Tag: Carolyn Crane

10 Rules for Followingback on Twitter

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Jeffe Kennedy and Carolyn CraneThis is me and bestie/CP Carolyn Crane at the Rita Awards ceremony in New York City. So fun to get shined up and celebrate her final!

The whole week of the RWA National Conference is a major whirlwind of activity. I try to post stuff online via my phone, but it’s really hard to keep up with replies. All those real-life people interfere with the online conversations! I also try to post nuggets of wisdom I hear in workshops and panels, mostly to Twitter. People really seem to love those and often begin following me on Twitter as a result. Which is lovely, of course, but it creates this backlog of follows for me to retrace and then decide whether to followback.

I know some people pay no attention to the follow notifications. Others automatically follow everyone back. I pick and choose via a shifting system that’s pretty subjective, but does follow a few rules. I thought I’d share them here.

1) How many followers vs. people they follow?

As of this writing, I have 3,958 followers and I follow 2,630. No way I keep track of everyone I follow. I use lists in Tweetdeck to see what I can, which the last statistics I saw indicated is around 200 people on average. Apparently that’s about as many as a human can really keep up with. So, when somebody follows upwards of 10,000 people? I’m dubious. If they follow just a few hundred more people than follow them, I’m HIGHLY suspicious. If they have huge numbers of followers and follow very few, I know they only want to collect my follow and will unfollow as soon as possible so they can broadcast to me. No. Just no.

2) Hashtags in the Profile

Easy decision. Makes me think they’re only in it to market. An instant decision for me there.

3) No profile.

Either lazy, a scammer or just wanting to lurk and view. No need to followback.

4) A plea to followback in the profile or the #teamfollowback hashtag.

No.

5) Lots of book titles in the profile.

This is a maybe. Lots of authors follow me and plenty do this. It’s not an instant no, but it’s a flag. I want to follow and support people, not be bombarded with pleas to buy their books. I don’t KNOW that they’ll do this, which is why it’s only a flag, but it increases the likelihood in my mind.

At this point, if I’m still a maybe – and a nicely done profile without follower/followee imbalances would already be a yes – I look at the timeline.

6) Is it full of thanks to people for following back?

Depending on how much, this is a no as I’m inclined to think they’re simply collecting followers.

7) Is it full of promo for something or other?

No no no.

8) Is it all output and no replies or conversations?

No. I’m not interested in reading a billboard.

9) Is it all retweets or inspirational quotes?

Eh. Nothing against that, but also nothing to interest me. No.

10) Did you unfollow me?

This comes much later. I get a weekly report from Tweepsmap that tells me how many followed that week, how many unfollowed and other metrics. For the most part I don’t look at it. Some of the maps are fun. I don’t look at who followed, because I already do that via notifications. I do usually look at who unfollowed, just to see if I still follow them. The majority – and I seem to get 15-20/week – are ones I did not followback, which is fine. They were either in it to get me to follow and quit me when I didn’t (or planned to do so on a certain schedule anyway), or didn’t like following me, which is also fine. But I don’t need to follow them. That isn’t to say that I don’t follow people who don’t follow me back – there are plenty of those. This is only people who followed me first and never gave any value back.

All of this said, I occasionally miss new followers – like when I’m crazy at a conference! – and the surest way to entice me to followback is to talk to me. Say something! When people reply to me I always look to see if I’m following and remedy that, if not.

Of course, there was that one guy who kept replying to me with annoying mansplaining, then would chide me for not following back, declaring his intent to give me EVEN BETTER content so I *would* followback. Yuck. He eventually went away.

So, what about all you Twitter people – any rules of thumb you use on deciding followbacks that I missed? Or maybe mine that you don’t agree with?

Please Say Hi

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

File Jun 02, 9 52 00 AMAnother pic from the RT Convention. This was an amazingly lovely and delicious dinner organized (and chauffeured) by Alexandra Haughton. Also attending were lovely friends Carolyn Crane, Tamsen Parker and Megan Mulry. Love my writer friends! Spending time talking with them is one of my favorite things about conventions.

But so is meeting readers.

Which I’m not sure readers understand. This morning I saw a Facebook post from a reader who’s become a friend. She attended RT for the first time this year and commented that she came back with far fewer pics of her with authors than she’d thought – mainly because she hesitated to ask to take photos with them. She and I had lunch at the convention and she’d asked then what the etiquette was for approaching authors, asking for autographs, photos, etc. Apparently there was a newbie session where people outlined “The Rules” for this. It made me think of a time that a gal pinged me online and said we’d ridden in an elevator together and she’d been excited, but didn’t introduce herself because she wasn’t sure if she should.

