It seems that the Frankfurt Book Fair has finally arrived. I've been watching various Tweets over the past couple of days and have been surprised how much has been going on, behind the scenes, before the fair even opens.
It made me wonder just how much actually happens at the fair itself, and how much just happens because so many of the right people are in the same place at the same time.
I guess it's a little of both.
Of course, for me, the arrival of the fair just means that it will soon be over, and hopefully some news will come our way. I'm certainly not expecting anything to happen with THE LONG SECOND at the fair (although I'd be delighted to be proved wrong), but I'm hoping that when all the hangovers have receded and various editors find themselves back at their desks come Monday, maybe normal service will be resumed. Whatever that is.
In other news... Book 2 continues to progress. There was a nice moment late last week when the second half of the book seemed to come into focus for a while and many words were written, then rewritten, then rewritten again. Sadly, the momentum got a little lost somewhere in those rewrites, and suddenly it's mired in the gloom once more, waiting for another little ray of sunshine to re-illuminate the storyline (enough metaphors?).
And as for Twitter... suddenly the cynic in me has discovered a use for it. So, a big hello to all my followers and followees (is that a real word?), and a big thank you to Nicola (who, I promise, I'm not really stalking) for enlightening me on the power of 140 characters.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I understand twitter is mainly for those who can't manage to string enough words together coherently to justify a blog, or able to work out how to run an rss feed of their pronouncements.
ReplyDeleteQuite frankly, who cares? I do not need to know when Stephen Fry gets momentarily trapped in a lift, how he feels about it, or the reactions of a random subset of the public to this horrible tragedy.
Add to that that that it somehow makes the top-posting, impossible to follow thread style of newbies who have just discovered usenet look eloquent, and I'm not sold on it.
Of course, like every other sad webhead, I have an account which screams look at me, look at me, I have an opinion, goddamnit. It has exactly one tweet on it, so it screams somewhat quietly, and oddly for me, is misspelt. Doesn't matter of course, as twitter itself has the date and time wrong....
The only thing I find more irritating than twitter are people who refer to it replacing the letter "i" for an "a". Oh, that's clever, I'd never have thought of that....
I like Twitter, I also like The Sun too (which you can't get in Newfoundland, but which I have been buying and very much enjoying whilst holidaying in Florida), it's drop in, drop out reading and writing, what ever your opinion is, there are others that are polar opposite. Like mine, opinion is great isn't it, I'm going to go and 'tweet' about this now.
ReplyDeleteAs one of the national newspapers (as in one that carries actual news, not a glorified comic for adults) referred today to twitter's possible loss of it's celebrities dues to studios realising that uncontrolled PR tends to be very poor PR, I'll just post the one line from the article.
ReplyDelete"..you may soon need to to find another way to keep up with the daily banalities".
Kevin Smith tweets about going to the toilet. Funny? Possibly. Worth actually reading? Not so much.
As I said, twitter is for those who can't put a coherent sentence together to justify keeping a blog, or capable of concentrating long enough to read one. It's micro-blogging for the sms generation.
This isn't an opinion, it's an observation. Different thing entirely.