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Facebook Vs Twitter

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2011| 25 Comments »

Months ago, probably some time before Christmas, I recorded a programme on Sky called Facebook vs Twitter. Not the usual thing I tape on Sky, I’ll admit, but something about the title intrigued me. However, being the busy bee I am, and this has nothing to do with my lack of organisational skills or my need to watch The Mentalist, Supernatural, Rookie Blue or Hawaii Five-O first, I never got around to watching it. Then, this past weekend, something strange happened. I had an hour to spare. I know, me having a whole uninterrupted hour. It’s unheard of. Anyway, I decided to watch it, mainly so I could delete it and increase my 3% remaining recording time. 

With a cup of tea hot in my hand, I settled myself on the sofa and pushed play on the controller. I was met with a curt message stating I had to subscribe to watch the chosen channel. (This was a channel I’d found totally by accident while rummaging the listings, and which had some obscure name I can’t even remember). So, after clicking ‘select’ a few more times just to be sure, I deleted it…..regaining one measly percent in the process.

Now I was bothered. I wanted to know which was the more popular. Twitter or Facebook? And as a member of the female population, what we want we usually get, right?

The only way I would satisfy my curiosity and find out for sure was to look at my own use of the two internet phenomenons.

Facebook:

A few years ago I succumbed internet pressure and joined Facebook. Up until that moment in time I’d been frequenting Friends Reunited, which I thought was the crème da la crème of the social networking world. I’m not embarrassed to admit that when it comes to computers, I’m the least nerdy person I know. I fumble my way through the cyber world on a daily basis and Facebook was no different. I err…, *cough cough* struggled.

BUT, and oh yes this is a big BUT…. once I’d got to grips with the site I absolutely loved it. Friends Reunited, I’m sad to say – oh okay, I’m not sad because now I find it utter rubbish – was cast aside like an ex-boyfriend. By joining Facebook, I found so many more friends and some of whom I’d long since forgotten. It was like reliving my youth all over again.

Twitter:

Then along came twitter. I’d just got to grips with Facebook and to take on another computer based task was daunting and stupid and one I first resisted. But everyone was talking about it and the name ‘twitter’ was thrown at me from every angle. Everywhere I looked I saw its name, luring and daring me to join so, and not one to back out from a challenge, I did. No one was safe from my @-ing and I followed everyone famous I could think of. I ended my fourteen day campaign with; go on guess how many followers? None. I know, I gasped too. It’s a surprise, right? I couldn’t fathom why Ricky Gervais or Eliza Dushku didn’t follow me back. I mean, me? Come on! Distraught, I blamed my laptop, called twitter a ‘loser’ and, on bended knee, grovelled my way back into the arms of Facebook where I felt happy and secure.

But I wasn’t happy. I am and not one who likes to be beaten, and especially by a website, so I revisited twitter a few weeks later. I tweeted about my running the 2010 London Marathon, I tweeted about TV’s Supernatural (don’t ask), and I tweeted about writing. Suddenly I was conversing with other tweeps.

I managed to get a few followers (no they were not all family members or offers of Viagra), these were actually legit followers, and what’s more, I was having fun. I was tweeting over the moon!

Twitter is where I first met author and social media guru Kristen Lamb and was invited to become a Warrior Writer. Then I read her book ‘We Are Not Alone – A Guide To Social Media’ and my life was transformed. Suddenly, ‘Donna Newton’ was a brand with a Facebook Fan Page and somewhere I could chat with other writers and update what I was up to.

I also met my co-writer Natalie Duggan on twitter, which led us to L.A, a TV pilot, and a manager.

Plus, twitter is fun, fast, and quick. I like to talk and I like to ramble, so twitter is perfect for me. I still get a buzz every time I see one of my tweets RT’d (retweeted).

On the other hand, Facebook allows me to talk more – something I really do like doing. 😀 I love conversing with other writers and I like being able to find links and other information easily on one page.

So, Facebook vs Twitter?

That is the million dollar question and one I don’t know the answer to. I do know that both should come with a health warning: “These sites are addictive and bad for time managing your writing.”

So, now tell me which you prefer. Give each a mark out of 10 and we will tally the ratios and see which one fairs.

My verdict is        Facebook 7/10   :     Twitter 8/10

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Writing Success – Talent or Luck?

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2011| 5 Comments »

Does our success as writers have more to do with luck than talent? Or do you think talent prevails over luck every time?

Well, speaking on behalf of my own experiences, I know it has a little to do with both; talent cannot function without luck and vice versa.

Recently, I co-wrote a Supernatural TV pilot, called ‘The Legend’. I had never written a script before, knew nothing about layout and formatting, but dug in, worked hard, and voila, a pilot was born.

