August 18, 2014

Just Snip It In The Bloom!

No one real topic to elaborate on today, but I do have a few snippets on which to bloviate, so I shall. Bloviate on the snippets that is.

Facebook. Sometimes knowing that certain other people also occupy the same cyberspace as you is not a good thing. Just like most other people, I too have family members in which I want absolutely nothing to do with. Permanent estrangement you could say. So you could well imagine my surprise when a blast from my very distant past reached out to friend me. Naturally the name did not ring a bell, so I did what I usually do, which is to send a very brief one sentence message asking who they were. They proceeded to identify who they was, which in turn I responded by saying that it was very nice to hear from them, but I have a personal rule of thumb of not friending family members. I told them that my only respite from my family is my blog and Facebook, and I don't bother them on Facebook and they certainly don't bother me (and they don't. my entire family is on Facebook, but they have their life and I have mine). So with one click of the mouse, I declined their request.

As one might say, I have a very very long memory about certain things/certain people, and the less contact I have the better I feel.

The Inner Sibling. I finally got off my butt and started looking into buying a book cover for the re-release of my commercial debut. First I decided to use a graphic company that I saw on Facebook, and I found a very good photo to use from Fotolia that would've fit like a glove for the book, Unfortunately, no response from an e-mail query and form query (from the website) over the course of three days (found out later that the owner decided to take a holiday) prompted me to contact the company that designed the cover to my debut. After catching up on things (we used to be published by the same company. she's still there), it was determined that she would be able to design a very nice cover that is similar to my debut (double image but fully clothed). Right now, I'm trying to figure what package I can get for the cover (possibly print in the future, but definitely e-book for now).

My next step is contacting the formatter that I found via Mark's List (he of Smashwords), who does formatting for both e-book and print, because quite frankly, this time around I have absolutely no patience for formatting. If I want it done right, I'll pay a professional to do it.

Writing. I finally did some writing over the weekend as I had a large chunk of uninterrupted quiet time in which to pursue it. As most of you are aware of, I started using my Dragon software to write. While overall it's been a positive experience, the mere fact that I'm verbally writing causes an unlimited amount of aggravation. Why? Because of the type of fiction I write (paranormal/fantasy peppered with scenes/language that starts at R and goes progressively downhill), I'm really worried about what my immediate family would say/react should they hear me talking like this. So yeah, I do have some ethics that do crop up from time to time. In any event, I wrote about 2 1/2 pages, which may not sound like a lot to you, but considering that I actually had to think/edit before speaking, it was a tremendous accomplishment.

So, for those of you on Facebook, do you face similar sticky situations? If you blog, do you have similar sticky situations as well? How do you handle family members that you suddenly come into involuntary contact with after a certain number of years (in my case, 25 years)?

(c) 2014 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.

12 comments:

  1. Thankfully, none of my family is any good with the Internet, so most of them don't even know I blog. God help me when they do figure it out. But I guess for now ignorance is bliss?

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  2. That's why I'm not even on Facebook...
    Glad you're taking the steps to re-release your book!

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  3. facebook is the only place I stay in touch with my family

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  4. ABFtS: Ignorance is definitely bliss. However, do you tell them what you do for job nowadays?

    Alex: Facebook to me is the lesser of three evils (the other two being chat rooms/forums and MySpace), so I have no problem being there. I just don't want my immediate family to bother me.

    And thanks. I'm shooting for a September release.

    Bearman: I agree Facebook is good if your family is stretched out from border to border. For me, I get enough of the family that lives within CT, so I'm good to go. I have no interest in family members who live out of state. At all.

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  5. My Facebook rule is an easy one. If I don't know them, I don't "friend" them. 9 time out of 10 they don't really know me either, they just saw some friend of theirs was a friend of mine and so they contacted me too.

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  6. G.A.: I used to get a few requests like that when I was first on FB, but most of those were simply people who knew me from the chat rooms and were only on FB to play games and nothing else. Other times I would get "suggestions" but because of the toxic nature of the chat rooms, there was no way in hell I was gonna friend them.

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  7. I value family relationships more than any other and I'm glad to keep up with them on Facebook. Beyond my immediate family, I was never very close to many of my relatives so it's kind of good to make contact over the internet. Probably better than having them come to my house in person on a regular basis.

    I don't think any of my relatives read my blogs on any regular basis so I don't concern myself about anything I might say there. Any who did read only stayed for the novelty of a few posts I guess and gave up on my blogs pretty quickly. At least I think they did.

    Lee
    Tossing It Out

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  8. Arlee: I value the majority of mine and to keep them like that, I don't want to know what they're really like on Facebook.

    As far as I know, none of my family reads my blogs, simply because reading on computer for them doesn't work...unless it's for a game.

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  9. I don't do Facebook, and most of my family doesn't know I blog ;)

    Great for you on the cover!! And I am stealing your idea of the formatting guy. Sweet.

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  10. M: Sometimes ignorance is bliss. :D

    Thanks and yeah, if I'm gonna self-publish, I might as well get it done right.

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  11. My rule for Facebook is maximum privacy settings and no one from work (except my two best friends there who are peers in the hierarchy). I am connected with a few family members, but most of them, with the exception of my sister, never seem to log on. Fortunately there is no one in my family that I am estranged from, so I don't have to make that kind of choice.

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  12. S.R.: Early on I was at maximum privacy settings, which was leftover paranoia my years spent in the chat rooms. Found out that I needed to tone it done so that people could find me. I still don't pop up on the search engines, so that suits me just fine.

    I also don't do co-workers as well. They have to be former co-workers (and some are) in order to be considered.

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