Linda Hewitt

I'll admit it. I've had a circuitous experience with Twitter. An early user, I dropped the first account, as I found myself doing a particularly lazy version of those airline passengers who call those waiting at the terminal to tell them the plane has landed, then call them again to say they're getting their carry-on from the overhead, then call them again to say they're standing in line to de-plane, etc., etc., boring etc. Shortly afterwards, I started tweeting again as a way of keeping in touch with a couple of friends who'd moved away, a substitute for the texting I could no longer use because there's no signal in the high mountain valley where I now live. After that exchange died out (which took about 2 days), I didn't bother to cancel the account, but I didn't tweet for three years. Last week I rediscovered Twitter, largely as a result of getting hooked on Kickstarter (more about that in a subsequent blog, but the URL's www.kickstarter.com if you want to check it out in the meantime) and being asked to tweet about a project in which I was particularly interested. I found myself once again on Twitter, and I am amazed. If not used to excess - aka, in the service of procrastination for its own sake - it has become a fantastic tool for a writer, a way not only to keep in touch with just about anything or anybody in the world in which you're interested, but also to get ideas. In just a few days, I've already added half a dozen pretty nifty info bits to my "Use later" file. Some of them relate to sources of information, but there's one that made me think of something else that in turn led to another thought that led to a precis for what may well turn out to be a Kindle Single. In brief, I think Twitter is useful for a lot more than promoting output. I think it can help a writer generate output.

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