It's NANO TIME!!

It’s NaNo time!!

(I have to confess. I really don’t like the new NaNoWriMo 2013 image. I think it’s hideous and worse than last year’s Venn diagram image. Do people really like this??)

I cannot believe that it’s almost November. Where the heck did September and October go? Summer was just yesterday! November 1^st is just five days away and I am not kidding when I tell you that I am not ready for NaNo. Nope. Not in the very least. I thought I had more time. I thought November was eons away. I have no plan, I have no survival kit… I feel like the kid that forgot to study for his final and only has five days to figure out how to get it done.

So, on that note, I will be participating in NaNo 2013 and I need to cram in the next five days so that I have an inkling as to what I’m going to do come Friday. Will NaNo let me call in sick?  Heehee

For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s really called: National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo, or NaNo, is a writing challenge during the month of November where you write your butt off for 30 days. From November 1^st to November 30^th, you have to write 50,000 words of a novel, which averages to about 1,666 or 1,667 words a day. If you write more than that per day, you get yourself ahead and that works out well in case you have to miss a day of writing or something comes up and you can’t meet your daily word count.

I personally like to write more than 1,666 words a day. I like knowing that I’m ahead because I know that I will have a day or two or five that I might not feel like writing or that I might not reach my word count for the day. NaNo may be a struggle at times and not everyone reaches the 50K finish line but I can’t be one of those people. I like the structure and the challenge of trying to reach that 50K word goal in 30 days. And I don’t fill my pages with junk words, random letters or strange things that don’t make a lick of sense to the story.

So, for my second time, I will write those 50,000 words for NaNo and I will win!

Look for my tweets and blogs (if I can find some extra writing time) and I will fill you in on my progress. You can also look for my updated word counts on my blog and on my NaNoWriMo participant page: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/jennifer-lynn-catz.

Let me know if any of you are participating in NaNo. We can commiserate together.  :)

Until next time ~

TWEETS - How much is too much?

I admit it – I still consider myself a Twitter newbie. I forget to hashtag words in my tweets, I often hit the Retweet button instead of copying a person’s tweet and putting RT in front of it and my tweets go over the 140 character limit and I have to figure out what to cut.

I also do not tweet all the time.

For me, I have two reasons and they are very simple: I don’t tweet unless I have something I really want to say and I don’t want to annoy people with a plethora of words clogging their feed.

But, what I want to know is, how many tweets per day is considered too much? Would up to five tweets be considered average? Would 10 tweets per day be the limit? Would upwards of 20 tweets per day be considered excessive?

There is a person that I am following and, I kid you not, tweets, on an average, of nine per hour. Between this morning and February 1, this person has tweeted over 1,130 times! Some tweets are replies, some are directed towards people, a few are retweets (very few) and the rest are personal tweets. Is this typical? Is this over-the-top crazy?

Here is a sample:

Feb 1 – 183 tweets

Feb 2 – 122 tweets

Feb 3 – 92 tweets

Feb 4 – 90 tweets

Feb 5 – 242 tweets

Feb 6 – 173 tweets

Feb 7 – 142 tweets

Feb 8 – 74 tweets

So far today, there have been 32 tweets and it's not even noon!

In my opinion, that is just beyond extreme and this person needs to chill out with the tweets. I actually stopped using Twitter for a few weeks because I couldn’t read anything important in my feed. This person’s tweets were appearing five, six times in a row and I spent too much time trying to scroll through all of the person’s messages to get to tweets I actually needed to read, that I just gave up.

When I use Twitter, I want to read things that people or companies are doing and how I can learn from their message. I don’t want to be bombarded by messages (especially the same message over and over and over). Give me a link to click on if you want me to read more. If it sounds interesting, I can guarantee you, I will click on it.

So, I ask you:

How often do you tweet an hour? A day? Do you just tweet random things? Do you constantly push whatever you are writing/selling/marketing/promoting?  If you are an excessive or an extreme tweeter, why?

What do you look for when you read other people’s tweets? What do you consider too much? What makes you stop following a person?

I’m curious about what you think and how you use Twitter.

Until next time ~