Inspired by social media and fortune cookies.

I’ve blogged a lot about ideas, and creativity, and the way the brain processes information to generate new ideas… but today I want to share how my Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Instagram/G+ friends and their passion, enthusiasm and support fire my creative jets and keep me working. (Please, click on those buttons on the sidebar and join the party!)

Since my books began taking off and I chose to be an “accessible author” who actively interacts with readers through social media, I’ve been experiencing The New Accessibility.

And I have a confession to make: I’m not actually that social. In fact, social media pretty much is my social life, and Mike’s too. We work, and we do things together, and we occasionally venture to something arty or out in nature…but we’re never lonely because we have our social media friends and family. When we do go out, we’re surrounded by them on this “small island” and we’ve met them in amazing and unlikely places, like a ghost town in Utah.

If I’m ever feeling lonely, all I have to do is throw something out to the Twitter/FBverse to find myself “connected” with a friendly, interested and interactive world. Mindful of buzz that says that people are sometimes made more lonely or isolated by all the apparent happiness of projected personas on social media, while I’m usually positive I’ll sometimes leak some of my bummer stuff, like my ongoing skin problems, getting manipulated by divorcing parents while doing kids’ therapy, or the shock of raised premiums and lowered benefits under “health care reform.”

These are real relationships with real people, who really care. Readers who’ve become friends have volunteered their time to comb through my manuscripts for typos, saving me time and money hiring a proofreader. Readers email, message, review and tweet me daily asking for more books, asking for movie or TV with my characters (leading to active shopping of the series in Hollywood!) and readers have emailed me about surviving all kinds of abuse and how the books have supported, encouraged and inspired them as they move toward freedom and healing.

All of which has been an incredible roller coaster ride, a heady voyage of hard work and dreams coming true.

Inspiration comes in many forms. I confess to a fondness for fortune cookies. The Holy Ghost is camped out in the fortune cookie factory making sure my weekly Panda Express indulgence gets a little divine seasoning.

These are uncannily perfect for me. Thanks, God.

These are uncannily perfect for me. Thanks, God.

Whenever I start to lose steam for my many projects (and don’t let anyone kid you—being an author/publisher/businessperson is great, but a LOT of work) my inspiration is all around me through encouraging relationships—both those “In Real Life” and those with wonderful people I may never meet in person, like my enthusiastic writer and reader friends and fans in faraway places like Japan, Germany, Australia, Canada, Italy and England just to name a few corners of the world. A friend I feel close to through social media, Ed White, wrote about this connectedness so well here on his blog post: How Facebook saved me from Loneliness .

I’m not only saved from loneliness, I’m inspired, connected and motivated.

How about you? When you lose steam, where do you find energy?

 

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