A Use for Twitter

I am not the type of person who communicates well in 140 characters or less. I'm just not. But for the well-meaning friends and family who have chosen to follow me on this new devil contrivance, I thought I ought to think of some useful content to give them. So, voila! I announce here the launch of my Twitter Daily Word Count! This will keep all those people who feel they need to know everything about me up to date on my most exciting news: how many words I write in my current novel per day.

For anyone who hasn't been keeping up (truly blasphemous!) my current novel is a children's book about the tooth fairy. For about a decade I've kept a word log of all my novels. It's a way of measuring my progress in some quantitative way. I try to write about 500 words per day. When I don't succeed, I seriously stop and record everything I wrote before the 11:59 marker and then I often continue after midnight to complete the quota, but I don't count it for the previous day. Therefore, if I don't write 500 words before 11:59, I have not completed the day and usually feel a bit annoyed with myself. It probably sounds stupid and overly literal, but I find the strictness helps motivate me to at least get a certain amount done by a certain time.

I think all this attention to numbers which are generally unimportant is a way for me to cope with the inability to measure quality. Anyway, I find it helps me feel psychologically that I'm getting things done. So now I'll just share that word log with the world! (The world being my mom and the two friends who have, to their vast misfortune, chosen to follow someone as boring as me). All my standard word log entries feature the number of words, the date, and the time I finished. This will note my daily progress, but since I often finish around 11:59PM, the actual tweet may not be officially the same day. Just putting that out there. These otherwise unexciting numbers will also give you some small insight into my psyche. On the days I write 500 words or more I feel, if not happier, at least more accomplished and productive.

Of course, I'll still post the monthly counts here in my blog. Speaking of that, the monthly count for June is 7,944 words! Not great, but better than I've been doing. And I'm almost to the end of the novel with a current grand total of 69,817 words.

But you'll have to tune into my Twitter for my daily counts! Why? Am I trying to force you to follow me? No. As a matter of fact I wouldn't blame the friends that do follow me if they abandoned ship now. As tantalizing as I'm sure the prospect of word counts is.

I'm doing this because I feel sorry for Twitter and its utter uselessness in my life. At least as far as communication goes. Is Twitter useless to everyone? It seems not. I'll acknowledge it has uses. I'm subscribed to a job posting feed that's quite useful. But for me using it to talk to you, this is as good as it gets. For everything else I still refer you to this blog (which now even has a handy feed to my YouTube channel on the sidebar!)

Anyway, thank you all for your interest.