I’m on Threads for whatever reason, though I hate social media for obvious ones. Still, I signed up on Threads and reluctantly use it, even though I get zero engagement (which is, let’s be honest, quite disheartening, but mostly totally frustrating).
The one thing it’s good for, however, is to find new artists to follow. On Instagram, I’m following the same people I found on TikTok (one social medium I loathe and have already deleted twice, hopefully for the last time) after I added them on Facebook.
On Threads, I decided to accept new suggestions and ended up following, talking to, and even meeting soon a comic books creator (she writes, illustrates and colours them!!!) I absolutely love called Mara! Turns out she lives about 45 minutes from me, but that’s not the subject of this post.
Mara is amazing, she’s talented, she’s inspiring, she’s super easy to talk to. We have loads in common, not least of all our Swissness and our kids who have approximately the same age. The difference between us? She draws, like, all the time. She’s working on the third volume of her series and still finds time to draw characters. Lots of them. And she calls that her warm-up. Like, basically, before getting to work on her plates, she draws full-bodied characters in pencil to warm herself up and get ready…
I mean… When I saw that, my mind literally exploded – OK, not literally, my brain is still pretty much intact, if only very tired, but you know what I mean, right?! Here I am, always searching for a bit of time to work on my stories, always ending up on the social media I dislike so much, always giving up on writing because it sucks the life out my soul (social media does, not writing).
I thought about it for a while, and that’s my brain for you: I understand things pretty fast, but it takes me a lot of time to integrate the new knowledge.
Anyhoo, I came to the conclusion that instead of wasting my time on social media, I should write blog posts, in order to warm up and boost my creativity before I get to work on my actual story.
The weird thing is, as I was writing this post, I went to check my emails because I got a message from a newsletter reader of mine who replied to my last NL. He’s just lost everything in a fire, and it devastated me, so I sent him a heartfelt reply (what do you say to someone who’s lost everything?? I don’t know… I just wrote the sincerest thoughts I had though), and then, mechanically, I ended up on Facebook because my brain is ever so tricky and just follows the butterflies and the squirrels (IYKYK) and found a “forgotten” message (as in, a message I’m only just seeing now even though it was sent mid-December, but OK…) from someone I’m not familiar with who asked me for tips to write a novel. There again, I replied as best as I could, knowing that all I know is I really don’t know much. Then I came back here to finish this now interminable post, and you know what?
I feel fired up, beaches!!! (sorry for the terrible choice of words here, but it’s really the only way I can say this to tie up with the warm-up subject…)
So yeah, this exercise definitely works, and I’ll be doing more of those in the near future! Now I just hope my kid will let me write my real story when she comes back from her music class…