I thought the time was right to put a new wrinkle in my brain. With so many writing projects in the works, so many people contacting me with writing-related concerns, and so many writers asking questions about the protocol of using social networking to promote their writing, I felt that the only thing to do was develop a professional "Page" on FaceBook.
I reasoned that I would endure the learning curve and then use the FB Professional Page to communicate with those interested in writing and in my ongoing projects without annoying my personal "friends" with work-related updates.
So, I spent some time creating a barely-ready-for-people-to-see FaceBook Page. Since it was so easy to have this blog automatically import to my personal page, I figured it would be a proverbial piece of cake to do the same with my Pro Page...
But I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Techno-Geek that I am NOT, I wrestled with the problem. I tried every setting, clicked on every "help" button, fiddled with the templates for both the blog and for FB. I tried to remember how I'd gotten the personal page to do the import, and got increasingly upset with my stupidity. Reasoning that eventually even the blind pig finds an acorn, I kept picking away at it for the past TWO DAYS.
So it was with twin emotional waves of both vindication and utter incredulity that I discovered the following post on a FB Help Forum:
"I have a personal page - and then I have a page that I am an admin for - I want to import our blog posts into the notes of the page I am the admin for, but it seems my only option is my personal page?"
This was posted a month ago, with at least two others chiming in that they had the same problem. No answer has (as yet) been provided.
This all just goes to show that Winston Groom was right when he had Forrest Gump's mom tell him "Stupid is as stupid does."
Though I may have been initially elated to discover that I wasn't quite as incompetent as I had feared, the fact that I wasted significant portions of two days of my working life trying to figure out how to do something that those geekier than I cannot do doesn't say much about my relative IQ...
In Other News...
My co-writer Paul and I spent most of the day re-writing and polishing the Marathon Man script. Thanks to a community theater group's roundtable reading of the screenplay last weekend, we discovered that a major character could be whittled down to nearly nothing, and the story would thrive without him.
So, we pulled out all of his scenes, distilled the essence of what we wanted him to accomplish, and re-inserted him into the story -- a stronger character, though one with significantly reduced screen time.
Listening to the recording of the actors reading the script is an interesting exercise in humiliation. (Did I actually write that? What on earth was I thinking? No one would actually say those words out loud...) I now understand a little bit of why many actors don't like to watch their own performances. I have discovered that I REALLY don't like to hear a lot of my scenes read. They sound SO different than I "hear" them.
We have another roundtable reading scheduled with a different group of actors in Sonoma at the beginning of next month. All are completely unfamiliar with this project and will be reading it cold. With any luck, we'll have the lines polished to where they sound they same in real life as they do in my head...
