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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Monday, April 24, 2017

WAW's Social Media FAQ


FAQ for Writing About Writing's Facebook Page but also Tumblr and any other social media sites. 

I really do love and appreciate the people who follow me. The ones who take time out of their day to send me a couple of nice words always get a few in return.  I don't always have the time to chat, but I try to engage with people who reach out in good faith. I know the tone of this can feel like I just want to be left alone and no one should ever message me for any reason, but trust me that a little good faith goes a long way. However....there are a handful of questions that make up about 95% of what people slide into my inbox to talk about, and I am indeed a little tired of answering THEM.

Apologies for the formatting. I need to just rewrite the whole thing from scratch, but right now I'm adding to it regularly.

1-What's with this blog you post to every day.

That's the whole reason this social media outreach is here at all: to get a few extra eyeballs (and maybe the occasional fan) on that blog....er....this blog. If it weren't for this blog, and the traffic that FB brings this blog, I would hang up all these puns and memes and go enjoy an extra ten or fifteen hours a week doing almost anything else. Fortunately if I can build an audience of a million, a few will click the links I post and maybe I can scrape out a few bucks a month.

2-"I'd like to become a patron/give you a donation? How can I do that?"

SHWEEEEEEEET!

If you want to be a monthly contributor and get in on a number of reward tiers, please consider becoming a patron of Writing About Writing. Even a dollar a month is enormously helpful and will get you in on the "backchannels" of questions about my work, polls only patrons can respond to about upcoming projects, and solicitations for feedback.

One time donations are of course welcome as well. The conspicuously placed tip jar is over to the top left, or you can use Venmo. My e-mail is chris.brecheen@gmail.com

Technically I can also provide you a P.O. Box if you need one.

And honestly, thank you. I've got rent to pay just like anyone. Financial support helps me keep writing (and running this page) instead of patchworking together pet sitting side gigs.

3-"Wait, you want money just for shitposting on some Facebook page?"

I mean, if that's what you want to support, I'll keep doing it, but that's not all I do by a long shot. The memes and the puns are just the tip of the cliché. This blog (the one you're reading right now) takes me about thirty to forty hours a week to maintain. I also write fiction–both short and long term projects–and it all goes here for free. Just because most people never click on the blog links doesn't mean FB is the only thing I'm doing.

And just so you know, I spend about six or seven hours a week most weeks running this page, so it's kind of a dillhole move to deliberately take time out of your busy schedule to sneer at the idea of someone who is entertaining you asking for maybe a dollar a month from a few of the more generous folks.

4- Please don't post about politics./Why are you posting about politics?

Writing About Writing has never been apolitical.

Never.

It never will be apolitical.

Never.

If you can't cope with that, you might want to find another page to service your "You should be writing" meme and terribad pun needs.

Roughly 2% of the posts here are "political" (which usually seems to mean: "social issues that don't affect me personally and which I'd like everyone else to shut up about because I don't like to think about them" to most people who use the word disparagingly). I know this because I post 10-15 things a day and only post such a thing every few days when I'm up for monitoring a comment thread.

What you're calling "politics" might split down left and right, but it is really about social issues. I'm not plugging a tax plan or endorsing a candidate or even a party. (I do that a BIT more on my own FB wall [see below], but I usually still consider that sort of binary thinking a rabbit hole.) But even when I get my polemics on, I'm usually pointing out that a writer has the power to tell stories, that narrative works to create villains out of nuance and desensitize entire cultures to genocide, that media affects culture, that representation matters, that language is used to obfuscate bigotry and oppression, that people get to tell their own stories, and that leaving out whole parts of the story is a pretty good way to control who is seen as angels and who is seen as demons without ever misstating a "fact." I find telling my own story more meaningful than making explicitly didactic demands.

Writing About Writing
 has always considered the link between social issues, narrative, and language to be valuable to explore for writers and storytellers alike, and won't be stopping this intellectual rigor any time soon–certainly not because some people want their stream of quotes and inspiration porn to never be tainted by an uncomfortable thought of the social consequence that comes with literally aspiring to master both narratives and language.

Further, it isn't really possible for a writer to be completely apolitical. The personal is political and those who find politics sequestered from anything that affects them personally usually have a lot of social advantages. Aggressively avoiding social issues in one's writing belies a strong endorsement of the status quo, which is in and of itself QUITE political. There are many writing pages that will stick to making fun of people's grammar in racist and classist ways and post the same hundred quotes over and over. I'm more interested in considering how we can all be vicegerents of the awesome power that comes with being a writer. Also puns.

And also if you demand that I stop posting about politics obnoxiously enough, I may show you the door. (Since clearly you don't want what I'm cooking.)

5a- Why are you doing transcriptions of the posts?/Why do you often ask for transcriptions?
 

We're at over 1.2 million followers and I've been asked if it might be possible to level up our disability access so more people can enjoy. Many macros and memes are pictures of text or text ON pictures. (Things like screen grabs of Tumblr or Twitter, but even just macros.) This means they can't be read and transcribed with text reading software for folks who are visually impaired. 

Personally I am not going to have time to transcribe some of the longer macros or complicated visual images into text and/or I am often posting from my phone or posting from work where transcribing would be very impractical. So if I put "Transcribe?" (or some variation) with an image, it means that if anyone would be willing to do that, I'll cut and paste that text along with my sincere thanks and a shout out and add it to the text.

PLEASE CHECK THE COMMENTS OF SUCH POSTS FOR THE TRANSCRIPTIONS-- Eventually I get back to most of them and copy paste the transcription into the OP, but they may sit for hours before I have a chance to.

You can also send it to me through PM if you'd prefer no attribution and the transcription to be anonymous. I'll probably just use the first transcription I see that does a halfway decent description of the picture and text, so no need to keep going if you see someone else has. I'm not trying to slight anyone if I don't use theirs.

