Tweet, tweet

31st May 2013

The search for a book cover had become a little frustrating, until one morning at 4 a.m. I awoke with the image of a Scottish dry stone wall. I thought that somehow we could invoke the idea of a transition through time by altering the wall slightly from one end to the other across the face of the book. I was taking a Twitter class that day and going back and forth with my editor during class about this idea. A few days later in the early a.m. again, I awoke with the notion of a gate in the stone wall and a woman walking through, perhaps from the modern era into the past. It seems obvious, now that I think about it, but I hadn't seen how evocative a stone wall could be and how it could work as a symbol both for Scotland and time.
Then yesterday I was going through a shelf of random sheet music, trying to see what could be chucked, when I came across a pencil sketch I had made years ago of a stone wall with a gate in it. So, you see, all things work together in this sea of quantum soup we live in. I pitched the idea to my editor, who promised to pass it along. Now to await the decision of the art department and see if they are living in the same portion of the soup as I am.
I attended this all-day Twitter class because my agent advised me to get on the Twitter bandwagon. I can see why he did, because it saves everyone standing around at dreaded cocktail parties trying to pretend they're not there just for the networking. Little does he know how absolutely clueless I am when it comes to computers and the workings thereof. I think when I was a high school student in rural Scotland under the tutelage of dragon maths teachers, something in my brain switched off and now won't turn back on.  Plus, almost everyone in the class had Twitter accounts, had their laptops open and at the ready. I hadn't even brought a laptop, because I don't own one. By dint of a Christmas present, I do own an Ipad, so had brought that. But to do what the teacher was asking, I had to download the Twitter Ipad App, and for that I needed the password for the Apple Store. Now someplace sometime I had decided on a password, or someone who was using my Ipad had, but God only knows (and wasn't telling) what the damn password was.
Upshot was that I couldn't download the App and couldn't create my Twitter account, and while I was figuring all this out, the rest of the class was onto Hashtags and Hootsuites.  In my medieval maths class in Scotland, the awful teacher would strut with his weapon of corporal punishment across his shoulder, waiting for a maths dunce like myself to mess up a precious piece of graph paper or not know what "a" signified. Being of a literary mind even then I couldn't for the life of me understand what "a" or "b" or "c" could possibly signify other than the beginning of a word. Hot tears would well, and panic ensued.
So it was in Twitter class. I left at lunch break with that wild frenzy of feeling I have sometimes had (once when walking out on a waitressing job in the middle of a shift, despite losing my pay for that last stinking day.) I drove out of the parking lot and knew I wasn't going back.
Consequently, I still know next to nothing about Twitter, though I do now (with a little help from my friends) have a "handle," which is @Kilmartin1978, incase anyone is interested. I have tweeted once since, and keep meaning to do it again. I have two followers, and no idea what to convey in 140 characters. I am not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to hear news bursts from others, and can't imagine why anyone would be interested in mine. I am long-winded by nature, intensely private like most writers, so what is there to say?
Great Gatsby: I've run out of time again. The movie suffers from the same problem the novel does, which is that for a story about one particular person, that person is not very well drawn. I am not any more fascinated by Leonardo Di Caprio than I was by Fitzgerald's description of Gatsby. I don't for a minute buy Gatsby's love of Daisy, who is as carboard-y as her counterpart in the novel. One difference is, the movie feels about half an hour too long; the novel was about one third too short.
But bear with me on the Twitter thing. I will work it out. It took a while, but I figured out blogs, didn't I?