Top Ten Social Media Gaffes

Social media gaffes. What? You mean like the time I mortally and culturally embarrassed myself by asking on Twitter what GBP meant and Jeffe had to tell me, "Uhm. You know. The POUND. As in the currency of Great Britain." I slunk away into the backwaters of Twitter for a few days after that one.

TOP TEN SOCIAL MEDIA GAFFES

10. Offensive or titillating, incomplete click-bait post (click through! find out why you aren't making a million dollars! You'll be amazed!)

9. Overly emotional primary relationship venting. Twitter is not a qualified marriage counselor. Breaking up via text message, FB post, or in fewer than 140 characters is truly bad form.

8. ANYTHING that would make you show up on Straight White Guys Texting (Tumblr blog - before you go look, just remember that what you see cannot be unseen).

7. Live Tweeting your 'Beat the Tide Beer Race' that day you called in sick to work. Never mind that your boss and coworkers follow you.

6. SCREAM AND NAME CALL a fellow professional - editor, agent, fellow author, as yet unpublished author. Nah. You know what? Anyone. Do that to anyone.

5. Expect social media to educate you. That thing you don't know or understand? No one on Twitter owes you an encyclopedic explanation on it. You *might* get one. You might get a couple. But seriously, you want to comprehend the complexities of LGBTQ+ rights? Do some damn research. Expecting that cool gender queer person you follow on Twitter to explain it all is A) disrespectful and B) a pain in the ass.

4. Use someone else's photos, words, or art without permission much less attribution.

3. Not sending cat pictures. This is a big one. The internet is for two things and two things only. You already know the other four letter word. Cats are the other. Fail to post pics and see what happens when they finally achieve complete subjugation of the human race.

2. Not saying what you believe in a sane, rational way - you get to believe what you believe - just be aware that no matter what you believe, once you speak it - or commit it to the eternity that is the interweb - it's available for target practice. But you NOT speaking your truth is also a gaffe. Against yourself and anyone who wants to know who you are.

1. Trolling J.K. Rowling. She owes the internet. Troll her and see how fast she'll own you.

The Good, the Bad, and the High School

Full disclosure: If I'm writing -  actually getting story on virtual paper, there is no place, no matter how awful, that's totally bad. It's only when I'm trying and failing to write that I claim someplace is worst. I'm keeping a running list.

1. Onboard a moving boat while a cat is having a full blown panic attack and insists she'll only be okay if you hold her and never let her go. Though, to be honest, that can go much worse. Sometimes the cat gets seasick into the bargain.
2. Onboard a moving boat because getting lost in your own little fictional world and forgetting to look up at the horizon once in a while is a sure fire recipe for getting seasick yourself.
3. Family events of any kind  - they've put up with this writing shit for however many years old you are. When it's Mom's 70th birthday? No one understands the need to just get this awesome idea on paper.
4. In a moving car - again with the motion sickness thing. I'm fortunate that airplanes aren't usually a problem. Or maybe it's that I'm already drugged to the gills in order to fly in the first place.
5. Anyplace with an internet connection - seriously. The best and most progress I made on books ever has been when my internet connection was down. Easy to make fictional tracks when you're not being tempted away to glance at email. Or Twitter. Or Facebook.
6. In the company of my nearest and dearest. I love my family. I promise. But there's something about me wanting to sit down and make word count that turns my normally rational husband and standoffish cats into creatures who adore me and can't possibly live without me. And they must all off them tell me so the second my fingers make contact with my keyboard. Writing email? No one cares. Blog posts? Yawn. Open the WIP? It's like I opened a can of magical husband and cat luring scent - pizza for him, tuna for the felines.
   

This is why I'm going to say what I'm going to say: Public places are generally conducive to my getting a novel written. So long as I *like* the place, I have  my mp3 player, and a little bit of space. The trick is to carve a tiny bit of personal space out of that public place. Make your booth in the café into your own little world. My corner table at the tea shop I jokingly call my office allows me to spread out just enough to have a buffer between me and any potential neighbors. The headphones and soundtracks I've chosen close out the public to an even larger degree.

The place where I wrote that I hated the most? High school. Wasn't a happy kid, I grant you that. It's hard to claim it's the worst place I ever wrote, though, because writing in order to survive high school is what made it necessary for me to write to survive period. And as coping mechanisms go? This is a-okay. I make shit up and occasionally, someone pays me for it. What's not to like?

Cats, Always, the Cats

This handsome fellow is the most recent of the Pets Past. Great guy. He thought I walked on water. He was convinced I knew how to turn off the rain (and that I just wouldn't do so when he wanted - this resulted in a few dirty looks during the Seattle winters). When western Washington suffered an earthquake, I was braced in an archway next to my kitchen counter. Copernicus jumped up on the counter and gave me the MOST accusing glare - he was certain all that shaking was my fault. Nothing like having all those super powers in the eyes of some critter that likes to curl up in the curve of your stomach every night.

For my family, it's always been cats. My folks had cats before they had kids. Long before they had kids. When I came along, a Siamese queen named Natoa had prior claim in the title of 'eldest' by a whole six months. She apparently decided that I was as much her responsibility as I was my parents'. As I was learning to crawl, Natoa would hide around a corner, wait for me to draw even with her, then she'd leap out of hiding, slap me upside the face a few times (soft paws!), then turn tail and race away. This, my mother tells me, amused me to no end. Natoa stuck around to participate in rearing me until she died when I was 16.