Feel free to use Google transcriber for the pure text macros (I sometimes do), but if I'm asking for a transcription, I probably am not at a proper computer where I would be able to do that myself.

5b- You could have just written the transcription in the time it took you to ask for one.

Chances are I'm on my phone or busy at work This may mean a couple of things:

1- I'm unable to see the image and what I'm typing on a single screen and going back and forth to make sure that it's perfect would take more time/energy than I have.

2- The transcription involves describing an image (not just rewriting the text) and that is what I don't have time to do.

Also don't be such a Judgy McJudgikins. I'm a fucking writer. I know damn well what I can handle with speech to text at a stop light and what is too much.

5c- Why do you tell us what you're doing that you can't transcribe. Just ask for a transcription.

At first I did ask for a transcription. Then people got mad about that because (I guess because they thought I was being lazy?) and just asking was too brusque. Then I wrote an extensive explanation, and people either said I could have transcribed it in the time I took to write the explanation (see above) or they just thought I was being too descriptive. So then I offered these weird fake explanations about fighting terrorists or parasailing to Mars or something, and people complained about THAT even though it amused me. Most of the time these complaints were mostly polite, but their frequency and the rare aggression and threats to flounce (which is a one-strike-you're out no-no here and led to tons of drama) made me just want to abandon transcriptions altogether. So today I ask and offer a quick line or two for why I can't, and even though definitely not everyone is happy, I think I've found this tiny fjord of frequency and caliber of request that makes the fewest people complain. Basically someone always complained, this seems to be the thing that makes them do so the least, so I'm sticking to it.

5d- Why didn't you transcribe that post or ask for a transcription?/Why don't you transcribe all posts?

There are a few reasons.

1- If I'm sharing something from another page, I won't transcribe their meme. Folks can take it up with THAT page's admin if they want to. I'm usually just quickly sharing something I got a tickle out of. It also has to do with which text proliferates in the event of a "share." If that meme gets shared by lots of people, it will be the original post, not my transcription, that gets shared with it. It's not a pride thing, there's just a lot of work that is involved and it would have limited returns. Often with such posts I will ask if anyone wants to do it in the comments.

2- There are occasionally subject dense pictures (like a mural comic) that can't reasonably be transcribed. If we had UBI and I could find someone to transcribe images, I'd be happy to, but I am pinioned by a capitalist society in which I neither have time to myself or the resources to hire someone to do so. I am also reticent to ask for members of the community to spend what would probably be hours transcribing a single post. This is not a "fuck you" to the visually impaired community, it is simply a recognition that visual art sometimes is more involved than my ability to transcribe. My saying anything even remotely like this on the post itself creates no end of shitty replies in the comments, so I will just post the image to avoid the drama. Of course if anyone wants to try to transcribe the dozens of discrete images, they are welcome/encouraged to—maybe it'll be thought of as good practice.


6- Is the free labor of people doing your transcriptions exploitative?

1) Facebook pages don't actually make money. And the FB throttling algorithm was designed by greedy shitgibbons who literally fiddled with the knobs until they found the sweet spot between "That's a lovely outreach you have there. Be shame if someone.......THROTTLED IT." and "Fuck it. I'll use Tumblr!" While I technically might make some Patron money via people from this page, most of them are donating money because they like my blog and my writing, not because I maintain a page that posts memes. (In fact, I often literally say when I post my Patreon something like: "If you're just here for the memes, don't worry about this, but if you like the blog I link to.....") While there is a symbiotic relationship and this page helps me promote my work, there isn't really a mechanic by which this page ITSELF makes me any money.

2) The particulars of transcribed posts are done for the accessibility benefits of folks who use assistive technology. For years there were no such transcriptions. I have been asked to do this, and I WANT to do so, but doing it all myself would be a tremendous addition of labor to what is already several hours a week on top of two jobs I already have. I tried to come up with a compromise to saying "No. I'm sorry. I just can't do that."

3) I'm more than capable of transcribing posts, and often do so (usually asking for help on only every few days). However when I am flinging up a post quickly on my way to work or posting from my phone with its little stylus, I can't describe some involved four panel comic or essentially type out 250 words. I could just leave it without a transcription–possibly for hours–until I can get to it, but that seems to defeat the purpose, and the alternative is blowing some off.....and not in the fun way.

4) I'm not promising people exposure or ground floor opportunities or some slick ass bullshit to folks who help out. (I'm certainly not approaching professional transcribers and guilting them to think about the children.) If folks help, I assume it is because they want our page to be accessible, not because they think it will benefit them in some way. Everyone is free to help or not help. Sometimes no one steps up and the post just goes un-transcribed until I can get to it. It's not like anyone is being leaned on.

5) If I were making more money, I probably WOULD think about employees rather than volunteers. I pay my guest bloggers, editors, and others who help me unless they insist that their work is a donation, even if it's just a few dollars. However, perhaps the fact that I need two other jobs besides writing will be indicative that I'm maybe not making as much off this page as people seem to think.

The community seems pretty supportive, but please let me know if you'd like me to revisit the question.

7- Why didn't you respond to my comment?

I am only able to read a fraction (a small fraction) of the comments from a page with over a million followers. Chances are that I didn't even see it. I occasionally look at the top replies or make sure people are playing nice on a post I know is going to be a tire fire. But my ability to read every comment was in the rear view years ago. 

I can respond to even fewer. If I tried to stay active in the comments of such a large page, I would quickly find my writing time completely gone.

PM me if it's important or if something is happening for which I may need to wield the banhammer. A good question or thoughtful comment may even go into the blog.

8- "Will you promote [my thing]?"

