The Tales of Missus P.

Librarians are of a profession that requires certain attributes.  You need a library and a lot of the times you need a degree (though I’m still trying to figure out how I get past the entry level stage into the “professional” stage so I can show off said degree.)  The art of being in the library and working for said library patrons best interest is essential too.  It’s a distinct field that has a nice amount of decent, like-minded folks but there aren’t too many of them in the world (heck, there’s a lot of information out there that needs wrangling). 

Same goes for educators though the amount of teachers is much more broad – for every 1 librarian in a small school, you may have 100 teachers or more for larger schools.  For the 400 teachers that you could have in an elementary, middle and high school for one area of town, there are probably 3 school librarians.  Point is the profession is distinct.

Once I started looking at writers online I found twice as many as I did for teachers.  The thing is, librarians and teachers can be writers.  But engineers, bank managers, plumbers and garbage men can be writers too.  There are hundreds of writers on Twitter to follow.

When I went to school, back in the good `ol 90s, I was young and naive and I was the only one (maybe two of us) in my circle of hometown high school friends who considered an English degree.  Writing and literature were my first subjects to love (computers, technology and gadgets coming in a close second) so once I went to UCF as an English major I was finally in my element.  We learned historical, cultural, comparative, subjective, interpretive, scholarly aspects of literature.  We wrote papers and talked about books all day.  How fun. (I need to add this to my “About Missus P.” page.)

But when I got to my Creative Writing courses I knew that from my years of writing in elementary school and high school had a place in college.  So, of course, I taught English and I studied Creative Writing more.  And there were plenty of people in college in Orlando who were into writing and teaching English Literature (and/or Reading). 

Now that Twitter has opened up the world to us, I found that there are way more writers in this world than I imagined.  I know there’s always been an issue with too many people flooding the market with books that aren’t so great, making the opportunity for decent work to get published.  (Queue J.K. Rowling, Jack London and Dr. Seuss who were all repeatedly rejected.) 

The biggest issue now is that with ebooks people can self publish which can be encouraging and discouraging equally.  On one hand, what you write won’t be in vain because it will be out there somehow.  Plus the amount of Kindle books (my personal choice because of its worldwide store access) sold is outstanding compared to print books.  Plenty of writers are successful in ebook sales.

But as the last link commenters note, there’s a lot of self-promotion involved and man, oh, man does Twitter have that going.