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My funny friend, Bonnie Boots, offers Free Funny Twitter backgrounds. We're both writers and editors and on Twitter (she and I). She's funny, I'm ... "quirky" someone once said. Online. This morning I was thinking about the kind of person/writer for whom Twitter might work best. It is hard to be funny, succinct, and make sense, all at the same time.I realized this when I started following Bonnie's tweets and discovered they are mostly serious. I mean, they usually offer information, links to useful resources, and such. I'm not sure you can tweet jokes, unless you're using it for pseudo-private conversations. I've observed those kinds of exchanges, and I have only one thing to say: Get a chat room!
I suspect Twitter would not work well for the kinds of writers who don't join writers' groups, prefer to mull things over alone, and pretty much live in isolation. It's for hyperchatty people who want to share. Like me and Bonnie. If we ever meet in person, it will be a nonstop gabfest. She and I have a few other common interests. We both wrestle with websites and publish online. Her main output is The Internet Wizards Magazine where the copyright notice reads:
© 2009 Bonnie Boots All rights protected. All wrongs avenged.
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A true story from Heifer International:
my knees in tweeps! Not twerps nor cheeps. Tweeps is Twitter-talk for people who follow you. I love it. I feel so ... wanted! And true to trying to model what I teach, I respond to each new follower with a "thank you" DM (Twitter-talk for Direct Message). The service is a little glitchy, though, and messages sometimes wander into the hinterlands of cyberspace, never to be seen by the intended recipient. And the sender doesn't know, either!
Heads up! Only three days until Bloggers Unite to write about Hunger and Hope. There is still time to 
The Invention of Air
by Steven Johnson
Mistress Shakespeare
by Karen Harper lives up to the hype of being a "delicious and intriguing historical novel about the woman who was William Shakespeare's secret wife". Questions of who really wrote the great bard's masterpieces aside, a historical record exists that suggests that he and Anne Whately of Temple Grafton were betrothed shortly before Shakespeare married another Anne, whom he got with child. Again and again. Whately became his "London lover", intimately involved with the productions of his work and possibly the inspiration. Part of the charm of "Whately" narrating this story is the perfect touch of Elizabethan language she uses, just enough to make us believe ... if only for the length of this book.
I'm Perfect, You're Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah's Witness Upbringing by 
by Kyria Abrahams is a sad supposed expose of the damages a particular religious sect perpetrates on its children and believers. I found it a disgusting, painful, and pathetic tell-all that should have been shut up. How anyone could tout this book as humorous is beyond me. I could write funnier about Lutherans. In fact, Garrison Keillor already has. And Lutherans can be just as insular and filled with debilitating strange ideas as any other religious cult.
You might want to check out the links in 
A list of literary agents who blog about what they do and what they want from writers who query them might be a handy educational tool, right? I compiled one and thought I blogged about it or added it as a free article, but I can't find it now. Here's a handy similar reference in a simple web page with hotlinks to the agents' blogs, courtesy 
I almost didn't attend the SD Bloggers Meetup last night at the Sophia Hotel in the heart of downtown San Diego. Why? Several reasons:
I spent this day changing over the email subscription service for this blog to consolidate it with the RSS feed from FeedBurner (now part of the Google Empire). If you want to receive the blog in your Inbox rather than going online, use the form near the top of the right column, click on the "Subscribe" link in the menu at the top of the page, Click on the "Subscribe by email" link in the RSS feed you may be receiving, or click on this one: 
Poetry writing can't be taught. Well, maybe you can learn strict rhyming limericks or doggerel (like I write) . The synthesis of metaphor and sound constituting lyrical, literary works is another matter. But perhaps we can learn from poets' lives and interpretations of their works.
OTOH, I could have done without all the digressions into minute details of slightest physical movement to riffs on art, architecture, Greek mythology, and so many other subjects. The only advice I have is to read slowly and carefully. You never know when something in the first half will link to a later reference, usually without narrative explanation or reminder. My memory is not what it used to be or else I would have understood the significance of a detective smelling of "lavender and tobacco". I remembered that fragrance combination was mentioned earlier in the book, but couldn't dredge up the exact context.
, which I could not force myself to finish. While I'm no prude, it seemed as if every sentence contained some version of the "f" word. Very tiring to read.