If your "thing" is exactly (and I mean EXACTLY) the sort of content I'm usually posting (memes, macros, "you should be writing," quotes, and the occasional really good article about writing, maybe some book love, or a really funny miswritten sign), I might post it if–big if–I like it. I tend to avoid the posts some typical writing pages share a lot of, like ableist inspiration porn or classist (and often racist) prescriptivism. [I'm all for giggling about a misplaced comma, but only so long as we're giggling about what the sign says instead of AT the person who did it. But if you send me something you made that is our usual fare, I'll consider putting it up along with a link to a page if you want.]

If it's not the normal stuff, but is at least tangentially related to writing, and if you send me a PM asking nicely first I will let you post on our "Guest Posts."  (For the record, Dave, the following is not acceptable: "Hey bro, you're not going to get your panties in a twist that I posted this on your wall, are ya?") I'll probably say yes. Be advised: web content filler slapped up there usually gets about the three or four clicks it deserves. 

If you really want to take advantage of a platform I've spent over a decade building, think about what might be fair to ask for instead of being entitled.

Will I do a trade promotion with you? If our pages are comparable, sure. If our pages are wildly differing in terms of traffic, you're basically asking me for free advertising. While I'm down with sidestepping unbridled capitalism (you don't have to pay me money) let's find some other way to make it worth it on my end.

If it is wildly not about writing or it is your own creative writing, or (AND LISTEN CLOSE TO THIS ONE) if it is a publication opportunity that requires payment [whether in the form of a "contest" that requires an entry fee or whatever], the answer will be no.

I have a regular post where you can share your own writing. And if you think a page called Writing About Writing is a good spot for your car detailing business commercial, I don't know what to say.


BTW: If you don't ask and just slap up your self-promotional link into the guest posts, I just remove it, even if it's totally about writing. And if I recognize your name from having pulled the same thing before, I'll ban you.

I'll be really honest with you about one of my many failings as a flawed human being. I've spent over a decade now building this page up. Don't even get me started on the first year when I was posting to 95% my own friends and like four other people. (Thanks Melissa!) Or the June in the middle of year two when I whooped inside a Kinkos because I'd passed 1000 followers. This page takes a lot of effort, and even though it's led a few more people to my blog and maybe been responsible for a few donations, it's mostly thankless, unpaid labor where the vast majority of folks only ever chime in to complain.

I have birthed a tiny little petty in these last few years. I've fed it cottage cheese and bile, taught it the dark side of The Force, and watched it grow up big and strong and it knows force lightning. I cheered it when it force choked the better angels of my nature. I kind of hate how people are crawling out of the woodwork–NOW–and acting entitled to ride my coattails without a thought about reciprocity or so much as a peep asking if it's okay. I really quite enjoy being able to point at something one of my friends did (or someone whose work I've been following with interest) and send lots of eyeballs their way. But I feel really used when people act entitled to it.

If your stuff is self-promotional, I'm going to be harder on it–especially if you don't ask. Darth Petty demands no less.

9- "Will you read/critique my creative writing?"

I can't. I'm sorry.

There are over a million of you, and this page grows by a thousand followers on a slow day. I'm getting a couple of requests a day to read things--everything from a ten line poem to a short story to a full novel manuscript for content editing. I know you've poured your soul into it and it's dear to your heart. I also know that because you've poured your soul into it and it's dear to your heart, that even for that ten line poem which I could read in a few seconds, you probably want more feedback than just "Nice poem" or something. I know how serious that request is for you and how important it is to you and even how much you may have psyched yourself up before sending it to me.

("Fortune favors the brave, Milton. FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE. LET'S DO THIS THING!!! LEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOY JEEEEEEENKIIIIIIIIINS!!!!!")

But still...as much as I admire your moxie, there's only one of me. A good week for me clocks in around 60 hours between both my jobs. I barely even have time to read and give feedback to my good friends and the folks with whom I have a relationship and rapport.

Of course, if you want to hire me, that's another story (see below).

And then of course you could also do the long con where you get to know me, we develop a relationship. Maybe go out a few times. Have a deep and meaningful relationship. Move in. Experiment with all manner of wildly fulfilling group sex. Get married. Have kids. Join the Columbia Record Club. Start planning for our multi-continent retirement. Then you look at me and say.... "Chris, actually, I really just wanted you to read my stuff." I'd be crushed, but I'd do it.

10- Will I tutor/edit/do some writing for you?


Sure. My freelance rate is $60 USD/hour. ($85 if you want me to drop everything I'm doing and give you all my writing time right this second). I will need you to pay for your first hour up front, and we'll figure out over e-mail or chat what you need. I can give you a billable hours estimate and a rough timeline for completion, and then I will work whatever is left of our hour, and you can see if my time is worth your money. After that, I'll ask you to pay me for every couple of hours for the first 10 hours or so. As we work longer and longer and build up professional trust, I can give you bigger chunks of time between payments. I'm much better at developmental editing than copy editing

Oh...did you mean for free?



11- I am interested in buying your page/running ads on your page? Will you sell it/give me admin controls?


Sure! Deposit $100,000 into an account I designate (that's a little less than ten cents per follower--the price may go up if the page grows) and after the money has been verified I will relinquish admin controls. (That's after I walk into my bank, asked for a manager, and made sure that there is no possible way that I'm being scammed and the funds will not disappear.) That's about what it would be worth to me to go build an audience from scratch on another page and might just cover the costs for the time it takes to do so.

I know the bitter, cruel irony here is that no one who sends me these fucking messages will ever read this FAQ. But at least that felt good to write.

12- Will you sit my pet?
 

I'm afraid not. I've hung up my leash and catnip. I mean, I'll do anything but hurt someone if the price is right because I've got to survive capitalism like everyone else, but it would be prohibitively expensive.

