Greenville and Google

When I started mulling over possibilities for the letter "G" in Arlee Bird's A to Z blog challenge, the first thing to come to mind was the only thing I want to blog about today.

I love my town.

I mean, I seriously love my town - if Greenville was a woman instead of a city, I'd probably marry her. And I can say this after traveling around and living in other cities, larger and supposedly better cities. I lived in Indianapolis for four years, but I just couldn't stay. I had to come back to my home.

Greenville is an oasis of culture and industry, a sparkling jewel nestled in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Here, art and technology happily cohabitate; on any given night you're likely to find a networking party sometwhere downtown filled with equal amounts of techie geeks and artistic freaks. It doesn't matter here what your specialty is, as long as you're passionate about it. I live in a city filled with people who firmly believe in the beauty of their dreams, and those people strive to help each other achieve success in their chosen fields.

A perfect example of this thriving community coming together to work towards a common goal is Google on Main. Several weeks ago, Google announced their plans to bring Google Fiber to one lucky town in America. Google Fiber is a new, super-fast internet which Google is now beta testing. It's supposed to be up to 100 times faster than broadband internet. Google offered its new service to the community who could stand up and show they wanted it the most - by getting as many people involved as they could, including city and state officials as well as individuals from the general public.

Greenville responded by organizing Google on Main, an event which drew over 2000 people to Falls Park downtown. The crowd was given eco-friendly LED color-change glow sticks, and once twilight fell, we organized ourselves into the letters of the Google logo, creating the world's first and largest people-powered Google chain! (The photo above is an aerial view of our accomplishment. You can click on the picture to get a larger view.) This was an amazing feat considering it was organized in less than two weeks, and the heads of dozens of companies, several city and state officials, and even a senator got involved.

I volunteered at the event with my friend and fellow writer Leigh Green, and the powers that be decided I would be responsible for handing out the majority of the glow sticks. I had a blast helping out. Everyone at the event was happy to be there, and showing them how the LED color-change glow sticks worked was a lot of fun. It felt as if I was handing out happiness! Everyone walked away from me with a smile on their face.

Being in the diverse crowd of techies, geeks, artists, moms, dads, businessmen (and women), teenagers, grandparents, and every other flavor of person you could think of really made me proud of my community and what we can accomplish together when we put our minds to it. Google hasn't made any decisions on where Google Fiber is going first, but Greenville's been noticed by the big guys - we even had Google representatives downtown during the organizing of Google on Main!

Greenville is responsible for making me the writer I am today. I wouldn't be who I am without the town I grew up in. It's influenced my career as an artist in so many ways, and I'm so proud to be able to give back to the community in any way I can. I'm sure I'll be posting more about my city in the future.

What do you love about your town? What makes you proud to live where you do?

If you'd like to give Greenville, SC a hand in winning a Google Fiber poll, click here and cast a vote!

Social Media

A few months ago I read that publishers and agents are much more likely to work with an author if they have an established web presence, including social media profiles. This makes a lot of sense to me, because I know the publishing industry is changing on a daily basis, and many publishers or agents just don't have the resources which used to be available to them for marketing and publicity. If a publisher sees a writer already has an established presence online (I learned later that this is called a "platform"), it makes working with that author more attractive, because it gives the publisher one less thing to worry about.

Reading that article is what made me get started with this blog. I already had a Facebook fan page, but I hadn't done a lot with it. When I learned that publishers are seeking authors who are willing to take over their own publicity, I added a Twitter feed and started keeping a regular web journal. I want to be able to show a publisher that I've established myself and keep up with posting, and also I want them to see that I already have an established fan base. This is most easily calculated through my Facebook fans. While 122 fans might not be as many as some people out there, I feel it's a good start.

Blogging has now become part of my job as a writer - it's a way to get my words out there, tell people how my work on different projects is going, and record my progress. I also love being able to talk about the different parts of the writing process that really interest me, as well as other topics like music and art. I've learned so much since I started blogging a couple of months ago, and made some great new friends.

I also love my Facebook fan page. I don't update it more than once a week or so, because I don't want to inundate people with my posts and turn them off. I try to post every couple of weeks about the blog, and once a week or so I change my status message. I'm trying to keep a balance of online-and-active but not annoying.

