…AKA: being social from behind the safety of my keyboard.

Oh, but first, really quick tangent. This is the last day to enter to win a copy of Sofia Grey’s Obsession by commenting on this blog post here. And it’s an incredible dark contemporary romance, so it’s worth tossing your name in the hat (or the comments section in this case).

Okay, back to basics, my actual blog post. I’ve been doing a lot of pondering over the last few weeks. A serious lot of pondering. About how many people are saying something (most of us) and how many people are listening (not nearly as many of us) and how many people are being heard (even fewer of us).

All this pondering is related to things that people refer to as ‘marketing’ and ‘platform’ and I’m sure about fifty other buzzwords that I never bothered to learn because I was too busy not being worried about it. When my social media feeds and blog were what I wanted to say because I was in the mood to say it. Not that I’ve ever been a big, vocal, controversial person, but…

I think this is jumping around too much. *focuses thoughts* Okay. Way back in the day, when I started blogging, before I had things like a book contract and a ‘coming soon in the Bits & Bytes series’, I used to hop on here ever day or so and just blab about whatever was in my Skittle-filled writer brain.

I’d look at those “other” authors whose Twitter feeds were full of nothing but links to their books (I’m not talking the occasional link, I’m talking nothing but links to their books), and I’d think haughtily, “I’ll never be one of those. I’ll get by on wit alone. Because I’m witty. Damn it. I said so, and that makes it so.”

Hey, it does in books, right? Author says so, and in that world it makes it so? 😉

Except now, two and a half months after my first book launch, my brain screams all the time “Why aren’t more people paying attention to us? SHOUT LOUDER.” Except I’m not a shouter, but I try. And then the other day I looked at my Twitter feed, and it was all links to my book, and my blog, and talking about coffee.

Which is the opposite of awesomeness frosted. In fact, it’s pretty freakin’ lame. Except the coffee bit. I’m an addict, so that probably won’t ever go away from anything I say online.

To make it worse, about four or five months ago I lost all of my blog links in my newsfeed reader. All of you whose blogs I would scan every morning and love, one day the links weren’t there. And the issue is, even though I know who you all are, I never memorized your blog URL’s (sorry :-P) so I’ve been able to recover about 1/4 of the missing links and the rest are just *poof* until I can find you again.

And I miss reading your blogs and chatting with you online and I really miss the silence that was in my brain before there was the roar of “MUST SELL MORE BOOKS SHOUT LOUDER”.

Skittles are a noisy bunch when they think they’re being ignored.

I’m going back to basics. The blog hops I love (which is why my sidebar is filling up with images), the people I want to hear from, the posts I want to write, the authors I want to feature, and the tweets I want to send. And if you’re here, you can see my pretty cover graphics without me pointing them out to you, and you can read more if you choose to.

And okay, I may still send up the occasional book link, but only if the Skittles make me do it.

I miss talking to people. So talk to me. If you leave links below, I can start to build my blog list again and I can have *good* things to read in the morning, instead of staring at gaming forums (gaming forums, worse brain drain ever. Trust me on this one.) What are you up to, and where can I find you?