At the end of February, my co-writer friend and I were attending the DFW Writer’s Conference in Texas. Now, I class myself as a thrill seeker, but my co-writer went a step further and thought it would be an excellent opportunity to stop by L.A. and ‘pitch’ the TV idea to some Hollywood bodies. Laughingly, and if not just to humour her, I agreed.

We queried everyone we could think of and arranged some meetings. One meeting in particular surprised me. It was with an entertainment lawyer. I asked my friend why she had contacted an entertainment lawyer, to which she simply replied, “why not?”

That entertainment lawyer read our script and loved it. At around the same time a manager contacted this lawyer, and at the end of their telephone conversation asked if he knew of any ‘new’ writers. He looked at our script and emailed it over to her. She read it, loved it, and promptly contacted us.

Two new script-writers left her office a week later with several projects and ideas to write; she wanted to see anything and everything we wrote.

In essence – we had a manager.

All that came from querying a lawyer. Now I’m not telling you email every lawyer you can think of; we also met with an actor and a producer – both of which have attached to the project. But with each person we met, we were recommended to someone else, and each contact is now a person we have met with personally and can email ideas and projects without the need of a query letter. Hence we have a VIP backdoor where only solicited work is allowed to enter.

So yes, I believe your career is made with a mixture of luck and talent:

Luck – Maybe we didn’t go about querying in the correct manner, but we did it politely and professionally…..and we got the face to face meetings we wanted.

Luck – We happened to be liked, and first impressions seem to be everything in this business.

Talent – That all important synopsis were our hook, and led our readers into wanting the script.

Talent – The script is why wanted people to meet us.

Without these key ingredients, I would not be sitting here now, blogging about my experiences. I walked away from L.A. a very busy girl, but having my writing described as very well written and with strong voice was a boost to an area of writing I am very new at, and being praised as audacious was fun – I mean, me, audacious? Honestly 😀

So, tell me if a mixture of luck and talent has led to any of your successes.

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What Was I Thinking?

Posted in Other Stuff, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 19, 2011| 39 Comments »

We often forget about the things we did as kids, maybe because our memories are not as sharp as they used to be when we hit middle age, but probably because these memories are so embarrassing, we choose to block them from our minds.

A couple of days ago, I was searching for some photographs. Now, if your parents are like mine, your whole life is packed into boxes and stored in the attic, and when I say your whole life I mean it. From the love letters you wrote to your first crush in maths class to the hideous video footage of your first sports day when you won the 100 metre sprint but all you really see are my skinny legs and knobbly knees. Anyway, my mum retrieved some of these boxes and, together, we began to go through them. I can tell you, while a mystery to me at the time, I look back at my school photos and now fully understand why I couldn’t get a boyfriend! Just when I didn’t think I could feel any worse about myself, I found something I really couldn’t remember writing. Of course, my hubby quickly took a photograph of it and threatened to publish it on Facebook…Who said a relationship stales after marriage?

So as a bit of fun (and I wanted to beat him to it), I thought I would share it with you.

 

In case you cannot read it, it says, “Dear John Travolta. I like your records very much and I like Grease. Love Donna. xxxxx”

Oh, how I can feel myself regretting this already. Notice there is no date. This is so I can adamantly deny I was older than five when I wrote it. Unfortunately I was 8 when Grease hit our cinemas, so I reckon I had to be 8 or 9 when I penned it. It reads a little like my query letters now, actually.

Ok, that’s enough laughing at me. I want you to comment with an equally embarrassing story or memory from your childhood. If I get over 15 replies, I will tell you of another TV couple who I do remember writing to, and I was a lot older too. 😀

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Finding The Right Kill Can Be Murder

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2011| 17 Comments »

How would you kill someone?

For the last month or so I have been plotting my second novel and I have struggled a little in one particular area. Let me explain. My antagonist is a professional killer hired to kill an amnesic victim. I reached his first kill and suddenly it hit me. Just how would he kill? Now, I unashamedly admit to having an over zealous imagination in the killing department. Because of this, I needed to strip bare my ideas, go back to the beginning, and list the basic ways one could kill a person.

So my list began.

Shooting
Stabbing
Strangulation
Poisoning
Torture
Asphyxiation
Explosives/Bombing
Snapping Necks
Bludgeon to the head
A Wand – well it worked for Harry Potter.