My Twitter feed is fun to play with, but I don't use it as much as I should. I have found a couple of new friends and followers through Twitter by using their search engine and striking up a conversation on related interests. My newest follower, Ryan from Iowa, is a Murder By Death fan, and that's how I found him - by searching for @murderbydeath in the Twitter search field, then tweeting to him about the concert this weekend and my blog post about it, complete with a photo of Sarah, the cellist. There are a lot of wonderful ways to utilize Twitter that I haven't played with yet, but I'm working on it.

The website will be up soon, and I hope I can integrate these blogs with the website. I've been told it shouldn't be that hard to do because it's a WordPress website, but I wonder if my blog followers will still be able to see my updates if I'm posting on the website instead of directly to blogspot? Has anyone else had any experience with this?

I'm having a lot of fun establishing my "writer's platform", and the more I work on it, the more I feel like a (flourish of trumpets, please) REAL WRITER. It helps me get my headspace into where it needs to be - that is, making things up and writing 'em down is my career, and punching in and out at my daily grind-job (a la Clark Kent) is only how I pay the bills. It's gratifying.

What are some other social media sites you would recommend (or NOT recommend)? Any and all suggestions are welcome.

South Carolina Book Festival

I went to the South Carolina Book Festival with Brian K. Ladd and Gail Gray yesterday. It was a fun trip, and as Brian said earlier this morning, "definitely an eye-opening experience".

I wish I'd had a chance to go to all three days of the Festival. There were a lot of interesting people, especially authors, in attendance. We sat in on two panels on Sunday: Debut Novelists and Science Fiction and Fantasy: What's the Difference?

The first panel featured four authors who have published their first novels within the last year: Brian Ray, Heidi Durrow, Batt Humphreys, and Dale Neal. They all had insightful things to say about publishing your first novel, but as a first-time novelist who's gearing up to send queries out to agents this summer, I unfortunately heard nothing helpful regarding the traditional submission of query letters and networking in the publishing world. Three of the four authors had won a contest to get their book published, and the fourth, a journalist with 30 years experience at CBS, was approached to write his book.

This lack of query-and-networking commentary (and, evidently, experience) was frustrating. It was kind of like attending a seminar on how to get rich and the speakers at that seminar encouraging you to buy lottery tickets. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure each of the three authors who'd won publishing contests wrote beautiful books - each of which I'd like to take a closer look at. You don't win contests by writing crap. I give each of those writers my utmost respect. But is 3/4 of the panel being contest winners really an accurate representation of the hundreds (if not thousands) of authors who get published each year? I would've liked to've seen a more realistic approach to getting published from these "Debut Novelists".

I definitely got more information out of the second panel, and enjoyed myself a lot more as well. James O'Neal talked about his new series of futuristic crime novels, while Janice Hardy discussed her "Healing Wars" fantasy novels, a trilogy which begins with the novel The Shifter. Both of these novelists had a lot to say about the differences and similarities between science fiction and fantasy, and they had a great chemistry for a two-person panel. Janice defined the difference between science fiction and fantasy as "Fantasy writing is the exploration of the impossible. Science fiction is the exploration of what could be probable." Interesting, huh? I also got some great insights on how cops handle certain situation from James, and hope to incorporate it into the novel - considering one of my main characters is a police officer, this was a great find!

After the panels, we walked the exhibit floor and talked to several different authors. My favorite by far was Nick Valentino, a steampunk and fantasy writer who's just published his first novel, Thomas Riley. Nick had some great marketing going on. He recruited a USC student to dress up in steampunk gear and hand out flyers for his booth at the door. Nick also dressed up in his own steampunk outfit, and handed out beautiful press cards and nifty swag like this cool iron-on patch:



I got one of these for myself and another for a friend who's crazy about steampunk. Nick was ingratiating and fun, and made us feel welcome in his booth. We pooled our money and bought his book, and he signed it for us after making us promise we'd become part of his "Sky Pirate Army". It was so much fun!

Aside from Nick, there was very little fantasy or science fiction showcased, and absolutely NO horror at all. This was another disheartening discovery for me. I hope the SC Book Festival will broaden their horizons in the years to come (especially when I have a book I'd like to showcase there, heh).

Even though it was a mixed bag of tricks, I'd definitely go to the SC Book Festival again next year. I feel it's important to meet other authors and show my support for the writers in South Carolina, and this festival is just one of the many ways I can achieve that goal.