Friday, January 28, 2011

Finding Something Friday on Love-Hate Relationships (I'm Talking to You, Twitter)

Here's the thing I found today: I love Twitter.

I love how this HUGE community of people come together and share thoughts on just about everything. I follow lots of writers, editors, and publishers, so I find tons of tweets relating to the subject I love best. And I LOVE how these folks find submission opportunities, or book giveaways, or funny little videos or vastly interesting blog posts that I would never find myself.

But I also hate Twitter. Because when I sit down at my little desk, telling myself that I will only look at Twitter (and if I'm being perfectly honest, Facebook, too) for fifteen minutes, PROMISE, and then I get up to stretch TWO HOURS later, I am not happy.

But a part of me is happy. Because I've learned so much that I didn't know before. It's just that I'm paying for that knowledge when I finally finish my To Do list at 12:30 AM. Whew. Anyway, that's how I found a tweet that took me to Steve Buttry's blog.

Steve Buttry happened to be interviewing Roy Peter Clark, the man behind Writing Tools, which was published as a book--and now Mr. Clark has a blog of that name over at Poynter.

Of course, you can peruse all those delightful links, because really, there's lots of good writing stuff there. Or you can go directly to this shortcut of the 50 Writing Tools, Quick List. Where you will find that number 2: Order words for emphasis, is the rule that Mr. Clark finds terribly important for all writers.

In the end, it was all worth it, right? (Or...It was all worth it, in the end. Right?)