13- Where can I get some advice about writing.

I need to be on The Office so I can look at the camera.

Here. Here would be a great place to start for advice about writing. Try here. This blog. The whole thing. HERE.

RIGHT HERE!!

14- Just a FB thumb up.

I'm not sure how people could send a page admin a thumb up accidentally so I suspect what is going on here is people messing with the fact that if I don't reply to every message, FB takes away my "responds frequently" (or whatever the fuck) badge and I have to wander through the wasteland of my own social media feces screaming to the heavens "Why have you forsaken me?"

Because what even is the world coming to without page admins struggling to be judged by Facebook as "very responsive."

So people send me a thumb up (or "Hi" or "Hey" or "Sup") just because they think I'll reply instantly to keep my "responsive" cred. When FB sends me a $500 check each month that I earn "very responsive," I'll start replying to a message that is just a thumb.

Until then, I'll be "very responsive" for a select few. #ohyesItotallywentthere

15- Hello./Hey there./Hi there./Ho there./What's up?/Can I ask you a question?

I appreciate your decorum if that's what you were going for, but whatever it is you want, please just get to it in your opening message rather than waiting for a reply. There are way too many many of these interactions, and about 99% of them are actually hacked accounts fishing to see who will reply, so I end up getting harassed if I reply.

Just say whatever it is you want to say (hopefully after having read this FAQ), and I will respond appropriately.

16- Sending a question to my personal FB mailbox instead of the page's FB mailbox.

It's all just me. You're not going to get a faster answer by sending it to my public account. Your message will end up in "Filtered Message Requests" which means I won't see it right away. And that's my PERSONAL account. I gotta tell ya, using that route to be combative sort of feels like showing up to a coworker's house to have an argument about last Tuesday at work. So maybe keep that in mind if you were hoping to be a bit salty. 

I'm particularly fond of the "Thanks for banning me asshole" versions. They're always real measured and unbiased takes on how I've failed to moderate my page in an appropriate way. I might have to make them a blog post some day.


17- GIANT UNWIELDY WALL OF TEXT

You can't make me read that.

I know we're all writers, but I typically describe my free time in terms of negative numbers. I get 50+ messages a day and unless I want my job to be Message Responder, I am not able to sit and read the ones that demand 5-10 minutes of my time just to read. Particularly by those who conflate loquacious with eloquent. Please get to the point and/or open with one GREAT FUCKING hook because trust that when I see unfathomable huge blocks of mammothian paragraphs, I just assume that it's self-important bloviation, with huge tangents about Bukowski or some shit, and delete it unread.


18- Where can I get that t-shirt/mug/thing I really liked?

Whenever I find something still attached to its original commercial source, I will put it in the OP. If someone knows the source and puts that in the comments, I will edit the OP. But if I don't know and no one out there knows, the only thing I would do is try a reverse image search on Google and start digging through the results, same as anyone else. I'd suggest giving that a try.

19- Messages sent to me in obvious altered states of consciousness.

Sober up first please.

Okay these aren't exactly questions but they are all too frequent.


Nudes (w/o prior consent), marriage proposals, raging screeds, strange claims of supernatural forces in my life that only converting to your religion can save me from. I'm not even going to dignify them with a response. 


But for FUCK'S sake, when you sober up, the message you should be sending me is "I'm sorry," not "Hey, why didn't you reply to this?"

20- WILL I marry you?

I'm pretty sure this was probably meant to be this flattering joke, but just so you know, I've actually hit that point of internet "fame" (or whatever the hell you want to call it) where I've had some online stalking and gotten unsolicited sex pics and some creepy obsessive behavior and some people who aren't well giving me some very uncomfortable focus, so this level of flirting makes me uncomfortable as an "opener." It's under FREQUENTLY asked questions because it happens....a lot. Surely there are other ways to be cute and appreciative, and if you're actually trying to hit on me, you can take it slower.

And if you're at all serious....I PROMISE that I'm not the person you think I am anyway. There's a lot of projection and idealization that can happen between an artist/entertainer and their fans. You want to marry the person you think I am....but I'm not that person. I leave my socks on the floor and have trouble articulating my desires, I work too hard, and am introverted to the point of flakiness, but can somehow, ironically, be to clingy. Plus, I would be ten minutes late to my own funeral. 


21- I was too impersonal in my reply to your question.

So this is another one that isn't a question so much as a reaction that has happened a few times. And even though it's "a few times" out of hundreds (maybe thousands), and I should probably trust that the law of large numbers applies, and that it's more about them than me, I worry about this shit.

I'm sensitive and crap.

I know for some people starting a PM is like reaching out personally and it might feel brusque of me to simply reply politely but briefly to whatever the question was. Please remember that I'm getting 50+ messages a day I'm trying to be a writer not an email answerer, so I get through my admin stuff as quickly as I can. That means, while I try to be friendly and polite, my responses might be quick and to the point.

If you were hoping to become virtual pen pals, exchange warm replies back and forth for days, maybe buy me a drink the next time you're in the SF Bay area, and perhaps even end up riding Medusa at Discovery Kingdom with our pinkies locked, you should let me know that's on your agenda and not just ask me if I know who wrote "that one meme about the fish."

21- Oh great. I see that you've seen my message but you won't reply. Thanks a whole lot you jerkwad. What is wrong with you?

I hate that people can tell when I've "seen" their chats. I hate it with the white hot fury of a billion supernovas. Because not everything is urgent. And sometimes I triage that shit. And sometimes I triage it right into the ignore pile. And it is a universal constant that the people who send the most ignorable messages that are clearly answered in the FAQ are also the ones who think they are absolutely the most important people in the universe and get bent out of shape if I don't reply within two or three hours.