Both of these things kind of hurt my heart.

Naturally I don’t – and can’t – speak for all authors, but the primary reason I go to reader conventions is to MEET READERS. I *want* readers to say hi, to ask for my signature, to have their picture taken with me. It’s flattering as all hell that anyone would want to. As far as I’m concerned, if I’m in a public space, I’m available to be approached. Maybe don’t stalk me to my room, because everyone knows that’s creepy which is why no reasonable person would do it, but otherwise PLEASE SAY HI.

Which brings me to another kind of weird thing that happened to me at RT. Several times, in fact. I should preface this with saying that I’m not good at faces. I don’t know why, but that’s always been the case. I’m the person at the table who has no idea what our waitress looks like. I remember names reasonably well and can associate them with Twitter handles and even bits of personal history, but I am terrible at recognizing people. Which means I sometimes introduce myself to people multiple times.

I’m sorry. I really am.

Still, I’d rather re-introduce myself than have no idea who a person is. So, I often use the gambit of saying, “Hi, I’m Jeffe Kennedy,” offering my hand to shake, which usually prompts people to either a) introduce themselves in turn, or b) tell me that we’ve met before. Both responses are equally good and, when I inevitably apologize for the latter, it’s almost always just fine by them.

But this year I seemed to have crossed some threshold where I got a different response, always from other writers. I bet it happened three or four times, maybe more. I introduced myself and they said, “Oh, I know.”

It was really disconcerting.

In one case, the other gal actually rolled her eyes. In all of them, it wasn’t said in a happy, excited-to-meet-you way.

On the one hand, this bothered me because in every case, I never found out who the other person was, at least not immediately. On the other… I dunno. It kind of hurt my feelings. I mean, the implication of was that of course everyone knows who I am, right? Which is so not true. It’s lovely to be recognized, but far from everyone does. Besides, assuming everyone knows who I am would be unforgivably egotistical, wouldn’t it?

This bothered me enough that, when I got home, I emailed an author friend who’s WAY more famous than I am to ask if this had ever happened to her. And she said it had, many times. It hurt her feelings, too.

I’m still not sure of the take-home message here. I mostly wanted to put this out there. Being recognized for achievements can be a weird thing because I think most of us still feel like the same person inside. I’m the gal who works from home, Tweets too much, hangs out with cats more than people, and interfaces with a keyboard all day. And who never knows which one is our waitress. I don’t feel like a particularly special person. At a conference, I want to meet other writers. I want to meet readers, bloggers, reviewers, industry folks. That’s why I go – to talk to people.

So… this might have been a little ranty. Am I wrong here? What should I say when this happens?

A Look Behind BEHIND THE MASK

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Behind the MaskGuess what’s out today?? YES! The fourth book in Carolyn Crane’s Associates series, BEHIND THE MASK.

You guys, this story is so super hot, twisty and amazing.

You can take that with a grain of salt, as it’s no secret that Carolyn is my CP (critique partner) and bestie. However, that means two things – I read this story first, before ANY of you could (ha ha ha!) and I’m the one who egged her on to do more, go farther, give me that hot steamy dark smexy.

Let me set the scene. Carolyn was here in Santa Fe, visiting me last February. We went out walking, to see some art in the galleries, do a bit of boutique shopping. Then we settled into the bar at Inn at Loretto, which is one of my favorite bars in Santa Fe. We scored a table by the fireplace, drank wine, and I fed her notes from my Kindle about sex, death and other fabulously intense elements.

Sometimes I wonder what people at the other tables nearby were thinking…

Now, I’m not sure what Carolyn did with this and others of my suggestions, as I haven’t read her final version. However, I can’t wait to read it again and see! She’s such a brilliant writer and works magic in revisions. The story blew me away in rough draft – it might kill me in its final form. Which it sounds like it’s doing to others, like in this review at That’s What I’m Talking About.

At any rate, I’m giving away a digital copy in the format of choice to a random commenter! Tell me what intrigues you about this story by midnight US Eastern Time on May 21 and I’ll choose a winner. The official blurb is below.

When her long lost sister – a prostitute – is won in a card game by a brutal drug cartel, Zelda knows what she has to do: take her place. Save her. Focus on infiltrating the shadowy group on behalf of the Associates, and try not to think about why she left the spying game years ago. She’s slept with dangerous criminals before; she can do it again.

