and I told her I thought the key to social media was using the new sites but not surrendering yourself to them. People are using Facebook for e-mailing and private messaging, and I don’t use it for either. Facebook is a powerful connection tool, but is also a greedy corporation selling lots of data. They are always pushing people to connect more and more, and speaking as a creative, I just can’t be on there all day answer scores of messages. I’m not judging people who do that, it would just interfere greatly with the focus and space I need in my head for writing. I can’t write well if I’m going back and forth on Facebook checking my messages or re-pinning topics and photos. I am not able to read most of the notifications or messages, there are just too many of them. I do try and keep up with the replies to topics, they are interesting and valuable for me. Sometimes I just can’t keep up.
The site also wants some monitoring, as all sorts of angry and trouble people will pop up from time to time, and I want my sites to be safe and civil and useful. I think I have chased most of the disturbed and self-righteous away, they have plenty of places to go, including Congress. I think I am getting there, nasty people seem to drift elsewhere quickly. So do those good people who only want to see cute animal photos. There are lots of them here, but lots of other stuff too. I never want the site to bring people down, but I also live in the real world and reality sometimes intrudes. I promised to be open on the blog, and I work on that, I promised to be authentic and I am getting there. Whenever I write something I ask, “is this the truth?” And if so, I’ll write it.
The podcast feels like a big deal to me, a change. I love the style and format of it, and I have to think carefully about what I want it to be. E.B. White keeps coming to mind, but I may develop my own style, much as I love his. It will not be anything Howard Stern, I can promise you that. If you have ideas for the podcast please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected]. I will get to them all eventually. I wrote yesterday that the Old World is collapsing, and today, at Mannix, I felt I was taking some big steps towards the New World. We’ll see.
The guard dog is different from the working dog in many ways. Frieda was trained, I learned, as a junkyard dog protecting an auto body shop in South Glens Falls. She is intensely aroused when behind a fence or gate, usually dogs are trained by people banging on the fence with sticks or pans. She is alert to any strange presence on the farm, barking the second a car even slows down by our driveway. She protects Maria’s studio all day, watching the doors and windows. She is convinced she is driving off trucks from the road near the house. It is an old and traditional role for dogs like Frieda, she is as serious and purposeful as Red is moving sheep.
A friend of mine, a mid-list writer struggling to survive in the new world of publishing keeps telling me writing is over, books are dead, literacy has been washed away by blogs, the Internet, Facebook, texting and the world of devices and story streaming. No one can afford to write books for much longer, he says, and no one will have the time or interest to read them. He is miserable in our new world, and I feel badly for him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was doing today. Around noon, I’m turning myself in at Mannix Marketing where Chris and I will have lunch and talk about the blog and Toby and I will meet to figure out how to get my new podcast up and running (I have a digital Mp3 recorder and will record the first podcast on it today, if I can figure out how to get it working). Then at 2 p.m. I will meet with Amberly at Mannix to learn more about Facebook and how to manage it efficiently. She has prepared a report on how to make my Facebook Page better.
This is not what John Updike spent his day doing, I told my daughter this weekend. Yes, she said, but then again, you are not John Updike. True. I sympathize with my writer friend, he is so wretched and I just listen to him. I told him that if whining made one wealthy and successful, I’d be living on a yacht somewhere off the Greek islands. I am broke, I said, but happy and engaged. Our lives are still about words, I said, and they are still about stories. What’s different is the way in which we tell them, the form and style. My podcast in my mind is a story-telling machine, I will tell the stories of my life and my farm and communicate with my readers on it. I think of E.B. White as my inspiration and I admire his wonderful observations from the Maine farm he bought later in his life. He and I share the same sense of revelation about life in the country and life on a farm.
Facebook is like taking your car into get serviced. It is no fun, but you have to keep it running, it is another tool for writers to use to move forward. I will try and figure out today how to reverse Facebook’s dumb new reply system, where all replies are out of order and even more confusing than usual. My readers do not like it. I suppose I could call my friend up and say, “listen, I should be writing today but instead I have to spend the whole &555(((*&&&@** day figuring out my Tascam Digital Recorder and wading through Facebook’s confusing and impenetrable management systems.” He would love it, and he would commiserate. That is just what he thinks of when he thinks about using new technologies.
But I won’t slip into that trap, it’s too easy and it would be fake. The good people at Mannix have gotten me far and I appreciate them and am lucky to have them. They have held my hand through the growth of this blog for some years now, and they have never failed me, not once. How does one squawk about that?
I e-mailed Kimberly and told her I didn’t want to know all that much about Facebook. I don’t spend a lot of time there, the noise to signal ratio is low, but that is where my readers are and that is where I will be. Hopefully sometime next week you all will be able to hear my first Podcast, warts and all, and watch me slip and flop around and hopefully get it right. Somewhere in the process I will write a book and hopefully it will pay for all of this stuff the new writer is doing. I might even figure out the reply thing.
I will call my friend from the car and urge him once more to get a blog up and running so he can talk to his readers directly. He will give me a dozen good reasons why he can’t do that – he isn’t technical, it’s a waste of time, an invasion of privacy, he loves bookstores and paper books, he’s not going to be on FB all day talking nonsense. Maybe he’s right and I am the sellout, I don’t really know, I’m too close to it. I suspect John Updike would be saying the same thing as my friend. You won’t find Philip Roth on Facebook either or fumbling with his Tascam recorder. As I drive up Kinney Road to Glens Falls I will be thinking about different roads, theirs and mine, about the new writer. Truth is, I can’t wait to get my Podcast up there. We will have great fun with it, and I will have another way to tell my stories, and a million people will listen every Sunday and I will get to take Maria to Florence.