Sorry random person. There was a time when I could give thoughtful responses to everybody who sent me a private message. That time was about 850,000 followers ago. Now I'm writing an FAQ instead of a regular post so that I can reply with this to generic questions I get a zillion of.

But go ahead and ask again. I can cut and paste the URL of this snazzy new FAQ to you.

22- Hey you posted my thing/my friend's thing/a thing I know the source of/a webcomic I want to see succeed. Can you make an attribution/repost with credit/give me a shout out?

Yes!

Thank you.

Crediting artists is important to me since I am one. There are half a million of you and one of me and the internet is a big place where reverse image searches don't always work (or are directly deceived), people steal images and add their own watermark, and where it's impossible to know who is happy to go viral with mere watermark credit, who wants a shout out, who wants a URL link, and who will be upset if their page isn't shared from directly.

I appreciate the help.

I will add one caveat to this. The world is full of people who are so desperate to promote themselves that they might try to take credit for something they didn't actually create. Or more likely they will post something (gotten from elsenet) and then assume that I (having also got it from elsenet) MUST have gotten it from their site. ("I posted this and you posted it three days later." "Yeah, but it's going viral right now, so––" "CLEARLY YOU GOT IT FROM ME!!!") If you are the original creator of something, I absolutely want you to have credit, but send me a link to the original image. I tend to err on the side of trust, but if you send me a link to your tumblr (or whatever) and it's full of thousands of memes you've just reposted over the years, I'm probably going to be skeptical that you are actually the "creator."

23- You should just make sure you know where something is from!

Like all the other pages and Tumblrs and Pinterests, right?

Look, I do my best. I always hit "share" if the source page matches the author. There are pages and sites that people hate because they're problematic, and I'm trying to navigate a big, complicated world. However, some of the stuff I'm posting has been image grabbed and reposted thousands of times. Some of it has been taken credit for by five or six different sources. Some of it would take some serious detective work to track down. Doing more would change the time I take to find an image from a minute or two to as many as 15-20. 

And that's PER post.  

That would add hours a day to my schedule, and that would add a level of difficulty I'm just not able to do. I would abandon the effort altogether.

Since there's one of me and over a million of you, maybe if you see something you want credited, you could just let me know where it's from, and I'll edit the OP right away.

And I know people's hearts are in the right place but even so, super shitty sanctimonious comments drift into the territory of my commenting policy.

24- I would like to volunteer.

That is so sweet!

Currently, I don't have a lot of volunteer opportunities. You can keep your eyes open for the posts where I'm hoping to get a transcription. And if you see a typo and want to give me a shout out, that wouldn't be unwelcome. And if you have the chops to write a guest post, but then don't take the money when I try to pay you, that could technically be volunteering.

But here's the thing. I don't want to take advantage of this. I  pay my editors, guest bloggers, and website designers, and come up with some kind of trade in trade with anyone else unless they insist they don't want that money. So please only do this if you really really really want to volunteer.

Ironically, one of the best ways you can help the most (beyond a donation) is super easy: just engage with the posts I send over from my blog. The FB algorithm is a cross between a greedy fuckwaffle, a lawyer with a $50k retainer, a code monkey who will do anything to stop free advertising except actually come up with a way to separate advertisers from content creators, and literally Satan. So tossing a like or a comment on those posts is an almost zero-effort way to help me be seen by more people, and it makes a big difference.

25- I answered your question/told you where something was from/mentioned a problem in one of your posts, but you didn't react.

Did you do that in the comments? Because like I said up above, I can't really read the comments. If it's important, send me a PM. I check back when I can, but that's really only a glance at the top comments of the most recent posts.

26- Can I get an autograph?

Um...sure?

This is all very new to me and weird and I've got huge imposter syndrome and I still think people who want my autograph are trying to trick me somehow, but this question keeps coming up, so I better answer it.

If you let me know you'd like to send me physical correspondence, I will give you a P.O. Box address that I check regularly.

Send me something I can sign (I don't have a book I've authored or anything yet) with a self addressed stamped envelope, and I will sign it and send it back. Please cover all the postage both ways.

Or just give me your address and I'll send you a postcard.

I won't turn down a donation, but there is no "charge."

27- I can't believe you're okay with what's going on in the comments on that one post.

I CAN'T READ ALL THE COMMENTS.

Writing About Writing maxes out its 100 notifications badge in less that four or five minutes. I don't know how many comments I get every day, but it's way too many for me to have read them. Some posts get threads that are thousands long. I've seen posts that are six months old still having people basically chatting in the comments on them. It's not that I didn't care. It's most likely that I didn't even know.

If something has gone past your ability to handle, and you need me to step in as an admin, link me to the post* and tell me what the problem is. 

(*I'm really going to need that link because after a day or two, the post has moved down and out of my ability to go digging for it.) 

28- Here's a poem I wrote, and have sent you, unsolicited.

That's amazing! It's exactly identical to the poem I just deleted unread.

29- If you're so overwhelmed, why don't you get admins?

Because I'm a control junkie.

Oh you were hoping for a long, rambling answer that wasn't breathtakingly self-honest! Well in that case.....aside from the occasional Social Justice Bard post.... Or maybe a macro that suggests that bigotry isn't awesome just because people who don't suffer systematic forms of it have decided that a particular expression is no big deal..... Or perhaps something horrifying to Status Quo Defenders like the idea that representation matters.....   Other than those posts, I don't really get the kind of comments off of grammar jokes and "You should be writing" memes that require roving bands of admins. I can swing through posts like the ones above, clean up the worst offenders, and trust that most of my followers are adults who will message me if they need me to step in on something. [Please include the link as well as telling me what's going on. Sometimes the comments rage for DAYS and I won't be able to just figure out which post you're talking about.]

