Writing As A Profession: Bad with The Good
Written by Robert Bacal | 
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| Writer's Cramp - General |
Writing professionally is different than writing for fun or oneself, and that's a major difference between writing for a blog without payment, and writing a book or article that is "consumed" or purchased by a publication with an editor. On YOUR blog you do what you want. When you work professionally, you are no longer "writing for you", but writing for a) your audience, and b) your editor.
It is, bottom line, a job.
Get used to it if you aspire to professional writer status.
I'm currently working on what amounts to my fourth revised book in this calendar year as my publishers wanted to release second editions. It's a challenge. Sometimes you write a book and it's simply just about as good as it's ever going to be. Revising in any cases, is tedious, because you are revisting something you've likely left behind, or lost interest in. Basically you put yourself in the seat of the editor and end up tweaking, fixing, and hopefully improving, but it's often hard to know if your revisions make it better, or worse. Sometimes your earlier attempts ARE better.
Of course it's not always that way. Sometimes you do have something new and important to say, and sometimes your interest in the topic hasn't flagged. Then it's good.
But bottom line, none of this matters. Writing isn't a very romantic process except for those that don't do it. it may be fun and satisfying, but after you've proof read a few of your 200+ page manuscripts (for the 10th time each), your book or project, which started as as your shiny new bride, ends up looking like a broken down two-bit whore on the corner of Main and YourTown.
Still you court her. It's your job.
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Social Media Peril
MicroThoughts
The biggest peril facing social media users and businesses has to do with trust. Anyone can be anybody they choose in social media since there are no even close to adequate methods to verify identities. The peril lies with users who, after interacting with someone they think they know, will believe they know them well enough to trust them as if they had known them for a long time. It's a dangerous situation on many levels, and I wish social media proponents would start educating people as to the dangers. Even if a person is who they say, we have no idea of the vested interests and agendas, and that's one reason to verify anything important heard via social media.
No Social Media Experts
There's no such thing as a social media expert. Anyone who claims that is lying, so hide your wallet. First, it's all changing almost daily for anyone to be on top of all of it. Second, there are literally hundreds of social media platforms, and nobody is conversant with all of them. Third, it's still all too new. Fourth, there's lots of opinions around, but very little good data to support the opinions. There are people who know a lot about one thing (like Twitter), or a little about a lot of things, but nobody knows a lot about a lot of things in social media. Yet!
Alice
In the sixties "You could get anything you want (at Alice's Restaurant). Things change. Now, in the age of social media, you can BE anybody you want, and if that's not a huge shift, what is?
Usexploitation
Mashable no-no
In response to a Mashable article about how Starbucks supposedly used social media to bring one million people into their stores in a day:
This is just terrible "journalism". First, the giveaways brought the people in. Second, we have no idea how many people came for the freebies hearing on it from Twitter or not. Third, They could have pulled people into their stores with this promotion in any of a number of ways. This is not a social media success, anymore than having sandwich board guys outside of each store would constitute a success for loitering.
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