I find I can either build stories, or successfully fizz around with social networking, but  balancing the two is a matter of going in fits and starts.

For me, writing fiction requires concentration, and focus.  I must line up all the imaginary ducks in their rows and then arrange them by color, height, width, feather style, or any other categorized tweak needed to Make Art.

With social networking, though, I wave and yoo-hoo my way across virtual cocktail parties as the ducks waddle off on their own.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t line up ducks at a cocktail party.

The growing shift in publishing, from writer writing and publisher doing most everything else, to writers following the corporate model of my husband’s workplace, ie, ‘doing more with less,’ requires writers who aren’t already household names (or at least big genre names) to be a one-man-band about their writing.

“Look at what I did!  Over here!  Hey, look! Over here!  Hey!  HEY! Look over here! It’s really great!  Look!”

Writers must tweet, blog, broadcast, podcast and strew landfills with empty ballpoints, roller balls and gel pens from book signings across the country.  Publicity becomes the job and the writing must be fitted in.  New ebook titles?  My Life in a Laptop, Writing on the Interstate, Auto Aerobics, Hotplate Recipes For One, Weekend Writing for Publicists.

This shift will carry along those who can squeeze themselves into the pigeonholes of the new writing Zeitgeist, and those who don’t find the results of the process, or the process itself, to be to their liking will change their desires until they come across something that suits them.

For those of us working our invisible way through the noise up to “Who?” or maybe even a short nod indicating that the other person has seen us, the job is to balance lining up ducks while enticing readers with sparkle-eyed party talk.

Today the talk is at Meg Waite Clayton’s “Blogger Ball Redux.”  (click on the bookshelves)

Now that I’ve checked off sparkle party talk from today’s to-do list, I need to pursue some poultry.

Here, ducky, ducky!