~ a story yet to tell…

Really?  It’s been a month since I’ve posted a single word here….My author friend Liz and I recently just about managed to exchange emails, let alone post to our blogs and other webbing social media access to the universe methods….I started a Twitter account today.  For now, just to watch and manage and to decide if that little blue bird of social media will even work for me.  As soon as I activated it felt like an airplane dropped off hundreds of letters on my lawn and I had to sort everything…it was dizzying.  Granted Twitter organizes the “letters” into categories.  But still…where do you start?  Do you even want to start?  I was on for less than 20 minutes and was itchy to write a letter or  journal entry or even place a phone call.  But now when the phone rings in the house (if there still is even a house phone) immediately you think, “what’s wrong?”  Amazing!

So, back to Twitter.  My nephew was patiently attempting to describe #hashtags to his mom yesterday.  Boy did my sister-in-law really try to get it.  And for the 20 something year old describing it, it was like he was describing brushing your teeth.”Well, you take off the toothpaste cap, wet the toothbrush…..” Hashtagging to him was like brushing or breathing or eating.  Needless to say a funny scene of generational divide,  So, to feel connected to some form of social media and universal sharing I made my way back to my WordPress site.  After a month (like Liz’s) of LOTS of family responsibility and getting everyone to where they had to go: college….more time is mine.  Well, maybe not quite yet because first, I really have to catch my breath and process the past summer.  I write in retrospect many times, so I need to take time to process events once they’re complete.

TEAPOTS and all of the big marketing and getting out there and talking it up awaits…In the meantime, the one on one marketing like yesterday in NY handing my new friend Debbie from Canada my TEAPOTS card and talking about the book, and how it came to be, is my kind of connection.  Slower marketing, but personal marketing.  I never wrote TEAPOTS to become rich or famous.  In my opinion, a story from the heart begging to be told spills out when the time is right in the Universe.  So any connection I make feels part of the journey and the reward.  No rush.  No big marketing campaign.

Holding out on final decision on the whole tweet thing…still holding on to the old-fashioned thing….last week I placed five letters in the U.S. mail.  It took 30 minutes to write them.  A tall order for any 20 something tweeting away, if I might say so…And I even had the joy of handing the stamped envelopes right to the postman who had just emptied the mailbox on the corner and was just driving by.  So 70’s!!  I had no doubt that in a few days my recipients would receive the notes in their mailboxes and be happy and feel personally thought of.  One is a 10-year-old girl who read TEAPOTS and wanted to talk more about it….Because like phone calls, letters in the mailbox are fewer and fewer.  I’m sure I’ll have to call my nephew or try to tweet him if/when I decide to launch full steam ahead into Twitter.  For now, I’m a novice, an onlooker who has to make sense of the whole thing – all the invitations to follow, retweet, hashtag….  Time to go write a letter!  Envelope, stamp and all!!!