And even though admins can reply to messages, having them handle "Can you post my thing?" or "Will you read my story?" isn't really what I think anyone would want to do. The last one whose job it was to answer my inbox left me for a beluga whale named Percival.

Basically, it's the wrong kind of "overwhelmed" for farming out the work. Hopefully this FAQ helps–or at least helps me to feel better about ignoring some of the questions that are answered here.

30- Hello from my sock puppet account that I made specifically to message you. We meet again, Mr Brecheen! Why did you ban my main account? Is it because you hate the founding principles of democracy like free speech? And can I get reinstated because I've suddenly realized that shitting on that post means now I don't get all the rest of your awesome content?

(Okay, maybe this exact phrasing isn't, strictly speaking, FREQUENT)

Why did this happen? Probably because you violated the commenting policy. I didn't write that just to hear myself speak. Or um...read myself write. (That phrasing doesn't work nearly as well.) I don't have time for warnings and explanations and the inevitable back and forth arguments that come from them. Pretty much every place you ever go has rules and a code of conduct whether it's to keep your shoes and shirt on or to keep your voice down if you don't want the librarian to shush and glare. And if you blithely ignore them, they show you the door. It has nothing to do with fucking democracy.

And if you message my personal account and I don't see "I'm sorry" in the first couple of lines, I just delete the shit unread. Hope you spent HOURS on it boyo.

I might be willing to unban someone if they apologize, but I'm not going to do so on a timetable that would allow them to jump right back into whatever argument got them banned in the first place. So you will have to hang in the penalty box for a while either way.

31- For a page about writing....

I'm going to stop you right there, boss.

Is what you're about to say kind of elitist, snotty, shitty, jerkwaddy, fucknozzly? Are you about to complain about the proper use of subjunctive in a FB post. Are you about to wax intellectual about the decay of western civilization because a Tumblr post lacked punctuation (even though it was piss-easy to figure out what it meant)? Is this going to be a comment where you sneer down your nose because my text to speech picked a homophone and I was too Driving on the Freeway to fix it right away? Are you about to laugh at my non-academic use of some word. Do you have something to say about "climbing down" ladders, "making" money, splitting infinitives, ending sentences in prepositions, or beginning them with coordinating conjunctions.

A) Fuck off.

B) Go teach high school if you want to be that person. The adults are trying to have a conversation.

C) I get paid....professionally....with like actual money, to basically make fun of assholes. Are you sure you want this to be your play?

D) If you insist on saying it anyway, the ONLY thing keeping you from getting banned might be how long it's been since I've gotten well and truly laid. [And right now we're in year two of a pandemic.] Be warned.

32- I am your customer; You certainly did not treat me with the proper deference!

Customer? What?

Have you actually given me money? Or are you just acting entitled.

Believe it or not, sometimes, if I just reply to a question with a brief answer or a quick answer and a link that answers the question, people will lose their fucking shit like woah. Because apparently they think I'm like Nordstrom's customer service and they are my big-fish client here to drop some serious Benjamins if I treat them with the deference they deserve. Clearly I am not spending enough hours a day doing free work, and I need to craft them a personal response that is both gratified that they graced me with a question they could have found the answer to in one minute of their own effort and so fucking courteous that they feel bathed in the milk of human kindness.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the law of large numbers just means that some people are going to be having a bad day or read a quick response as undeserved of a human of their stature because of maximum bad faith, but at a million followers and less that .001% of them being actual "customers (Patrons)," I have negative values of time for that sort of bullshit.

33- Did you delete my comment?

Maybe.

More likely just set it so that only you and your friends could see it. So you go back and check it and then have an existential crisis about why no one is liking it. The thought of that keeps me warm on the long winter nights.

But I maybe just deleted it. There's sort of an "asshole threshold" and trying to explain to you exactly where the hide-to-delete asshole threshold on a comment would be is not something I'm really interested in explaining.


34- Well why did you do THAT?? 

It's not like I have a flow chart.

Sometimes I just think "Shut the fuck up." And since I'm the one who knocks have all the admin tools, I can actually see to it that someone DOES shut the fuck up.

I dunno. Was your comment kind of a shitty comment? Was it elitist? Was it absolutist? Was it lecturing people about The One True Way™ to be a writer? Were you piggy backing off a funny eggcorn macro to just generally complain about grammar. Did you reply to the title or preview text without reading the article. Or were you being a prescriptive prig in a post about how being a prescriptive prig is priggish?

Was it the kind of comment where you thought you were "telling someone off" instead of communicating? Were you being a jerk or snotty or snide? Was it a social issue that I totally agree with but you were being a really obnoxious jackhole about it? Did you refuse to acknowledge nuance in a situation that has some? Were you basically using my hard-won platform to be preachy about something that I find vaguely annoying? Did it violate our commenting policy which I did not spend fifty hours writing because it was a great time? Was it overly encouraging of Welsh-American separatism?

I didn't read the comment. 
But let me show you what I think about people who don't 
read the article to which they're replying.
There are tons reasons I hide comments that range from it being just a little too acerbic... 

To something problematic that I don't want to have a thirty comment fight with people saying "Well *I* didn't see a problem with it"....

To my personal pet peeve of people who take it upon themselves to answer mailbox questions clearly without having read the article.
(Look, I'm thrilled if you found the question provocative, but read the post be ready to have your comment deleted)... 

To projectile word vomit of several hefty paragraphs in response to a title clearly without having actually read the article.

I put time and effort into my content. Having someone basically "listen to themselves talk" about it when it's piss obvious they didn't read what I wrote is super annoying. I'm a flawed human and that's one of those things I'm really bad about just shrugging off. I know it's the internet, but I find it insufferable.

And though I can't run a page about writing where I ever successfully get rid of every comment kvetching about grammar, that's not what we're here for. So you know...there's a lower "shitty-to-delete" threshold on that shit.

