Words Per Mile

I took my car to Costco recently to get new tires put on it. I’d been told recently (by someone who knows) that my car was in need of new tires, and since I’d never replaced them before, i figured that person might be right. I brought it in, walked next door to the Container Store and browsed around, then went and picked up the car. My hubcap was cracked (not sure if that was their fault or mine), but otherwise all was well.

What was more interesting was when I went to replace my wiper blades. They were giving me some trouble, and I live in an area with rainy summers, so when I was visiting my parents I dragged my dad along to AutoZone to help me make sure I got the right ones.

Well, the woman who helped us was shocked I’d never replaced my wiper blades before. “How long have you had this car?” she asked. Two years, I told her. She told me my wipers should have stopped being effective long before now (especially because, as an essential worker, I had no reduction in the mileage I was putting on my car from 2020-2021). And yet here I had been, driving along and not giving my wiper blades any thought. They were fine, weren’t they?

Well, they were fine until they weren’t. And now I’ll be more vigilant about replacing them, rather than waiting until they’re scratching and smearing my windshield.

And maybe this blog is much the same. (Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m committed to my theme, for now.) I’m out here, writing when I want to and doing very little about my online presence, which is going to work fine for me until it doesn’t. There’s a lot of mixed messages out there about whether or not fiction authors need a social media presence. Some will argue that it doesn’t really translate into sales, not unless you’re in the top top 1%, and my intuition is that that’s largely the case.

But does everyone else feel the same? Maybe not. Maybe this agent or editor who would be perfect perfect perfect just doesn’t feel comfortable taking on someone who has no proven track record of promoting themselves. I’ll probably never know for sure if that’s the reason for a query or manuscript rejection, but somehow that makes it even scarier. What if there was something I could have been doing all this time, something that I could spend an hour or two a week on, that would have turned a “no” into a “yes”?

I don’t want to have that question rattling around in my head, smearing my metaphorical windshield and whatnot (I’ve somewhat lost the thread of the metaphor, I admit). And there’s an easy fix to that potential problem. So, here I am. Hello, world.