#BlogFlash - Day 1 - Thinking about Tara Cove

Today is Day 1 of Terri Long's blog challenge. We are responding to visual prompts each day. Here's the first one: Thinking:

I was thinking about the fun I used to have as a kid. When I was a girl, every summer I was invited to spend a week or two with my cousin. Her family had a chalet at Tara Cove, an Irish sea resort. 

Tara Cove

For her and her brothers, the chalet got boring. There was no TV and one radio. Her father expected us to go to the sea and swim three times a day, rain or shine, in order to get his money's worth. 


About that - the Irish Sea is COLD. If it hit 70 F it was a balmy summer. We went in, shivering, but after a few minutes we were leaping about as splashing each other as happily as the seals that sometimes joined us.


After the swim we'd run back to the chalet. By that point we were gasping for food. In order to feed such large crews, my aunt set out plain but nourishing meals - sardine sandwiches and oxtail soup were staples. It could have been cardboard and we'd have eaten it.


With no television, we had to improvise games. Monopoly was a staple (the Dublin edition) as well as Authors, but we also played Truth or Consequences and Battleship on endless pieces of paper. 

Authors. Looks riotous, does it not?

Sometimes other members of the family would arrive. The kids were banished to a tent outside so the adults could sleep indoors. After swimming three times each day it didn't matter - we could sleep through anything.


We read and read and read, anything we could get our hands on. Once we finished our books we raided my uncle's library; that's how I got introduced to the Ian Fleming books.

Got to love these retro covers!

My uncle followed everyone around with his little cine camera. Once a year he'd have a showing of the films he took - of my cousins crawling around (he always called them "SmellyBot") to my mother performing a dance the day she borrowed my cousin's bikini. Pretty impressive that she could wear a 14 year old girl's suit! That particular movie was one of the faves.

Eat your hearts out, tech geeks!

Eventually we all moved on, went to college. The chalet was sold, and whoever owns it now - will they ever have as much fun as I did?

In Another Lifetime ...

...I will get that armband tattoo. I'm on the verge of hangy-down arm skin now, and to get a celtic symbol or barbed wire at this point would be wanna be-ish.

Looks good on HER, though.

I will work for the Peace Corps. I really meant to do it this go-round, but I somehow got too caught up with laundry, family functions, and my own inability to stand in direct sunlight without exploding into flames.

I'll write my books before I reach middle age, so I can be a Cool Young Artist, not a Comfortably Padded Mother Figure. People will sigh over the fact that I'm a prodigy instead of congratulating me for finding a hobby in my golden years.

My skiing ability will be much better, since I'll learn how when I'm three, not thirty.

Ditto skating, and every other sporting activity. Plus I'll be able to do the splits until I'm seventy.

I'll insist on Sunday mornings spent in the reading room (did I mention that I'll have a "reading room?") as I calmly read the Sunday papers, instead of forcing my child to wear anything other than a Hogwarts robe and flip flops to church.

My second-hand bookstore, the one with a large black cat asleep in the front bay window, will be well-established by the time I'm married so no one can talk me out of it.

I'll eat a lot more meringues. You can't get enough of those things.

Also Irish sausages.

The thing is, though, that probably I already made all these pledges to myself in my last lifetime. Still, I will definitely read more good books, and I'm going to fight for that second hand bookstore and that cat.

Speaking of good books, I have a great new author on my blog tomorrow. His name is Ross Kitson, and he'll guest blog here on Fresh Pot of Tea, on the subject of anti-heroes. (You know, those guys who are heroic but really flawed too, not all squeaky clean like Superman. I love those guys.)

He is the author of Dreams of Darkness Rising, a fantasy that has all kinds of cool surprises inside.

See you here!

Social Media for Authors, Pt. 1: A New Star in the Twitterverse

Over the next few weeks, some of the authors at FIBP and I will be running a continuing series on how to work social media  to increase your author network and drive traffic to your  blogs. In doing so, that will get more eyes on your book and hopefully drive sales.