Hugo Martinez is one of South America’s most lethal and wanted men, a legendary mercenary living on a windswept mountain. Even at the height of the war he wasn’t in the habit of taking women captive, but the American whore has seen his face. And he and the orphan boy need a cook. He shouldn’t want this woman, but there’s something so unusual about her…

Little by little, Zelda finds herself falling for her captor…but is he the killer she’s been hunting all these years?

Writers Helping Writers

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

B-UQ3E6CEAAPVlUI’m kind of blue today. For the past few days, my bestie and crit partner Carolyn Crane has been visiting. We got up in the mornings and did “parallel play” – working our social media and indulging in dishing about it, in a way we never get to do otherwise. Then we wrote, sometimes silently, sometimes discussing. On the best weather day we went hiking around noon. Regardless of weather we headed into town around midday and indulged in long, delicious, boozy lunches. We used the opportunity to give each other live discussion feedback on our latest works – so much better than on the phone or via social media. And we talked about writing careers in general – both our own and people we know.

This morning I dropped her off at the airport and my world feels emptier for it.

We talk a lot about writing being a solitary profession, which it certainly can be. Worse, however, the various writing communities can be, well, less than fully supportive. There’s a lot of professional jealousy out there. Carolyn and I both started our writing careers in the literary fiction world and that’s one of the worst. One of those cases where the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small. There is very little friendship in those particular trenches, with plenty of tail-sniffing, jockeying for position and plain mean behavior. The egos run huge and the competition intense.

Neither of us miss it a bit.

The romance community is SO unbelievably better that way! With a very few exceptions, the egos remain manageable in romance. Maybe that comes from writing a much-sneered at genre or maybe from it being such a predominantly female community. Or from the original friendly and supportive mindset of the organization’s founders. Regardless, I love my sister romance writers and greatly appreciate having that network. Still, even in my few years spent in this group (six – since 2008), closer friendships have come and gone. I mourn some of the ones that have fallen by the wayside, but the ones I’ve gained more than make up for the few losses.

I’ve long observed that friendships tend to develop among the people who are doing the same things we are. You know – in college we have our college friends, and among those the theater friends or the peer counseling people. After college, most of those friendships fade away. Not because anything goes wrong, but because all that energy that came from shared daily experiences evaporates into the ether. It’s more difficult when the largest energy in my life, the experience I have to share, is with people who are also my “competitors,” in some sense. It can take an active effort to combat that, to not let it get in the way of supportive friendship.

Carolyn is an amazing friend that way. Someone I love, admire and enjoy – and who always makes me feel like an important and precious part of her life in return. Last night we skyped for nearly an hour with Anne Calhoun, sharing this same kind of friendship. There are others, wonderful, nurturing friends, but for the moment I want to celebrate these two and give my thanks to the universe for bringing them into my life.

Love you gals!

Stalking Tina Fey

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Tina Fey in Mean GirlsSo, I’ve heard through the grapevine that Tina Fey (@nottinafey) is here in town filming a movie. For those who don’t know – and why would you? – New Mexico is the site for a LOT of films. We’re relatively close to Los Angeles, have a variety of landscapes and there’s this whole infrastructure here set up to support movie-making. Word gets around that infrastructure and…

Now I know Tina is in town. And I want to stalk her and make her be my friend.

Right??

I mean, it’s not like I haven’t done this before. Carolyn Crane and Anne Calhoun used to be authors that I admired from afar, until I stalked them and made them be my friends. Now they’re among my closest friends? Why couldn’t this work with Tina? She’s my go-to choice when interviewers ask me what celebrity I’d like to have a meal with. I think Tina and I would have a lot to talk about – similar senses of humor and life perspectives. We’re both authors. I even used to write essays very like hers in Bossypants! We are practically soulmates. Remember in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant’s sister (played by the hysterical Emma Chambers) confides to Julia Roberts that she’s always suspected, from watching her in movies, that they’d be best friends?

EXACTLY.

I mulled this question on Twitter – as I do, you know – and received a number of suggestions for how to go about this. One was to don an outfit like the one from Mean Girls above and casually run into her. Which could work. However, the overwhelming suggestions were for me to simply tweet her, say hi and that I’d love to meet. One gal, who is now one of my favorite people ever, thought I could totally pull this off because, as she said, “After all, you’re famous, too!”

Heh.

Tell it to Tina, okay?

So this is my love letter to her. Perhaps inadvisably titled, but she’s got a spine of steel, right? And it’s accurate. Honest and straightforward, like me. No more neurotic than the average writer, which isn’t saying much, I know.