By that time, we'd had Katmai, who gave us two kittens - Skepna and Tyggja (say Tig-ya). They were followed by Pharoah, Isa, Alexander, Leo and Tabitha. Somewhere in there, I grew up, went to college and established a life of my own. Once I did, I needed felines to be the visible soul of my home (“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” ― Jean Cocteau) I was working at a large software company that shall remain nameless and was a member of a group of cat lovers. I'd been doing feline rescue with the group when a woman emailed that she had a pair of kittens who needed a forever home and fast. My husband and I went out to meet with the lady. We walked in. The kittens oozed out from under the bed to come check us out. They looked exactly like my husbands' childhood cat. We ended up going home with that pair of fluffy white kittens and their kitty condo. That was Copernicus and his sister Eratosthenes (Erie). We lost Copernicus at 8 years old to aspiration pneumonia, but Erie is still with us. She'll be seventeen this summer.

The creatures who share our lives change us and encourage us to live up to their considerable expectations, I think...even if I really don't aspire to causing earthquakes. Honest.

Cats. Why Did It Have to Be Cats?

They're neuroses wrapped in fur and armed with sharp, pointy bits. Depending on who you ask, you’ll get various stories about how I was reared, not by my parents, but by a seal point Siamese queen named Natoa. Mom tells tales about how, once I’d learned to crawl, the cat would lie in wait just out of sight. As I crawled past, she’d leap out in front of me, slap me upside the face (softpaws!) a few times, then turn tail and run away. I was six months old. This was apparently high comedy. Mom says, I’d plop back on my diapered butt, looking startled, but then laugh. My husband claims this explains a great many things. Beyond the fact that I am without question a cat person. 

This is my eldest, Madam Eratosthenes. She is sixteen, arthritic and stone deaf (not congenital – she wasn’t born deaf, she went slowly deaf about the time she turned seven). She, of all the cats, most enjoys living aboard her boat. She endures the months we house sit, and then blossoms when we cart her back to the boat. The only downside is that a deaf cat cannot hear herself. Vibration is the only feedback loop available to her. So Erie sings opera. Klingon opera. At the top of her considerable lungs. At 2am.

This is Autolycus. He has a serious issue with stress, as you can see. He’s eleven. No tail. Hell on four paws. His specialty is blue screening computers. We’ve threatened to sell him into slavery as a tester for major software companies. Hasn’t slowed him down. I had a conference call scheduled with my editor to go over a few changes. The night before, I got all my files together, made sure I was organized, shut down my computer, and left for dinner with my husband. When we got back to the boat, this little orange terror was lying across my keyboard. He’d started the machine and then pressed F10. During the boot cycle, pressing F10 takes you into set up. The little sh*t was trying to reformat my box.

This is Cuillean. She helps with the laundry. She’s my fraidy cat. Change of any kind makes her terribly anxious. She eats to compensate. It isn’t your imagination. In this photo, the girl is chunky. We’re working on that and she has slimmed down a bit. Not enough, but some. She’s eight. She’d been brought into a local pet supply store as part of Purrfect Pals adoption program. I found her hiding behind the bags of dry dog food. Every time I went to pick up catfood, I made a point of finding her hidey hole and stopping by to whisper sweet nothings to her. Eventually, she let me skritch her chin. One day, my husband went into the store with me. I showed him her fort, spoke to her, and offered her a chin rub. She accepted. Then the unthinkable happened. She left her hiding place and followed me. DH finally stopped me and said, “You know she’s your cat, right?” J This one doesn’t meow. She trills. Softest fur, ever. I call her My Plush Velvet Cuillean. She’s still all about hearing the sweet nothings.

Then there’s the youngest, Hatshepsut. Why, yes. She is convinced she’s the princess, was there ever any doubt? She’s also eight – she’s the youngest only by a few months. She was a happy accident. I had four cats when a neighbor boy showed up with an itty bitty squalling kitten in his hands. He’d found her under a car in a parking lot, screaming her head off. His mother wouldn’t let him keep her, so he’d brought her to the local crazy cat lady. I didn’t dispute the title. I keep four cats aboard a 34’ sailboat for eight months out of the year, two of whom get seasick. I’m comfortably certain ‘crazy’ covers it. Regardless. I took the wee bundle of feisty kitten and put her in my isolation room. It took her fewer than 24 hours to wind me around her paws. It took her 72 hours or so to get to the DH.

The fifth cat? He fell hard for my mother. Really hard. When it's obvious that a cat you adopted has found the great love of his life and you aren't it, there's only one thing to do. He lives with my parents and another rescue project of mine - a Japanese Bobtail named Pikachu. Seeing a theme here? Yeah. My folks, too.

Why the adoration of all things feline? Maybe I'm a pushover, but I love winning the trust and affection of a creature a single generation removed from the wild. I rescued a real feral once – she’d been hit by a car and left in the middle of the road late one night. I scooped her up and raced her to the emergency vet. After she’d been treated and spayed, I went to pick her up. She was a roiling, shrieking mass of claws and teeth. I might as well have rescued a bobcat. The vet said the only reason *I* was still alive was because the cat had been in shock when I'd found her. We caged her, let her heal, and then released her where I’d found her. The moral of that story being that every cat who has been a part of my life has brought a tiny bit of that wild heritage with them. The choice to live together is a mutual one - they choose me as much or more as I choose them. They aren’t just pets in my household. They are partners in the family dynamic. Each of them, at one time or another, has voluntarily operated as a familiar when I had specific energy work that needed doing. More than once, when I’ve been sick in bed, one or more cats has sought me out and demanded a spot on my chest (or head, if the primary spot is taken). The application of purring feline has enormous healing power. You do know that the feline purr resonates at a frequency that helps knit bone, right? Mind you, I do not intend to go about breaking bones in order to test that assertion. It’s watching the wariness and tension melt away from a cat because you’ve taken the time to listen to and to understand the needs and wants of each feline individual. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but living with my furry companions makes me a better person. Or maybe if just makes me want to be better.