Online Rudeness

I've met some really wonderful people Online. Their kindness and generosity has left me speechless and inspired. At the same time, I've met some very rude ones. Their hostility has left me feeling miserable. Sometimes I consider giving up interacting online altogether because of this. The past few days have made me feel that way.

I visit a few blogs regularly, even though I don't post on my own all that often as you can see! I visited one blog a couple of days back and noticed one of the people who'd replied to a post had become rude. He called the blogger names and was aggressive. The blogger stayed calm - I don't know how - and tried to keep the discussion going in a friendly way. All the time I was wondering how she did it. I was wondering why she did it. I was wondering why he thought she should do it.

In real life, we can walk away from rude people, not open the door to them or cross the road when we see them outdoors. What do we do online? What do you do? Do you delete their rude comments, ignore them, put up with them, try to win them over?

The Internet is my window box

I have spent the past two months living in a caravan while my house was being renovated. With a husband, two children, three cairn terriers, a cocker spaniel and a hamster, the experience was, well, let's call it "interesting". With no telephone connection, so no broadband, I have been cut off from the world. The good thing to come out of it has been the completion of my second book - yay! The bad thing has been that I've come back online and found this Internet world has moved on without me.

I was just starting to make some headway online. I'd struck up friendships and was beginning to find my feet in a world that I really don't understand. Now, I'm back to square one. My first book's been left to its own devices - who came up with the idea to renovate right after its release anyway? Um, that would be me.

I'm so clueless online, but I've learned one major lesson from all this. Whatever progress you make here, it can all be for nothing if you don't maintain it. I'm going to think of my online presence as a window box from now on. I've killed so many of those by forgetting to water them and tend to their needs. I need to tend to my online presence daily, nourish it and make sure it doesn't get overgrown or wither and die.

Resist the urge to ME, ME, ME!

I am new to social networking, but I am seeing something straight away that makes me shudder and turn off my computer - blatant self-promotion and "ME, ME, ME" syndrome. As a writer, I am networking to (hopefully) interest people in my writing, but direct, repetitive and in your face selling on the internet isn't appealing to readers. You go into a bookstore and a sales assistant leaps on you and won't let you out of her clutches - what do you do? You run!

I've been watching the way other writers behave on the internet, hoping to get some pointers because, honestly, networking frightens the hell out of me. What I have noticed about the ones that are doing well is they engage. They don't force people to look at their work. They don't send emails to you asking you to buy their book. They don't post links to their book's Amazon page every hour. Talking to them is like talking to a real human being, not a sales machine.

The biggest issue I can see with places like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc., is that these sites don't encourage community. Status updates are all about "ME". It's difficult to get around it. I look at my Twitter page and I don't know what to say - I feel compelled to tell the world what I'm doing - I feel compelled to make it all about "ME".

I don't know how to network online, but I think I'm getting a good idea of how NOT to. If I ever post on my Twitter page "Check out my bestselling book! Buy it now!", I hope some nice person will come along and hit me upside my head - hard!

Don't give up your day job

I'm not a full-time writer. But then how many writers can afford to be these days? I spend my days in a cramped office, answering a telephone to speak to people who are equally bored with their jobs and just as fed up of the daily grind as I am. The sad truth of the matter is that in the book business authors are at the very bottom of the food chain and few scrape by let alone make a decent living from their work. We're all hearing about the problems publishers are having, the fall of Borders UK, and the extinction of independent bookstores. In all of it, the ones who have been hit the hardest are the writers. Every twist and turn in the market affects us. Every time Amazon pulls one of its stunts, like the recent one with Macmillan and the removal of buy buttons, writers are suffering as a result.

A writer friend of mine saw an ad in the local paper for a job that involved handing out leaflets in a mall for two afternoons a week. She calculated the amount she's earned from sales of her five books during the past year and concluded that she'd make more money handing out those leaflets. Me, I'm hoping to come close to earning that much money!

If you want to write books, do it for the love of writing, and don't give up your day job.

The story behind the story

In October, 1998, my Japanese grandmother sent me a box of papers. Inside that box were old photographs, postcards, letters, drawings; a collection that captured my family's history on paper. Almost everything was familiar, as grandma had shown me the contents of that box many times when I was a child. One collection of papers was unfamiliar, however - pages of handwritten Japanese that looked very old. I couldn't read them. My mother couldn't read them. Grandma told me she'd explain the contents when she visited that Christmas - she said she was the only one who could read the antiquated Japanese they contained.

Before translating the contents to me (though she admitted she knew them by heart so was really reciting rather than translating) grandma told me all she knew of the back story. A relative on my grandma's side of the family had written the letters in the latter part of the 19th century (I named the relative Sankatsu and moved the time period to the beginning of the 19th century for the book). There were numerous scraps of incomplete letters, and two whole letters, one of which told us what grandma already knew - Sankatsu's sister had been sold by her father and the two girls hadn't seen each other for many years. The fragments and second complete letter painted a picture that sparked my imagination. Family rumours, handed down over many decades, added to that picture.

My grandmother had her theories about what had happened to the two sisters. She was still thinking up new ones, she said. She shared all of them with me. Some detective work and research, and a lot of my grandma's imagination, transformed those pages of writing into the preliminary pages for "My Dearest Osan".