Why One Aging Hippie Mom Loves Twitter

My friend Melanie finally lured me into joining Twitter Nation by bribing me with scones and tea.

“It's really easy, and it's great once you get the hang of it,” she said as we buttered scones. “Come on. I'll show you how to set up an account.”

“Next, you'll be pressuring me into smoking cigarettes and trying Botox,” I muttered, following her into the office, where she had already coerced another friend of ours, Anne, into Twitter Nation.

Melanie's rationale was simple: we're all writers. Writers must tweet if we're going to build name recognition. “You're building your brand,” she said.

“I'm not a cereal,” I said, still muttering.

Melanie is a tech-savvy journalist currently working on a nonfiction book about the oil business as well as a novel. Anne writes historical fiction. And me? I work as a magazine writer and celebrity ghost writer; I just self-published a novel and sold another one to Penguin. All three of us are old enough to have launched (or ejected) our kids out of the house; I still have a young teen at home, but he's already taller than I am.

In other words, all three of us are aging moms and, in my case, a bonafide aging hippie mom. Examples: I marched on Washington for various causes throughout the 1970's and into the 1980's; I worked as a Vista Volunteer; and I still prefer wearing natural cotton.

Another example: I hate carrying a cell phone. In fact, most of the time I hate having a cell phone. Why would I want anyone to know where I am at all times? Why would I want to answer the phone when I am, say, walking on the beach or sipping tea with my aging hippie friends?

Yet, I followed Melanie into the thick, mysterious, shrieking Twitter jungle, and guess what? I love this crazy busy place—but not for the reasons she thought I would.

As a book marketing tool, Twitter is fairly useless. Maybe it's because I'm not one of those people who tweets all day long about my books—I don't ever tweet great lines from my texts, I don't announce giveaways, I don't pester people with book reviews. Not because I think these things are necessarily a bad idea, but mainly because I don't find these kinds of tweets very interesting.

Instead, I delight in Twitter for other reasons:

1) I love checking in with Twitter as a ticker tape kind of news service. I receive updates from various news feeds--yep, you guessed 'em, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and The Daily Beast are right at the top of my hippie news feeds.

2) I use Twitter to drive traffic to my blog posts on Huffington Post, Open Salon, and guest blogs.

3) I rely on Twitter to gain professional insights on the rapid upheavals in book publishing, mainly by following writers, publishers, business journals, and book reviewers. Twitter leads me to all sorts of fascinating blogs and news articles, and has been enormously useful in helping me both think about my writing and decide where to sell it.

4) Most importantly, I use Twitter to support other writers—and to be supported. In this way, I have discovered that writing doesn't have to be a lonely business, despite the fact that I work alone in a barn about eight hours every day (dressed in my hippie cotton pants and flannel shirts, a cup of tea at my elbow). In fact, through Twitter, I have made great new friendships, like the one with a mystery writer in Hawaii. This writer and I now exchange manuscripts for critique and chat on the phone. We hope to meet some day. Our friendship never would have been possible without Twitter (unless there's some kind of Match.com for women writers that I haven't found yet?)

I still wonder about those people on Twitter who have gazillions of followers. Where did they get all of those followers? Do they ever interact with them? Do they have interns who post tweets for them? Maybe they're outsourcing their tweets?

Another friend once suggested, as we were sitting in a restaurant with relatives, that I should get a better cell phone so that I could tweet from it. “Just think, you could be sitting here right now and tweeting about what we're having for lunch.”

Really? And why would anyone care what I'm having for lunch? I'm not Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber. Thank God.

“You could even use a service that schedules your tweets,” she added. “You know, write them all at once and then have them sent out on a regular basis to stay in constant contact with your followers.”

No, thanks. I'll keep tweeting in real time, venturing into Twitter for a few spare minutes here and there during the day. I love Twitter—especially for the friendships it has brought me. Otherwise, you can find me alone in my barn, pondering sentences and sipping tea.

Why I Don't Want to Live on Girl Island

Recently, I was having lunch with a group of women friends who only have daughters. They were bemoaning, as women at lunch love to do, the habits of their husbands. You know: the dirty clothes on the floor, the snoring, the need to own the remote. Oh yeah, and peeing into bushes because that's easier than asking directions to a gas station when you're on a road trip.
“I want to live on Girl Island,” my friend Carla said. “Sometimes I don't think I was meant to live with a man.”
I thought about this as we parted, and decided that, if I had to choose, it would definitely be Boy Island for me.
I have three sons and two daughters. Nothing against girls – I love my daughters and cherish every minute I spend with them – but the boys keep me sane. Throw kids together at a picnic, and the girls circle each other, wary as cats, while the boys pick the top dog in minutes and all play together. Girls on the school bus make each other cry with a word or a look, yet it might be weeks before you hear about it or even figure out exactly why your daughter was so upset. Boys? They're either really mad and throwing something, or so happy that they're yelling and singing in the shower.
Girls do art projects without getting glue and paint all over the furniture and each other. Girls will sit in the kitchen with you, sometimes, too, and let you know what their teacher wore that day and what their English papers are about. Meanwhile, the boys say school was “uh, okay” and just want to ride their bikes, or show you how cool it is to put cereal in the ice dispenser and then hold a glass of milk under it.
Most of all, boys like to puzzle over the wonders of the world. Last week I drove my 12 year-old son and his friends to the skateboard park. It was kind of like riding around with the editors of Ripley's Believe It Or Not: “Did you know that more people are killed by vending machines than by sharks every year?” “If everyone in China was chewing gum and spit it out at the same time, would there be enough gum to cover Rhode Island?” “Did the Egyptians invent glass?” “There are probably 1800 thunderstorms happening in the Earth's atmosphere right now, that we can't even see!”
At the skateboard park, the boys were out of the car almost before I had it in park, donning helmets and pads and zooming off to a place that probably wouldn't exist on Girl Island: a place where 360 is a verb and you can do ollies, grinds and slides while wearing brightly colored puffy sneakers. A place where Moms, alas, can only visit for a short time before they're banished.