Guess what? I’ve been doing stuff on social media!

I know as an Indie author, I’m supposed to do stuff on social media, but I’m not one to do what I’m supposed to do, so this will come as a surprise to many of you. Besides which, there’s my age to factor in – two weeks to go to my 63rd birthday – and as we all know, us oldies are still getting used to The Face Book.

But I’ve been trying to improve and so here’s a few things I’ve done this week, mainly on mastodon social (I’m there as @caronallan – pop in and say Hi!)

I’ve discovered the pleasure of online writing groups. On mastodon, there are two I enjoy – writerscoffeeclub and wordweavers. In addition to those, a lovely author lady (@elizabethguilt ) suggested a daily 100 word flash fiction, she calls it a drabble – this is new to me, though I used to regularly write 500 word flash fictions and also haiku – 17 syllable poems in a 5-7-5 format.

These groups plan a daily task or question for those who want to play along, and there are some interesting things on the list that came out at the start of the month. For example, Oct 3 for the Word Weavers was ‘How do you convey a character’s emotion in your work’.

This was my reply (there’s a word limit, much bigger than Twitter’s but still, it confines you.)

#WordWeavers 10/3
Conveying characters’ emotions.

Because I write 1930s cozy mysteries, I sometimes like to keep things a little understated. I think less is more in terms of emotional impact sometimes.

Though this is true of my ‘contemporary’ murder Friendship Can Be Murder series, which are written as 1st POV diary entries (yes, I now know no one likes that, but 11-12 years ago, I didn’t realise) So Criss Cross, when her hubs is murdered, MC simply records:
‘Thomas is dead. And I am alone.’

And because I wanted to share more about my Dottie books, as part of my reply, I added this image, which is an extract taken from The Mantle of God: Dottie Manderson mysteries book 2.

Coming back to the Drabble – the task was to share a 100-word limit story. I found this quite tricky, because I tend to think in terms of long fiction, so I’m not sure I’ve really followed the spirit of the idea. On Oct 1st, I uploaded this:

And then on Oct 2nd, I couldn’t stop myself from continuing on from there instead of writing a whole new 100 word story…

But I have to say, it was highly enjoyable and I feel really proud of myself to have written two new (teeny) pieces of work this week, made some new friends and talked about my books a little.

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