Collaboration in the Age of the Internet

I have no idea if any of you follow me on Twitter or not, but if you do you might have seen the hashtag #sprr floating around in my Twitter stream for the past two weeks or so. And of course by now you're probably wondering what the devil the dang thing actually means.

The short version is that, after a discussion early last week, myself, Ren Cummins (@rencummins), Theresa Meyers (@theresa_meyers), Anabel Portilo (@nemone7), and Angyl (@syferlocke) decided to write a round robin story. A Steampunk round robin story, that eventually turned into a Steampunk Romance involving Air Pirates, an evil Empire, and a ridiculously vibrant world of arid landscapes, high mountains, derring-do, floating cities, and super mega powered airships. The "Air Pirate" is a woman, incidentally, with a dashing male Air Fleet captain sent by the Queen-Empress to catch her.

In deciding to write this story, we were presented with a unique problem. Theresa and Ren are located in Washington state, I live in Massachusetts, Angyl calls Kansas his home, and Anabel lives in Ireland. How to conquer this time and distance differential so all five of us can work on the story? We could've spent time emailing a Word doc back and forth, but there's a distinct difficulty with that method. This difficulty being that we'd need to figure out a hard-and-fast order for who writes when and the word count limit that each person would have before passing it along to the next person. An additional problem is that there'd be a certain amount of lag while the next person read what had come before and then figured out what they wanted to write.

However! I'd recently begun a project -- tentatively called "Purity Distilled" -- where I shared the file I was working on with Theresa, Anabel, and Ren via Google's Docs application. If you don't know anything about Google Docs, http://docs.google.com, it's a fantastic web-based program that mimics Open Office or Microsoft's program suite with a word processor, a presentation program, a spreadsheet program, etc. The Google Docs format allows you to create a document and instantly share it with anyone you select so each person can either Edit or only View the document in question. I'm a HUGE fan of Google Docs, and do a large amount of writing in their service particularly in regards to my freelance articles or anything that I want to access from multiple computers.

The end result of all this is that we're currently writing the round robin story in a Google Docs word processing file, which allows real-time collaboration on the same document across all the time zones we're in. The added benefit is that there's a Chat column active when multiple people are viewing the same document. So Anabel, Angyl, Ren, Theresa, and I can both write and discuss what we're writing all at the same time. The only real challenge now is figuring out a time when we can all sign in to the doc to work on the story. But when that happens, hooboy is the discussion and the writing fast and furious. It feels like we're all sitting around a table chatting while we work on this awesomely vibrant tale that we've all come up with.

Ain't collaboration in the age of the Internet fun?

Why Twitter is Awesome for Writers

This isn't going to be the standard argument for Twitter's usefulness to writers. Seeing as everyone's been told backwards and forwards until their heads spin that Twitter is good for networking and building your brand, that argument is very old hat by now. And in fact, I'm reasonably sure that y'all are sick of hearing about it.

No, there's a different reason that Twitter is amazing for writers, and here's why: at 9:52 am Eastern time on Monday, Februrary 28, Theresa Meyers wondered on Twitter if Steampunk science could develop a machine that detected whether a woman was a virgin or not. This sparked a discussion of how you'd make the machine actually function properly, which involved @nemone7 and @SyferLocke among others.

Aaaand things snowballed from there, until you come to yesterday when I spent a good portion of my workday sketching out a short story called "The Trials of the Virgin." To be fair, Theresa will probably say I was the one who sparked my own idea because I made a comment about virgin sacrifices working to get someone published and she just played off that, but I'm still blaming her for sparking my idea (my blog, my rules).

The idea was sparked in conversation on Monday -- it's now Thursday and I already have a basic outline and plot development document (sort of) put together along with slightly over 1,000 words written on the story itself. Then I found out about Carina Press's call for holiday or winter-themed Steampunk submissions, and now I'm planning to maybe turn this short story into a novella and send it along to them. Or maybe keep it at short story level and send it to David Lee Summer's Tales of the Talisman magazine during the reading period in July. It all depends on where I am when Carina Press's deadline of June 15 rolls around.

What's my point here? Well, Theresa lives in Seattle; Nemone7 lives in Dublin; @SyferLocke lives in Wichita, Kansas; and I myself make my home in Eastern Massachusetts. Because of Twitter, and the connections it engenders among people, the four of us were able to talk back and forth about an idea that one person mentioned. And yesterday, Theresa, Nemone7, and I spent at least an hour collaborating on the Google Documents outline I'd made for "The Trials of the Virgin."

Even ten years ago, this sort of long-distance cross communication wasn't possible outside of knowing each other's email addresses or belonging to an internet chat room. Go back 20 years, or 30 years, and this electronic collaboration does not exist. In the age of Twitter, you can have four creative people separated by time zones and distance collaborating on the same idea.

