My Twitter Adventures

I've probably been spending way more time on Twitter lately than I should, but when you are meeting a lot of fun people and having enjoyable conversations it is hard to stop. It's doubly addicting because when anyone asks, I get to say I'm on Twitter "working." I get one of those, "yeah, right" looks, but I can say that I am. I'm networking, I'm letting people get to know me and see that I'm a writer so they'll be interested in what I write.

The other day, I had a great exchange with a couple of new friends from Twitter, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but they know who they are! The whole conversation started over some chips & salsa.

You might wonder how can a whole conversation start with chips & salsa, but it's quite easy really. It was that hungry time of the day after lunch, before dinner and Twitter was full of people sharing what they were going to be eating. I suggested that someone share the Mexican food they were planning and was offered chips & salsa. I fell for the ruse and the conversation was off and running.

From sharing chips & salsa, or rather attempting to keep the chips & salsa from one another, the three of us stumbled upon some fun Twitter rules to writing I thought I'd share.

First, do not eat a big meal and then try to write action scenes in your work. When you're all stuffed and happy, imagine running, chasing or sword fighting just seems like too much effort.

That leads to the second rule, wait at least one hour after eating to write action scenes. It's very similar to the waiting to swim after you eat rule, and therefore seemed to make good sense while we were exchanging tweets.

The third rule I learned was that if someone offers you chips & salsa -- it's a ruse! They will then go off and eat enchiladas, tacos, burritos and rice and beans leaving you distracted with the chips & salsa.

Rule four was that writing chips & salsa into a sword fight can lead to some interesting descriptions such as: Lunging forward with a chip, she dipped into the salsa spinning away to crunch the chip while blocking her opponent's advance to the salsa.

A final rule, or rule five, was that if you are going to steal all the chips & salsa be sure to clean up all the crumbs from your keyboard or someone will send a security cat over to investigate.

Okay, so the true rule I learned from all this was very simple, Do not tweet when you're hungry.