Twitter? Oh No!

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way.  You can follow me on twitter here: @TheWriteScott

Against my better judgement, I created the account to network with people in the writing and publishing industries, and to promote this blog.

Why was I against doing this?  Am I a twitter hater?  Can I not figure out the point of 140 character messages?

Far from it.


I gave up twitter almost a year ago.  Maybe I should have marked the date.  "Hi, my name is Scott and I'm an addict.  I've been tweet free XXX days."  Well, make it 0 days now.

I had more twitter accounts than I can remember.  Some had dozens of followers.  Some had hundreds.  Two or three of them had thousands.  Low thousands, but thousands nonetheless.  Parody accounts, hobby accounts, serious accounts targeted at certain subjects, zombie related accounts.  You name it.

What was that?  Ah, yes.  Role playing accounts.  So you've heard of them.  Before I discovered those I was getting pretty bad, but they were the ones that dragged me down.  In role playing accounts, you either create a character or assume the role of a character, you find others who like to role play and you make stories together.

It's almost completely, but not entirely, exactly unlike the thrill of writing.  It wasn't writing.  It wasn't craft.  Still, this was during a time that I wasn't pursuing professional writing, and to a small extent, the creative outlet helped release some of my creative energy.  Probably because of this, and any joking aside, it became a serious addiction.

I knew I had it bad when I asked my wife one day if she could drive us to the restaurant.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I'm in a wedding."
"You're what?"
"It's okay, it's not mine.  One of the people I role play with asked me to create an account so I could be the best man in his wedding."
"You're crazy," she said.

I'm just glad she didn't ask what I was doing the day before during the bachelor party.

I gave it all up.  Deleted the twitter app off my phone.  Deactivated many of the accounts, the ones I was active on anyway.  And I felt... free.  Sometime later my mind cleared up enough to pour some of the energy into real writing.

I love twitter.  I hate it.  This time I intend to use it as a tool for networking first and promotion second- and nothing more.  I'm proud of myself too.  I didn't know it was possible to be active on twitter and tweet less than 10 tweets in a weekend.  I've got one more hour though.

Hopefully I'll see you on @thewritescott