And....and..........AND....yeah, I probably hid it. Comments are moderated on this page and you should read the commenting policy if you don't know exactly how and why. I would love to have a policy that is simply "Don't be an asshole," but it saves me a lot of grief to spell out what that means.

35- No Bro. You full-on DELETED my comment!

I'm not your bro.

The number one reason I full-on delete comments is that people leave exactly the sort of comment I tell people openly that I'm going to delete. I know that seems like it would be pretty sodding rare, but it happens all the time. Either they don't make it to the end of the post itself to read or they don't click on the links where, like, the first paragraph says "I'm going to delete such-and-such comments from my FB page,"

Or maybe they don't care.

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the fact that I haven't read the bloviations of someone who didn't take a moment to read mine.

The number two reason I full-on delete comments is that they were overt, naked bigotry of some type or encouraged self harm, violence, or were otherwise absurdly abusive.

Number three is that a fight breaks out in a thread. I'm not here to host bullshit. If one person is clearly in need of a banning, I'll do that, but if everybody's dillholinating the countryside, I nuke the whole thread from orbit (it's the only way to be sure).

Number four? Banning people. That deletes all their comments everywhere on the whole page. While rare, it can happen instantly to bigots or two or three posts if I recognize that someone is going to backlash every time I post about social issues, or it might be that long, slow burn that takes six months of a person slowly getting on my radar and then becoming recognizable and then watching their patterns before I say to myself, "Dang Chris, that person is just always just a tosser every time they comment. I don't think they're really doing much but making this a worse little corner of the internet. This is no longer worth it."

I don't erase comments that disagree with me. You can see that easily from a casual glance at any post that is even moderately controversial. I erase comments that are buckets of anal sphincters.

Don't be a bucket of sphincters, and your comment won't get erased.

36- You're biased in favor of liberals and progressive values! You let liberals get away with more. That's unfair moderating. What about conservatives? What about libertarians? You are where FREEZE PEACH goes to die!!! What about folks on 'the other side.'

What about them? I'm not running the goddamned debate club here, and no one is entitled to feed my posts through their ideological filters and then comment without consequence or treat my comments section like it's a podium.

Even if the overton window didn't mean the average "unbiased moderate" here in the United States is the extreme right of most other democracies, I STILL wouldn't care.

I do a thing.

If you don't like that thing AND can't scroll past that thing AND have to comment AND can't comport yourself in any way other than an edgelord shithead, my page is not for you anyway. If you want to take umbrage or a shot, fucking play nice and you may even get some discussion. That's really the only goddamned rule. I'm not going to excuse bigotry because some people believe it exists on a political spectrum they're entitled to discuss anywhere and everywhere they want to and that white nationalists and nazis and racists and misogynists deserve to be able to drop whatever dehumanizing festering shit turd of a comment they can pinch out in the name of free speech whether they agree with it or just haven't grown out of their basic immaturity long enough to realize people's lives are at stake. I'm not here to host the bullshit idea that reacting to oppression with angry internet words is "just as bad" as the oppression itself.

There are a million ways to disagree without getting banned. (I've got that artists' weakness for nuance and humanization, so seriously all you have to actually do is not be a total fucknoodle.) And while there is a complicated point to be made about power differentials and privilege, if it helps you feel better to just imagine that I am unfairly mean to anyone who isn't a liberal, you just go ahead and tell yourself that when you're lying awake in bed at night.

37- Why don't you do more wordplay riddles like you used to. They're fun.

Basically because this page is too big now. 

Too many people too eager to show off that they know the answer end up making it so that you can't look at the post without seeing the answer right there in the comments before you've even had a chance to think about it. I would have to monitor comments too closely to keep the riddle from being spoiled for everyone else. Even when I ask in the post to let people have a chance, it doesn't even slow folks down. Sorry.  Just one of those things that doesn't work well on social media where you can just SEE the comments (rather than having to click to open them or something).

38- Can I ask you a quick question?

You can ditch the soft positioning and actually respect my time. 

I love questions! I have an entire part of my blog that is dedicated to them called THE MAILBOX. You may even end up getting answered as part of our "show." But there's a way to ask those sorts of questions and even though I do a lot of "variations on a theme," I'm not going to reanswer the same question for the blog over and over again. I'll really WILL usually answer questions if they really are quick (pinkie swear), but please don't be a dillhole if I point you toward an article I've already written.

And please respect my boundaries if I have to say no. Not every question is actually quick, feedback is an incredibly involved process, I may have already done the hard work of a nuanced answer and I'm just linking you the article to save myself time (not to be rude), and "One more quick question" is a way to piecemail attain the kind of labor from me that I normally charge $60+ USD for,

39- Why didn't you approve my post.

I didn't NOT approve your post. If you tried to post on the page, it shows up as a GUEST POST and those are in different places from the posts that I put up. They do not immediately go out to people the way the regular posts do, and from what I can tell, FB has gone to great lengths to keep people from availing themselves easily of a platform that isn't their own. 

There is no approval process. Your post just shows up. I don't even see most of them. But the FB algorithm doesn't show them to as many people as the main posts (the ones I put up), so it better be VERY interesting/funny/whatever if you want engagement.

I cruise through there every few days to make sure no one is spamming us. If people are dropping links to self-promotion or ads, I delete it and ban them and if they're just trying to promote themselves I delete it the first time and ban them if they keep it up. But a lot of those guest posts get past me. 

If you are very interested in a main post, PM me and let's talk. I won't post your fiction or poetry or YOUR blog about writing (unless I find it AWESOME) or promotional stuff, so you shouldn't bother asking (the few artists I've promoted here have been longtime friends––membership has its privileges), but I am often willing to post the kinds of things I USUALLY post here that you're just sharing with me (like a great meme you found), links to contests (provided they're not super local), and relevant stuff. 

