The Lousypoet

So I’m currently awful at Twitter. I admit it, I’m a hardcore lurker. I rarely raise my head from the muck to draw any attention. This isn’t such a great idea to get others to follow you, or to show a publisher that you can build some kind of personal hype machine around your book, but seeing as how publication is quite some ways away, I’m not going to stress over it.

That said, Twitter can provide some links with great insight into writing in general, using Twitter, and just generally making yourself known on the web. In that spirit, here’s four links I found interesting today;

Cheryl Klein posted four techniques to get to the emotional heart of your story. It’s quick, to the point, and extremely useful.

Jo-Lynne writes a great article giving seven ways to be worth following on Twitter.

Following this link will give you some great tips on being creative.

Finally, if you want to get more interactive on Twitter, this link will give you some great points.

Several months ago, I created a Twitter account. I admit that I did it during a phase where I felt compelled to sign up for everything I thought might promote this here website. I suppose that drive came from an insane idea I had that by putting links for this site in numerous places, I might

a) Drive more traffic to the site

b) Improve my Google Pagerank

c) Make mountains of money from Google Adwords and Paid to Post programs

Well, I no longer do Paid for Post (as I stated back in May) and when I started using the new layout, I decided to fore-go the Google Adwords (no one was clicking them anyway), so all that linking was redundant.

According to my pagerank counter, I don’t get shit in terms of traffic each week either, so that was a huge bust.

And last but not least, my Google pagerank currently sits at 0, so that was about as big a bust as could be!

Now, this has been a long winded-round-a-bout way of getting to me being on Twitter. I never did use it until I convinced Carolyn that it might be a good networking tool; once I saw how much she was using it, I decided to join the fun.

One of my watches is Writer’s Digest. They’ve got a great mag, some really useful online content, and provide some great insight into the craft of writing. So they just posted a few tweets that I had to share.

The first is a cool little idea that could provide you with some much needed inspiration during those dry periods of creativity. It is to type a few words into Google and see the results that the autocomplete suggests. I’ll let them tell it in their own words, go check out How to Write a Novel Using Google’s Autocomplete.

Secondly, is a great list that might entice you to Twitter (if you want to be a writer). Meryl K. Evans (@merylkevans) wrote a great article called 50+ Writer Uses For Twitter. This one got me pretty psyched about using Twitter, and I added her to my following list.

I suppose it’s for links like these, and hopefully a whole bunch of others from Meryl’s list, that I’m trying to increase my Twitter presence. If you feel so inclined, you can Follow me on Twitter (@Lousypoet).