But seriously, Tina, lunch? Coffee? Cocktails? Come out to the house if you’d like a break and to take in the views! Or I can come to you. I know all the best bars.

Love,

Your New Best Friend,

Jeffe

On Not Writing in Pretty Journals

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

2014-08-27 08.34.39Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I had a rush of ideas for a new story.

It’s partly Carolyn Crane‘s fault, because we were IMing and we started riffing on story ideas. Actually, to back up, she’d watched two episodes of Game of Thrones, hated that the dog died and wanted me to promise her nothing else bad would happen.

HA!

She’s so adorable. So I explained who was still alive of my last watching, we started talking about our favorite – female, naturally – characters and what made them heroic. And then we segued, as you do, into my heroines in The Twelve Kingdoms books and what would be a really awesome plotline for Dafne. My brain was still buzzing with it as I brushed my teeth and the opening scene for book 4 crystallized in my head. Now, I always think I’ll remember these things the next day, but sometimes the intervention of sleep and other dreams will muddle them. So I went back to my desk to write down some notes.

Any of you who follow me regularly are snickering, because you know my issues with the cryptic notes I leave myself

NEVERTHELESS.

One of my many issues along these lines is that I tend to grab a sticky note – which has the dual complication of being small enough to encourage even more crypticness (cryptnicity? crypniticism?) and can be easily lost. I have a bad habit of using what’s at hand. For example, the page of notes above are on the back side of the title page of my galley proofs of The Tears of the Rose, book 2 in the series. When I reviewed those galleys, I’d finished book 3, The Talon of the Hawk. As I was reading, all sorts of tweaks occurred to me that I needed to work in during edits. Thus the mess above.

You’ll also note the pretty notebook with my name on it.

Followed by three exclamation points.

This was a gift from Carolyn, meant to poke at me because I’m forever excising exclamation points from her manuscripts when I critique them. Every once in a while I let her keep one. NEVER multiples.

I have a number of adorable little notebooks like this – with pretty covers and enticingly blank pages within. Some have been gifts like this one. Some I’ve bought for myself. I keep them around and have for many years. When I first decided to become a writer, friends gave notebooks like this to me with encouraging messages in the front pages. I treasure them all. Many of them I never marked a word in, feeling like I needed to be worthy of those blank pages. Or I saved them only for the “good” stuff – carefully penned sentences and transcribed poems. Things I never look at.

So, last night, instead of grabbing a sticky note – let’s be honest, I couldn’t find one under the stacks of books – I opened the journal and used that to jot down the basics of that opening scene. And now I’ll have those in a place I can find them. Something to go back to someday, maybe even long after the book is on the shelf. Not careful or pretty or perfect.

But useful and real.

Which is what our notebooks should contain.

Mug Shots, Book Forts and Major Awards

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

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Last week I attended the Romance Writers of America (RWA) National Convention. My sixth, which is amazing to contemplate. As you can imagine, I’m sure, it’s begun to feel like a cross between a high school reunion and a grown-up slumber party. Many of these people I only see once a year – at this convention – and they are all my tribe. We spend an intense few days talking nothing but writing and career, exchanging all the gossip and pretty much going from one social event to another.

It’s unbelievably and wonderfully restorative.

 The above “conference mug shot” was the brainchild of writing friend Christine D’Abo. She had everyone at the Carina Press Author Breakfast taking them. Hysterical idea.

039I roomed again this year with my bestie, crit partner and all-around lovely person, Carolyn Crane. We took this selfie upon arrival, full of the delight at being in the same geographical location for once. 042

 

She was a finalist for the RITA awards this year, for her wonderful book, Off the Edge. Which means she got a pretty silver pin to wear on her badge.

 

 

045I signed again this year at the Literacy Signing, this time with print copies of both The Mark of the Tala and Going Under. Kensington provided me with an absolute TOWER of books to sign. So much so that one of my friends, Katie Lane, sent someone walking around with a white board telling people to buy my book and free me from my fortress.

She thinks she’s funny.053

 We also raised over $56K for literacy – so fabulous.

 

While I schedule in a lot of meetings, parties and meals, to make sure to see people, I also love to leave some things up to serendipity. For the keynote luncheon, I had no one in particular to meet up with, but happened to run into Ericka Brooks of The Bookpushers and lovely writer Nalini Singh. They made terrific lunch dates.

