News! I'm the new Twitter Diva for our SCBWI Regional Team!

Our local chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the California North/Central Region, has been bidding a fond farewell to longtime regional team members, and welcoming new ones into their positions.

I'm happy to announce that I'm taking over the Twitter Diva (does a tiara come with this title?) position from Bitsy Kemper, who has done a fantastic job of filling the @SCBWINorthCal feed with useful and entertaining content for our regional members.

So if you're not already following, please do so! :)

RTW--D'ohn't Try This At Home

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors and followers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic: What's the biggest writing/querying/publishing mistake you've made so far?

I think others will also be featuring this biggest mistake: querying before the manuscript was actually ready.

Three years ago, I absolutely thought it was ready. Well, this close to being ready. But you see, I was going to beat the system. I knew it would take a while to hear back on queries, so that bought me more revision time, right? Yes, technically it did--but I didn't do anything else during that time period that improved my craft, so it didn't matter.

Sure, when the requests started coming in, I caught a few more spelling errors or typos, but there were not any drastic improvements. So those requests turned into form rejections when they got the pages.

It wasn't until we formed our current YA crit group that I felt like I made real progress in my writing, partly from what we cover in our meetings and partly from all the links and resources we exchange. Couldn't do it without the cannibal club!

Now, if the question had been about the funniest mistake, I only have to go back to last week on Twitter. An agent posted that they were going to start a "Query All-stars folder" for the really crazy queries she gets.

It struck me that some twisted soul would take that as a challenge, a way to get her attention. So I jokingly tweeted, "Challenge accepted! Something new to strive for!" Only she didn't know I was joking and I think I kind of scared her.

The Power of Social Networking: It Can Move Floors

So I'm on facebook, I have this blog, I have my art website, but I'm dragging my feet on joining Twitter. I've found the Twitter pages where I can stalk some agents, but I haven't set up my own account yet. Mainly for the time constraints--as you can tell, my two-three-times weekly blog posts fell to occasionally-weekly when I was wrassling my rewrites.

Twitter seems like it would be fun, but time-consuming as well. And apparently there are politics to worry about, too. It just hasn't gotten to a tipping point yet where I think it's worth it.

And then, a local mall got hit with a flash mob. I actually know a person in one of the choirs, and she was telling people for weeks ahead of time about the secret upcoming spontaneous event. Of course as a writer, I had to argue the semantics of calling a planned event of this magnitude a spontaneous event, but the official designation was "Random Act of Musical Kindness."

I also questioned how it could be a secret if she's telling everyone. She said, "I have to tell my friends, and the more the merrier." Well apparently the organizers did not allow for the Twitter factor: a secret told to one friend, or even an overheard conversation, can spread like a fire (okay, that was a bad analogy, considering the mall was hit by a fire last month) with the power of Twitter.

And like the old shampoo commercial, where friends tell friends ad infinitum, the crowd of participants and performers swelled to 5,000--when they had only planned for 500. That's some pretty powerful tweeting, even if it did turn out pretty scary for all the people that got caught up in the crowd and had to be evacuated.