Each blog focuses on a particular aspect of the social media network. Today’s post, for example, highlights Twitter as an important portion of your toolkit for reaching readers. We should point out, however, that all forms of networking can interact: Twitter can highlight blog posts, blogging can take readers to sites like Goodreads, and Facebook can be a central hub for it all. In fact, each individual author can design a network that reflects her own marketing goals.

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When I finished my book,  agents and publishers never called or rang the doorbell. Once I was live on Amazon, the throngs of people clamoring to shell out three clams for my book also failed to materialize. I had to go and get them, one at a time.


One of the main tools I use to do that is Twitter. It’s a great resource for writers - in fact, I would hazard a guess that a lot of tweeps out there are writers.


When I started marketing, I had 17 followers. I now have close to 700, three months later. If you are starting off from scratch,  I suggest you use your writer’s name as your twitter username, or your name + author if it’s not available. Go to Twitter .com and build a profile. Be certain to upload a nice photo – one that looks good humored or that has a bit of sass to it.


Include a short bio that  mentions what your connection is to writing, as well as a link to your blogspot (more on that later.) The next step is to get a whole boatload of followers.


I built a following by participating in #WW or #WriterWednesday, and #FF or  #FollowFriday. If you put some of your followers’  names in a tweet and add those hashtags, they will do the same for  you. They’ll know you have done that because they will click on the @Mentions, which will bring up all the tweets with their names in them.

At a certain point the following will just start building on its own, especially if you take the time to say thank you to every new follower. 


You can do the same thing. Click on @Mentions after you have been on for a few days and you’ll see who has mentioned you in a tweet. Tweet them back and say thank you. That gets both of your names out there even more.


That brings us to the magic RT, or retweet. If someone puts up a mention of a book or a blog in a tweet, be certain to retweet it for them. Do it often enough, and you’ll pick up a lot of thank yous. When you put up a blog or book link, people will do the same for you.


While all of this is going on, be certain to tweet about funny thing that happen to you, random thoughts as a writer, snippets from your day – fun things to read. If you go overboard with the marketing and retweets and #FF’s,, your tweet list  will look like one sea of red links, and you won’t get as many followers. Who wants  to get in touch with someone who talks like an infomercial all the time?


The more time you spend on Twitter, the more followers you will get. Don’t let it take over  your life, though. You have  books and blogs to write after all.


Which brings us back to that blog link you put into your profile. Remember how you told new followers that you would check out their links? And how you did? And how you liked some of them enough to follow their blogs so you could read them each week?


Well, some of your new followers will be doing that  to you as well. Through the use of Twitter, you will increase your blog readership. This is how social media will begin bleed over  across formats, in a good way.


Not only that, but as you look at your new  followers’  blogs and read their tweets, you’ll find new  opportunities. There are writers out there looking for guest bloggers and people to interview and books to feature. They might as well feature your book.


BTW - as a reminder, you only have 140 characters to tweet in. You’ll need to shorten some of those looooong  links.  You can do that at bit.ly, or at a host of other shortening sites. I like Bit.ly because it stores  your shortened links and copies them to your clipboard when you need them again.


As a final tip, now on #WW (Writer  Wednesday) I feature a few select friends, instead of long lists of @writername and @whoosis.  Here’s an example:


#WW @danielleraver - She’s funny, talented, and a tech whiz. Her book Brother, Betrayed is at http://amzn.to/jZxiSk

I actually tweeted that, by the way.


A tweet like that  gets a lot of attention - well, more than strings of @writernames, and the people I mention in those tweets get a real kick out of it. 


In my opinion, being classy, having a thick skin, and respecting the other authors out there will get you a lot further  in the Tweetiverse than any automatic Followback software. But I think that’s true of most of the aspects of being a writer.


Look for the next aspect of social media at Philosophies of a Young Heart by Danielle Raver, author of Brother, Betrayed, appearing next week.