All of these are killing techniques we have seen a thousand times in various movies such as Die Hard, Scream, Basic Instinct, Friday the 13th ……I could go on and on. However, each of the above, when applied to a certain character, would be executed in a different way. For example, Die Hard’s John McClain would perform a magnificent display of acrobatics while catapulting his vest top covered torso through the air to shoot his enemies. Whereas in Fatal Attraction it takes Anne Archer just one determined shot to kill Glenn Close. Another example is stabbings. In Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone seduced her victim before unleashing a frenzied attack by way of an ice pick. However, Romancing the Stone (can you see a Michael Douglas pattern forming here?), sees Kathleen Turner merely flicking the knife at her antagonist who, unfortunately, blocks it with a plank of wood.

So, which would my professional killer use? And how would he carry it out?

Well, firstly, what kind of professional killer was he? I did not want a character like Richard Kuklinski, who froze his victims to disguise their time of death and even filmed victims being eaten alive. So, after watching timothy Olyphant in HITMAN once or twice (oh alright, maybe it was a lot more), I decided my hitman would be military trained and disciplined in planning his attacks. Explosives, sniper shootings and the odd hand to hand combat would suffice nicely. The places he choose to kill, however, are another blog.

Now it’s your turn. Can you think of a similar outcome where two characters use the same tools but apply different methods?

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A Story In Six Sentences

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 5, 2010| 30 Comments »

I thought it would be fun to see if it was possible to write a story in no more than six sentences. This is what I come up with…

The Wrong Path :

He stood at the crossroads at the tender age of seventeen where, as predicted, he had received his first criminal record. He could have walked to the left and stayed on its disastrous path, ending up just another statistical drain on today’s society. But he chose the path to the right, working hard to reclaim his dignity and self respect. He cherished this path, gaining a rewarding job, loving girlfriend and loyal friends. He awoke on the day of his 22nd birthday not knowing that today he would be honoured a hero. Today he would rescue the life of a young child from a burning building, sacrificing his own life in the process.

NOW, it’s your turn. I want to read your 6 sentence stories. Good luck!

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To Tweet Or Not To Tweet

Posted in Other Stuff, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I am nosey and curious. I don’t mean to be but just cannot help myself. Maybe it was because I was born a Collins and is implanted in my genes or maybe it’s just because I am female. Whatever it is, this curse leads me to check out things…..like twitter.

It was about a year ago now and just after I had decided to write my first novel. I had heard people talking about this new social networking site and thought I would take a look. And a look is all I could do. I understood nothing; follow buttons, @ tags, tweet options – my mind boggled. Two days later, and on the verge of losing the will to live, I tired of trying to figure out how it worked and walked away.

Twittermania was exploding around me so a few weeks later I tackled it again, still totally clueless as to what it was all about. However this time, and I’m still unsure how, but people began to follow me. Now I am not a huge tweeter by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t class myself as extremely humorous, I don’t follow people just because, and I certainly did not think twitter would benefit my writing in any way, shape or form. I just liked the idea, as with Facebook, that it allowed me to see what was going on in the world outside my own little bubble. I was totally unprepared for what was coming.

The last time I attempted to write a novel I was ten years old. I was the proud owner of a beige electronic typewriter and my trusty pink laptop was an item that even NASA could not comprehend. There was no internet, no mobile phones and certainly no ‘wheelies’. If you wanted to read a book, you actually walked (yes, remember those days), to a book store and purchased a £1.99 paperback. And if you wanted to talk to someone it was either in person or via the telephone, which was usually a hideously coloured and oversized monstrosity taking up the majority of a kitchen work surface. If you happened to be ringing a number containing numerous zero’s, then you also had to contend with the possibility of watching an episode of Starsky and Hutch while waiting for the dial to rotate.

Nowadays, though, it’s so different. The internet allows us to talk to our friends via Skype, keep in touch via numerous social sites, and the research benefits are extraordinary. Taking for granted these amazing, if not now under appreciated, opportunities, I tweeted a link to a friend. It was a draft first chapter for a book I was writing and they wanted to read it. It wasn’t meant for anyone else and I was certainly not expecting anyone else to even click the link, let alone read the chapter. But a young lady named Kristen Lamb did click the link, then read the chapter and finished with a comment. I was overjoyed. We got emailing and I found I really liked her. She shared my passion for writing and had the most brilliant, wicked sense of humor. She began to tell me where I was going wrong with my writing. Up until then I had only written articles, something so different to novels. I listened to her intently, she was amazing and I could not believe my luck at having found this kind of help, and even a friendship that I will always be grateful for.

Over the past year I have become a much better writer, am a proud member of WWBC and have met some of the most amazing writers (you know who you are Karla).

I used to plot and write……now I plan, plan, plan, plot and write. I don’t know about you, but twitter has been an amazing experience for me.

Kristen Lamb is the author of ‘We Are Not Alone’. Check out her blog or twitter

Author Piper Bayard’s blog

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