Honest Honey, I was Just Tweeting

So, if you look over to the right you’ll see that there’s a twitter button on my blog now.  Yep, that’s right.  I finally joined John McCain and a retired Pope in the twitterverse.  Given the fact that I spend ten hours a day working with cutting edge electronics, you’d think that I would have taken the plunge a long time ago, but here’s the thing.  I grew up in an era when “ur” was spelled “you are” and people wrote with complete sentences and proper punctuation.  Dealing with a 140 character limit on twitter really chaps my cheeks.  But even glaciers move, albeit slowly, so I am now in the world of tweeters.

Over the weekend I set up my account, picked out a handful of folks to follow, tweeted a couple of times and sat back to watch my horizon’s expand.  Then it happened, I got an email that someone was following me.  It turns out that it was T. Michelle Nelson, a young lady who, like me, is a budding author.  She’s blossomed a little further than I have though, her second book will be on sale next month and a third is in the works.  Her first novel is called The Life and Death of Lily Drake and it’s a paranormal vampire book, less Laurell K. Hamilton, more Charlaine Harris.  I’m about three chapters in and so far I’m impressed.  I’ll give a full review when I’m done.

I tweeted a thank you to her and she responded with an amusing reply.  That prompted me to do the same, which is when things started to go bad, really bad.  As I sat in my chair firing off a 140 character response, my wife looked over and said, “Why are you smiling?”

“Oh nothing,” I replied.  “I’m just writing to one of my followers”

“Followers?  What kind of followers? Are you mixed up in some sort of a cult thing?”

“No, no!  She’s one of my twitter followers.”

“She?”

“Yeah, she’s an author too.  She writes paranormal fantasy books.”

“You’re writing cute, funny little fantasy notes to a woman you just met on the internet?”

“She’s not a woman. Her bio says that she’s young, married and has a little boy.”

“Most mothers are women.  So you’re writing a cute, funny fantasy note to a woman your daughter’s age that you met on the internet?”

“It was NOT a fantasy note.  I just told her that I missed Inara.”

“Who’s Inara?”

“She’s a companion.”

“Companion…what kind of companion?”

“Well…ah…she’s kinda more of an escort.”

“You know an escort well enough to miss her?”

“She’s not really an escort.”

“You said she was.”

“No, no.  She’s really an actress.”

“Most women are, especially the ones that are escorts.”

“No, I mean REALLY an actress.  She’s on TV.  Her real name is Morena.”

“You know an escort’s real name?  Have you been watching Cinemax After Dark again?”

“NO!  She does TV shows and sometimes she does movies.”

“What kind of movies?”

“She did one called ‘Serenity’.”

“Where did you watch that?”

“I have the DVD.”

“You have a DVD movie called ‘Serenity’ that stars an escort named Morena?”

“No, an actress named Morena…Morena Baccarin.”

“Where’d you buy that?”

“I got it online.  Honey, what are you doing?  Sweetie, don’t mess with that; it’s the router.  If you unplug that we won’t have any intern…..”

I’m back now.  Do you see how simple it is to get into trouble with twitter?  I wasn’t doing anything wrong and the next thing I knew…  “No Ma’am, I’m not on any restricted sites.  Yes Ma’am, I realize that using one of the library computers is a privilege.  My wife called?  No Ma’am, I’m just blogging.  That’s not a code word Ma’am.  It’s a little like writing an opinion column.  Ma’am, I promise that I’m not on any restricted sites.  It’s WordPress Ma’am.  It’s just for blogg….”