 

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The 060Kensington party was held off site at this amazing restaurant with probably the best anti-pasta I’ve ever had. (Aided by the fact that it tasted incredibly refreshing after the sweltering San Antonio heat and humidity. They also gave us the best party swag ever – mobile chargers. LOVE!

 

 

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FF&P‘s Gathering theme was Steampunk Cowgirl this year. Here’s the lovely Veronica Scott and local chapter buddy/aspiring author Anna Philpott kicking it up. Also, Rogue’s Possession won third place in the PRISM awards – such 059a wonderful honor when it competed with so many fabulous books.

 

 

 

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I, of course, attended the Harlequin Ball again this year, which was amazing fun as always. In the coming years, I’ll have to remember to do some training. The four hours of non-stop dancing took a toll on me this time and I limped around a bit the next morning. Also, rumors that I performed an exhibition dance of Beyoncé’s All the Single Ladies with RT’s Trent Hart are terrible, slanderous falsehoods. Besides it’s been days now and no video has cropped up, so I think we’re safe.

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I wrote about this already on the Word Whores blog, but the highlight of the week was being Carolyn’s date to the RITA awards. She dubbed this pic of us as “the Busty Twins.”

 

 

 

AND THEN SHE WON!

072I’m told she thanked me right off, though I was too busy crying and taking pics to really process it. Her achievement is made all the more spectacular because she’s the first to have a self-published book win what is our industry’s highest award. We spent hours in the bar afterward, during which she never let go of her trophy.080 Many members of the old guard came up to congratulate her on breaking the ceiling.

I couldn’t have been more proud and happy.

Or more revved for another exciting and successful year for us all!      

 

Cleaning Someone Else’s Kitchen

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

021A lovely vista at Cerrillos State Park from a hike last weekend. I mentioned before that author, critique partner and fab friend Carolyn Crane came to visit for a long weekend.

 She mainly came to Santa Fe to get out of the crushing Minneapolis winter. In fact, when she Tweeted that she didn’t know how she could make it through the endless snowstorms, I sent her a link showing how cheap plane tickets to Albuquerque were and reminded her that I have a guest room.

Ostensibly I was doing her a favor.

 But then she did me one. First of all, having her visit brought several days of nonstop writer convo into my life. Carolyn is one of my favorite people (and RWA roomie!) and we had the best time rambling over numerous topics, gossip, business and ideas. We even came up with an amazing brainstorm for a Sekrit Joint Project. Best of all, Carolyn got along great with David and even had him bringing out his guns to show her the different kinds. You’ll all be pleased to know that her Associates will have a much more varied arsenal now. 🙂

 At the same time, I got back my final set of line edits on an upcoming manuscript. For this third round of edits, my editor STILL wanted more on a particular scene I’d never wanted to put on the page in the first place. Her instincts are good on this kind of thing, but I felt so *done* at this point that I just couldn’t face taking another stab at it. But Carolyn – well, she cleaned my kitchen for me.

You all know what I mean, right? Or maybe this is mainly a female thing. I know a lot of guys cook and clean, too, but I’ve never heard them mention this. But my female friends and relatives sure have. And I know I’ve said it to them.

“Oh, let me finish the clean-up – it’s so much more fun to clean someone else’s kitchen!”

Because it just IS.

My own kitchen I’ve cleaned hundreds, if not thousands of times. I know every countertop stain, the persistent yellow crud in that hard-to-reach lip of the sink at the back, that one pan that never *quite* yields up that old burn on the bottom. Over time I give up on these things. I just don’t care enough and I’m resigned to these little, enduring failures to reach perfection.

In SOMEONE ELSE’S KITCHEN, however, I become a dynamo of shininess. I scrub those pans until they gleam. Those countertop stains cannot withstand my zeal to see them gone, gone, gone. My mother managed to get my glass-top stove cleaner than it was when we moved in – and was happy to do it.

So much more fun to clean someone else’s kitchen.

Likewise, Carolyn took up the torch of expanding that scene with excitement and enthusiasm. She wrote a page for me in no time at all – and had fun doing it. Once I had that from her, I was able to see past the old stains and revised it to blend with the story. What she gave me was brilliant. More, I don’t know that I had it in me to do myself. I might have just let that stain go, yet again.

A gift beyond price.

Best of all, she’s excited that I owe her. She’s got ideas for a scene or two she’ll ask me to riff on. And I’m excited to do it. I’d love to take her story and play with it. For the first time, really, I get what fan fiction is all about.

It’s all the fun of cleaning someone else’s kitchen – just once – without having to face it day after day.