Friends and Unfriending (an IWSG post)

This post is brought to you by the letter "I." Also, it is brought to you by the letter "W." Oh, and "S" and "G," too. That would be IWSG better known as the Insecure Writer's Support Group dreamed up by Alex Cavanaugh while he was sleeping. No, really, he was asleep. The letters fell on his head, and he had to make them mean something. His first option was "SWIG," but he felt that didn't really convey anything meaningful. Take a swig of what, right? Next, he went with "WIGS," but he didn't want to imply anything or insult anyone. Since nothing else was working, he threw the letters into the air and got IWSG, which had to mean something even if he didn't know what that was. After Rusty supplied the word "insecure," the rest fell into place.

This month, I'm actually going to talk about an insecurity, something I tend not to do because I tend to be mostly secure. Some would say overconfident, but I think more like comfortably confident. Well, in context, at any rate. I'm not, like, Barney Stinson confident. I know what things I'm good at, and I'm confident in those abilities. That does not extend to playing Skylanders with my kids as my younger son showed me the other day as he continued to clobber me in player vs player mode. I think my video gaming skills are beginning to atrophy since I haven't done any real playing of, well, anything in a few years, and the last thing I played to any extent was one of the Indiana Jones Lego games on the Wii.
But I digress...

My biggest area of insecurity, right now, is being unfriended (which is now a word even if my spell checker is telling me it's not (which is not to say that I agree with it's word worthiness, but no one asked me (still, it's better than LOL being a word, and I still can't figure out how that made it through))) or unfollowed or whatever. But it's not even that, it's the not knowing WHY! Or who. I mean, if Facebook would just do us the courtesy of telling us who unfriended us, it might cut out a lot of the anxiety. Even knowing that, generally, the reasons have nothing to do with me specifically, as often it is actually just people deactivating their accounts, it's hard for me not to question myself every time I lose one of those FB friends. "Who unfriended me?" "Did I do something to cause it?" The questions, they plague me!

Sometimes, there is a reason. For instance, there was this whole thing in the past year over this review that I did. I'm not gonna give names or anything, but let's just say the review wasn't a good one. The author had friended me on FB prior to the review with this quote:

Andrew, I'm excited for you to read it and I will accept any review you give, harsh or glowing or harshly glowing. Get on it already!

I sort of expected that to be the truth; unfortunately, it ended up not being the truth, and the recipient of the review attacked my character over the review (I think the most tossed around term was "douche"), so I wasn't surprised when he unfriended me. However, FB didn't tell me it was he that unfriended me, so I scoured my friend list trying to figure out who it was, which is a maddening thing to do (since some of the people on there are from back when I used to play Farmville and stuff, and I don't really know who they are), and it was a long time before I thought to check to see if he was one of the people that recently dropped me.

And he's not the only person that has unfriended me over review issues. But, then, when someone friends me over the prospect of a review for his/her book that does not mean I'm going to give a good review just so that s/he will be my friend. I mean, that is so high school. "Do my homework for me, and I'll be your friend" kind of thing. In the end, those situations don't bother me. When I know that's what's going on.

Anyway...
I've been struggling at around 370 friends for months, now. I've hit 374 two or three times and dropped back down to 370 again every time. Every time I lose a number, I scour my list trying to figure out who it was, because I want to know WHY! My wife tells me I'm being silly, and, in my head, I know that I am, but this whole thing really is an insecurity for me, especially since I'm in a field where I "need" to build my friends list and my followers. I used to be fairly particular about friend requests, even when I was playing Farmville, and turned down a lot of the gaming requests I got. These days, I tend to not be very particular and accept pretty much every request I get, since it's everyone is a "potential." Don't ask me what that means; I just know that it's so.

The funny thing about all of this is that in life I'm not so concerned with "friends." I tend to just do my thing and people that want to join in can and those that don't want to can go their own way. I've always been like this, so I've bounced about a bit in the number of friends I've had at any given time based on what I was interested in and where I happened to be. Being the "weird" one has never bothered me, unlike my brother, who always wanted lots of friends and to fit in. Of course, he was one of the ones always telling me that if I just wouldn't be so "weird," I'd have more friends, and he couldn't understand why I was so unconcerned with it all.

But all of that is different now that I have to deal with it on a faceless numbers basis. It's not like walking down the hall in high school and knowing who is and is not your friend, because you can't easily see these people behind the numbers on facebook or blogger or wherever, so it bothers me when that number changes and I wonder if it was me even when I know I should be even less concerned over it now than I have ever been in my life, and that was not at all, which tells me that number fluctuations shouldn't bother me. And, yet, they do.

They do! And I can't stand it! Yes, it's enough to make me neurotic. That is, if I wasn't already.

So there you go... my insecurity. Do with that what you will.

However, up there on the right, you might see where it says "FIND ME HERE!" If you do see that and if you want to find me in those places, you can go over and catch me on facebook and goodreads as well. Just, if you do, don't unfriend me without letting me know, okay?