40- You used to post so much more on your Facebook page. What happened?

Facebook happened. 

I used to try pretty consistently to get something up once an hour whenever I was awake.  I would obsessively be on the prowl for memes and macros. I would pop over and post ten to twelve times a day—sometimes more. I annoyed my friends and loved ones by always being on my phone. I would even go plumb the depths of Pinterest if it had been a while.

Then FB put its moderation into the hands of bots, and I've had nothing but problems. There have been periods of days I couldn't post because the algorithm can't discern context and suspended my account. ("I would kill to see you, friend," flagged as a threat for example.) I still can't post from any mobile device or "share" things from my main account because of a glitch they seem to have no intention of fixing. For a while there I made a friend editor and I had to send her the posts a few times a day so she could post them on my behalf. It has been kind of a nightmare. 

And understand that this recent development is happening after FB did not one, not two, but THREE major throttlings of how they show Pages to people (even people who are following those pages and WANT to see that content), reducing the visibility to a fraction of a percent for any given post. This was to wring more money out of page admins for advertising revenue. 

For the most part, things are semi-functional now—I still have to post from my private account and mobile doesn't work at all, but at least I can post things and I don't need a friend to help—but it was a wakeup call that I was putting in a TON of effort for self promotion on a medium that would/could/(and for a moment did) have an algorithm affect my career without even any human oversight. I could not go back to the "status quo" after that. I'm not whining that "Facebook doesn't CARE about me" (they don't, but I already knew that), but more that I realized how much time and effort was going to something that could be gone in a heartbeat and would be changed even faster if it raised the stock price a couple of points.

It's no way to live spending that much time on something so unstable. I've decided to spend more time doing the actual writing and less time posting constantly. These days I limit my "social media outreach time," and spread it out across more platforms. I've been cross posting more to my Tumblr, my Twitter, and even Instagram. They're all redundant to the posts I do here, but the intention is not to have so many eggs in a basket that isn't even mine, can be revoked for any reason without a single human so much as double checking to make sure that's fair, and is often made smaller so that I will pay for additional "basket space." I still do six or seven posts a day and try not to be heavy handed with the blog promotion, but things HAVE cooled off a bit. 

41- Can we be Facebook friends?

[Okay, most people don't really ask me this, per se; they just send me friends requests.]

Yes, you may, but let me make a few disclaimers:
  • This is my public account: Chris Brecheen (Public) If you've stumbled upon my private account, the answer will be no. That account is for friends, family, and people I've known online either for a very long time or have developed a rapport with. It's not the VIP room or anything, but it's an essential aspect of a private life as my online persona becomes very public. I need to trust those people aren't just with me for the show. If your long term aim is somehow to be my friend, work on that rapport. 
  • You might want to follow for a while and decide IF you want to send me a friend request. I'm definitely not everyone's cup of tea with the geekery and the social justice stuff. 99.9% of my posts are public, so you really wouldn't be missing anything except the ability to comment.
  • If you don't care for my (very) occasional social issues post on the Writing About Writing Facebook Page, you will like my profile even less. I write about that stuff almost daily.
  • I can be a bit much for people. I post a lot. 
  • I have 1 "Note" that is a Commenting Policy for this profile. You should read it before charging in. ESPECIALLY before charging into a contentious post.
  • Send me a PM with your request. (Don't worry, I check my "Message Requests" at least once a day.) That account gets around 200-500 friend requests a week. I reject most of them because I don't know if they're there to try and rent my page or just pick a fight in the comments. So send me a message along with the request.

41.5- Would you like to be friends? 

I'm getting more and more messages through the page's PMs that strike me as trying to kind of break the ice. Like, they just seem like they're trying to strike up a conversation. ("Hey so...do you like bread?") 

I want to stress that I totally love hearing from folks, enjoy getting questions, even though I have an extensive F.A.Q. to help me not answer the same ones over and over again, and it's REALLY QUITE LOVELY to get a PM from time to time that isn't hate mail or focused on something someone perceives as a failing. But I'm really in "business mode" when I answer questions on the WAW page. If you're looking to have (a) more familiar/personal interaction(s), you want to see question 41 (above) and message and/or friend that account. Beyond that, it sort of depends on the rapport we develop. (Although please understand that the nature of the power dynamics and the tendency for people to treat even eighteenth rate online celebrities like they're not entirely a human being with feelings––which happens with attraction as easily and powerfully as with repulsion––mean that I am likely to gently, but firmly, pump the breaks if I feel like I'm on a pedestal.)

More to come....

3 comments:

  1. You've come a long way sir! Your empire has grown to a most impressive size. I simply wish to congratulate you.

    CONGRATS!

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  2. My god this was long but well played. I love your post but didn’t believe you were real just some not spitting things out, lol. Great job on making a living on something you love.

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  3. Chris, I've been greatly enjoying your posts for some time but never read your FAQs... recently mentioned in a post.
    Wow! That was a long and beautifully written rant. Evidently high traffic has brought huge irritation with it.
    I couldn't handle that shit.
    So let me just say what I wanted to:
    THANK YOU, Chris, for your humour interlaced with thought on writing and your very good prose.
    I want to stay "in" as a good guest who you will never mind having around...or at least cantcan always trust to just politely leave if you need to clear out party central for some alone time.

    It's been a joy reading your posts and the comments of good folk. MakesMMakes a huge difference not seeing loads of nasty comments, which occurs waaay too much on waaay too many threads.
    Your hard work is evident, but may the flood of it abate.
    Wishing for you, eventually, a nearly troll-proof dungeon.

    And hoping someone soon could up with a vaccine for the internet, too.

    Mary

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