How is that not awesome?

Social Networking for Fun and .... Well Maybe Not for Profit

I first found out about this strange innovation called Blogs a few years back, when I was in college. I loved the idea, and tried to start one up while I was still doing my undergrad.

Yeah ... that didn't work out too well.

It took another few years until I figured out the platform I wanted to write on -- Steampunk, Writing, and Video Games -- and that only happened after I came around to the realization that pure Fantasy wasn't the genre I should write in. That brainchild was Free the Princess, which is the name of a now-defunct idea I had for an online Video Game Encyclopaedia. I still want to craft that resource, if no other reason than I'm a hardcore gamer geek, but that's beside the point.

Anyway, since that July 2009 day I launched my blog, I've had the good fortune to meet some fantabulous fellow writers working across the country and around this great world of ours. I've also joined the Twitter-verse, and maintain a personal Facebook page for no other reason than to keep in touch with friends from college. (And now post to three separate blogs, including one that's an ad-supported review blog.)

Since I've now bored you with my own experience in blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, it's time to move on to what I really wanted to talk about: how I've used my platform to connect with people.

Just writing to your own blog is great, but there's only so much word-of-mouth of your readers can do to build your platform. Granted, if you're already a celebrity or have a built-in audience waiting, you might not need to worry (Literary Agents like Nathan Bransford, Janet Reid, and Mark McVeigh have huge numbers of followers partly because of their positions in the book world, for example). Since I'm not a wildly famous author like Neil Gaiman, a literary agent like the aforementioned Ms. Reid, or an editor like the fabled Moonrat, I had to work to build my meager following.

How'd I do this? Comments!

I started following other blogs and became a regular commenter on some of them. There's a culture of reciprocity in the blogosphere, and many of the proprietors of blogs I followed in turn became my followers because they clicked on my profile and saw what I was writing. I'm up to nearly 75 followers as of today partly because of this strategy. I'm kind of half confident that I'd have more if my blog was of a more general focus, but Free the Princess is focused on what I want to focus on already; so I have no intentions of changing. Anyway, the end result of this is that I've gained 4,000+ hits since I started tracking visits to FtP.

Twitter is another animal entirely. My success there is partly due to Gary Corby and his network of followers, but also because I'm a regular contributor in the discussions that occur there. That's the key to success in both places, truth be told. Contribute regularly via your own blog, comments on others blogs, and in Twitter and you'll end up building a network quicker than you can say "Hey look I built a network!"

Twitter's also allowed me to talk to people I otherwise wouldn't get a chance to. Like Gail Carriger, Cherie Priest, and other published authors who in an earlier time I'd have to communicate via letters and their agents. Now I just Tweet @ them and can, depending on my tweet, get a response decently fast.

Facebook is a more personal outlet for me, and I've yet to really connect professionally with anyone through there. Which I intend to remedy once I have something interesting to a wide audience to share through it. But as I don't quite yet, that's not done.

Anyway, if you take one thing and one thing only away from this ramble, it should be that participation is the key to growing your presence through social networking. Unless you're ridiculously famous ... then pretty much all bets are off and you can do whatever you want.

Theme Week: Social Networking-- Well, okay, fine

It's just a bunch of Facebook statuses. Why would anyone want to know what someone else is up to every second of every day? Teenagers are the only ones who use it, and they just text about their trips to the bathroom and what toppings to have on their nachos.

All of these are excuses that I've heard-- and have used myself-- for not using Twitter. I have to admit, I still don't quite get it. But I have come to realize that there are benefits, despite the 140-character limit and soul-sucking-- I mean time consuming-- nature of the thing.

The main benefit, networking, was kind of nebulous to me itself until rather recently. I always had this vague image of networking as a term used by men in stiff suits, weary from days of financial reports, bandied about with phrases like, "Let's do lunch," and, "I think if we can just synergize on this, we can have a meeting of the minds and really power through." You know, the sorts of jargon-filled conversations that really don't say much of anything.

But it's true. Networking is beneficial. And you know what I've realized Twitter does? It gives you the opportunity to interact with otherwise un-interact-able people, like celebrities. People you wouldn't have a prayer of contacting any other way will totally talk to you on Twitter. Something about the format brings everyone to the same level (well, mostly).

So it's a great thing for writers, who suddenly have the ability to talk to agents, publishers, and other famous writers that they otherwise may not have. And that can lead to book deals, or Neil Gaiman reading your ARC, or any other number of really, really cool things.

So, is it worth it? I don't know. The chances of an agent signing me on my Twitter feed alone, or Neil Gaiman wanting to read my book, are slim to none. But, I do know that while I've been resisting the idea of and scoffing at Twitter for a really long time, I'm finally ready to give it a shot.

Do you Twitter? Care to share a link to your feed? What do you think about it? Positives and negatives?