Creative Answers and Creative Writing

First off, I got tagged by Michael Offutt for this new meme that's running around. These things seem to be really contagious with an almost 100% infection rate. I'm wearing protective gear as I write this, so, hopefully, not too many of you will catch it. Unless, you know, you want to. But I'll get to that in a bit. It's a fairly simple meme other than the fact that it involves time travel, and my flux capacitor is on the fritz. So is my police box. And that's unfortunate, because I was trying to use it for extra storage space, and it suddenly spit everything out as it returned to its normal interior dimensions. I was sad. So here are the questions and the answers:
1. If you could go back in time and relive one moment, what would it be?
Um... I don't really understand this question. At least, not in respect to the next question. I just get to go back and relive it? Which implies I must have lived it once already, so I can't just go back and experience some moment in time, but it has to be one of my own moments. And I'm just reliving it, but I can do that by remembering it, so what's the point? Maybe to approach the experience with a different sense of appreciation, in which case I would pick the first time I saw Star Wars. I had no idea of what I was walking into, and it might be interesting to be able to go into that theater all those years ago with an appreciation of the impact it was going to have on my life.
However, reflecting on Michael's answer, I might go back to this trip to Washington D.C. when my friends and I stopped in some hole-in-the-wall diner for burgers. Best burger ever. Seriously. Even if they didn't want to serve us and we feared for our lives. The burgers made it worth it.

2. If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?
See, I don't know if this question is related to the previous one or not. Change one thing in my life or change anything? How do I know what the consequences would be? Although there are things in my life that I would do differently, I wouldn't do them differently if they wouldn't get me to where I am now. I have a great family. Wonderful wife. Awesome kids. I wouldn't do anything to risk that, so mucking about in time is not something I'm very inclined to do.
However, if I could be assured that my family would stay intact, I might go back to the Roman Empire and support their steam engine technology (Did you know the Romans invented the steam engine? Well, they did.) just to see where we would be, today, if the steam engine had gone into use, basically, 2000 years earlier.

3. What movie/TV character do you most resemble in personality?
This question doesn't work all that well for me, because I don't really watch a lot of television. And how does this question relate at all to the previous two? Should I pick a time travelling character? But, no, that doesn't really work.
If I have to pick someone, my wife would probably say Bob the Tomato. If you don't know who that is... well, I don't know what to say about that. Runners up would be Monk and Sheldon Cooper.

4. If you could push one person off a cliff and get away with it, who would you choose?
Just one? I don't know how I could possibly choose. I mean, there's no one I actually hate enough to want to kill, and there are too many people that deserve it to pick just one. And are we talking about one person alive today or just anyone from history? The whole scenario is just too... ambiguous.

5. Name one habit you want to change in yourself.
Hmm... farmville? The farther through these questions I get, the more I wonder about the purpose behind them? Wait, wait! I have it! I would change my habit of not travelling in time. Yes, that's the one.

6. Why do you blog?
So I can discover the ability to travel in time? That seems to go along with the rest of these questions, and I can't think of a better reason. Of course, there's also the whole thing of giving people the opportunity to discover whom I am so that they'll want to buy my book(s). But time travel is a much cooler answer.

7. Name at least three people to send this to:
Since I'm trying to limit my contagiousness, I'm going to let you guys answer if you want to. Expose yourself to whatever kind of computer virus this is at your own discretion. But, um, yeah... three of you should definitely choose to answer these questions. At least three. You can let me know in the comments if you're gonna pass this on.

So that's it for the creative answers part of this post. Now, we move on to the creative writing part.

Starting today, I'll be teaching a creative writing class at my kids' school one day a week (in the middle school). Unfortunately, it's not a paid thing. But it is pretty cool. Going to a charter school, all the parents have to have some level of involvement at the school. Most often, this is just helping out in the class room or, maybe, grading papers. What I'm saying is that parents don't generally get to be involved in the academic side of things. That's probably as much the parents' decisions as the school's, though. There are a number of parents who contribute to the P.E. side of things and the drama group is parent lead, but that's about the extent of it that I've seen. At any rate, I'm excited to be doing this, even if it is a free gig. It should be fun.

My son (the younger one) had to have his classes switched around so that he could get to be in my class, and he's all excited, too. He was sort of grilling me this morning about what sort of things we're going to be doing, and I harassed him by telling him I was going to get to be harder on him than on everyone else in the class. I don't think he appreciated that very much. I am glad he's getting to be in it, though; he started writing his own novel at the beginning of the summer but quickly found out that it was harder than he thought. He hasn't gotten very far with it. Hopefully, having regular creative writing assignments will help get him in the habit of writing creatively.

In other, unrelated news:

I think I'm disliking November and this whole NaNo thing. Yeah, I know, blasphemy. But I think of Mork every time I see NaNo anywhere at this point. "NaNo, NaNo!" Just, you know, please don't start sitting on your heads. I suppose I'll see how the rest of the month goes before I make a final decision about this weird ritual.

We got a dog. It's about time. More on that to come, I'm sure. Maybe pictures if I ever get the camera set back up since the move.

Online sales in October for The House on the Corner were completely flat. That's less than heartening, but, overall, I suppose I've been doing okay. I wouldn't really know in all actuality, though. Maybe everyone is just waiting to hear what Michael has to say about it. It seems the trend that anyone he reviews gets a spike in sales afterward.
heh

Well, it's time to go get ready for class...