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Five months ago, I set out my rules for Social Media the Second Time Around — what I did, and planned to do, differently as I built a social media identity from scratch for my pseudonym. Five months in, how’s it going?
Both better and worse than expected.
If I count it up, I’ve done pretty much what I set out to do. Here were my guidelines for setting up the second identity:
- Don’t just replicate exactly what you did the first time around.
- Do make deliberate decisions.
- Do watch yourself (or selves).
- Don’t blast the world.
- Do tell the truth at the right time.
I’ve followed those guidelines, and they’ve served me well. P.M. (Pseudonym Me) is definitely not a clone of Jael McHenry; she follows different people and posts different things. She’s less flippant and more political. She talks less about writing and more about reading. Overall, she has a lot to say and isn’t afraid to say it.
Here’s the problem: I kind of don’t have energy for both. And the busier P.M. is, the less we see of Jael McHenry. All it takes is a peek at my Twitter account to see that my activity has dropped off dramatically; the same is true of Facebook.
If I had unlimited time, of course, things would be different. But that’s never how it is in a writer’s life. Even before I had the pseudonym identity, I was already balancing a dozen identities, as we all are — the promoter and the writer, the supporter and the mom, the critic and the cheerleader. Time spent talking to people about our books is time spent not writing them. It’s a balancing act, and a tough one. So my social media time, once 90 percent J.M., is now 90 percent P.M. The five minutes here and there that I have to pull up Twitter or Facebook are generally spent checking on P.M.’s contacts, not J.M.’s. I didn’t anticipate this, and it makes me a little sad.
How will I resolve the situation? At the moment I’m taking the philosophical bent: everything is ebb and flow, and depending on what happens with future books (and the other things in my life that keep me busy), I may find myself having more to say as J.M. and less as P.M. in the future.
Or I may need new guidelines. Time, and Twitter, will tell.
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About Jael McHenry
Jael McHenry is the debut author of The Kitchen Daughter (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, April 12, 2011). Her work has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, Indiana Review, and the Graduate Review at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. You can read more about Jael and her book at jaelmchenry.com or follow her on Twitter at @jaelmchenry.
