Parenting teens is easy...
just type any question and stare at the three dots until your heart breaks
Heya — both of my kids are home right now and I’m completely distracted; family is coming up from Houston for Thanksgiving dinner…. I’ll be impressed if this newsletter makes any sense.
But I am so unbelievably happy.
What gives you joy? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
To put it differently, you can choose to amass a pile of cash in a criminal way or in a lovely way, and the money holds the exact same buying power. It is not what we have, but what we do with what we have that shows character.
I am not sure if that paragraph made any sense.
My kids don’t get what the big deal is about Twitter. No one who is a non-Twitter addict gets what the big deal is. I was talking to a non-teen-human today and trying to explain what the big deal is. I ended up shutting myself down because I sounded like a teenager trying to explain why I loved someone who was clearly emotionally abusive.
But there are so many good things about Twitter! Some of them are: there is a writing community that bands together to boost each other’s posts and follow each other on the site so that if/when we find an agent we all have decent “platforms.” There is easy and immediate direct access to the random thoughts of celebrities—not just the People Magazine kind but the smart, quirky, reclusive souls like Margaret Atwood and Kelly Link and people I went to grad school with who are now famous even though they still deny it. Twitter is full of armchair philosophers.
Between those posts, though, there is random humanity. I love Twitter in the same way I love NYC — I do not know what kind of crazy I will come across, but I am certain to come across some kind of crazy. This makes me happy because…I don’t know why.
Because it means I am not the extreme of the bell curve? It’s nice to know you are a unique human being; a unique voice that is one of several billion unique voices on this planet. Why is this nice? because it means that you are equal. On Twitter, only the meanest voices were silenced. If you slandered people, you were silenced. If you espoused negativity, it was fine—so long as you were not appearing to hurt anyone or encouraging others to do any hurting.
Anyway — amid all the random chatter there was frequently also lots of breaking news. When I hear sirens blaring down Broadway, or a protest march passes under my apartment window, or when I see smoke in the distance, I always check Twitter to see if anyone has explained it. (The Fire Department of New York has an automated feed of all of the dispatch calls that easily solves most things siren-related; and #breakingnews will give me the protest info, even when I can’t see what their signs say.)
But not just local: Twitter helps me stay in touch with international friends. During the pandemic, I invited an editor I know from Twitter only, who lives in Brisbane Australia, to zoom with me. I had coffee, she had wine, and we had an hourlong meeting that would never have happened if not for lockdowns and social media.
Twitter is a terrific place to inform people about books and prizes - the feed scrolls by so quickly that you never have to feel ashamed of self-aggrandizing when you mention that you got some public acclaim. And the instant feedback is nice as well.
Point is, I love Twitter. I understand that it could end at any moment, either because Elon Musk shuts it off in a snit, or because one of the hundreds of coders he fired wants revenge or even because the software breaks on its own given that there are few employees left who care to do their jobs right now…
Many people are holding their platforms to be the next best thing—my husband recommended Mastodon—so I gave that a whirl. (I wrote about it on Medium.) I also signed up for something called The Post, which isn’t even ready yet (it was a landing page telling you to sign up…whoa! I just went to find that link for you and discovered that Trump is tweeting on a social media platform called Truth. It is literally called PRAVDA. Do his followers not see the irony of this?)
WRITING:
I got PAID for a story!! I entered a 100-word piece called “Junk Mail” that and it is now included in an anthology of super-short stories about Space Junk. Here it is, in its entirety for you to read:
And here….is the money I was paid (and the publication.) Again, in its entirety.
Anyway, I’m still thrilled. I love print publications.
Oh! More news about the Birdhouse Magazine publication - the editor wrote the most incredible, jaw-dropping note to me (suffice it to say they are not changing a word of the very short story) - I think it may be out as soon as next weekend! It will also appear in the print magazine, whenever that comes out.
Happy me.
RANDOM FINAL THOUGHTS:
What is a snit? It is such an evil-looking little word. (The internet claims it was first printed in a Southern novel. Another website claims it comes from a German word for cutting.) It’s really a weird little word. Do you think that it was considered vulgar language ever?
well said about twitter - great comparison to NYC!