We interrupt this regularly scheduled program for: Pre-Eclampsia Survivor Rant

Okay, folks, I'm going to apologize in advance, because this is a rant and it has nothing to do with writing or fiction or anything else this blog is usually about. It's coming at you now because of two experiences I had this week, one on Facebook and one on Twitter.

So, for context, some facts up front:
I am pregnant. This is my fourth pregnancy, but the second one was a loss. In my first pregnancy everything was hunky dory until about week 27 or so when I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. In short, that meant I had dangerously high blood pressure (that's not all there is to it, but that's the main thing I was dealing with). Ever watched Downton Abbey? Sybil died because she had eclampsia--what develops from pre-e if it's allowed to. Basically to avoid that you have to have the baby earlier than the due date. My son was induced at 37 weeks (normal pregnancies go to 40 weeks as a rule). Very luckily for me, we both came through without harm. Seizures were a big concern for me for the duration of those weeks, and I was put on bed rest and eventually magnesium--it was not a fun time.

No one knows what causes pre-e. Some of the most recent research suggests that not eating enough protein in early pregnancy may be a factor, but I have no way of saying if that was the case for me. I mean, I ate meat probably most days. But it's true that protein requirements for pregnant women are significantly higher than for the general population. Was I getting enough? I don't know.

Anyway, some things that have not been proven to cause pre-e are: being overweight, having high blood pressure when not pregnant, having blood sugar problems, whether or not you exercise, whether your diet is high in fiber, vegetables and fruit, and whether your diet is low in fat. But today on Twitter, I saw an account devoted to pre-e education that said this:

Okay, so I thought, are they talking to someone specific about their issues with their pre-e, or just everybody? So I tweeted them and asked.

To which they replied:

With the following infographic attached:

Now, I'm sure this person means well, but honestly, fuck them.

Because the original tweet might have been helpful if they were speaking directly to someone they knew with pre-e who actually had bad blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, etc. Otherwise it's just a shitty thing to say. Why? It implies that people who get pre-e have some kind of control over it.

They don't.

No amount of dieting and exercise can protect a woman from developing pre-e. Dieting is really controversial these days and it's just plain stupid to go around telling people they need to diet. That's a conversation people have with their doctors. Stay out of it.

In my case I have naturally low BP when not pregnant. I have never had a problem with blood sugar, even while pregnant. My cholesterol is normal. All of it is normal. I am a size 20, though, so clearly I need to go through some sort of weight loss plan to be thin before I should consider having more kids. Because we all know what the outcome rates are for people who do weight loss programs. So what you're actually saying, Twitter twit, is that fat people just shouldn't have babies.

As for the oh-so helpful graphic, thanks a lot for all the stats telling me I'm going to die and develop terrible diseases. That's so helpful and good for my stress. It's not like I don't already worry about this pregnancy's impact on my body, now I have to worry about a pregnancy that happened five years ago, too. Fabulous.

People keep "liking" and retweeting the tweet with the infographic and that, dear readers, is why we are here.

Just in general, please don't tell fat people they need to lose weight. Don't you think most of us would go ahead and shed the pounds if we could? Don't you think we've tried? Actually, many people don't think fat people have tried, they think fat people are lazy asses who never try to do anything healthy. Truthfully, I have stopped trying. I maintain my weight at 220lbs. Why? Because the last time I tried, like, really tried to lose weight, I spent four months drinking two slim fast meals a day and having one actual meal. I also worked out every day for a minimum of an hour and half. I went down to 175lbs after three months and that was it. No more weight loss after that. I tried decreasing my daily intake of calories from 1400 to 1200. I tried adding a half an hour to my daily workouts. Nothing. The scale did not budge. And you know what? I was exhausted and miserable. So I went back to eating like I normally do, which is pretty healthy. I never drink soda or eat fast food. I eat a lot of vegetables, avoid overly processed foods with high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats, etc. I make most of the food I eat from scratch. I exercise some, though not as much as I'd like. I've tracked my eating and basically I eat 500 calories a day more than the recommended amount, so that's why I'm heavy. But when I cut those calories out, we come back to the situation described above. What's the point? I'm not going to give myself headaches and feel wrecked and shitty every day so I can drop maybe twenty pounds and maintain my weight at 200lbs instead of 220. I'm just not enthused by that idea and considering my blood pressure is typically 110/70 and I don't have any signs of blood sugar issues... it's just not something I think about much anymore.

So that was Twitter today. A couple of days ago, there was Facebook.

I made the mistake of commenting on an NPR article that was warning pregnant women to wear long sleeves and long pants and bug spray because ZIKA IS COMING TO GET YOU.

And maybe it is, in Florida, I haven't checked the news stories recently. But here's the story I told in my comment on the article:

A couple of months ago my husband, two sons and I went to what is essentially a zoo nearby. When I was there I noticed the most unusual mosquito--it had stripey legs. Of course we all got bitten. When I got home I googled it and found out it's one of the two main types of mosquitoes that carry Zika. Now, I'm in Northern California and when I told my husband this he was like, "Meh, Zika happens in tropical places." But then a day or two later he and my older son both got sick, with flu-like symptoms and bloodshot eyes. Guess what? That sounds like Zika. So I told my OB about it. He was very nice and not at all condescending, but he basically told me I was being paranoid. At that time there had been no cases of people getting Zika in California or Oregon. All cases of Zika were people who had caught it elsewhere and traveled here.

I concluded my story by saying that I thought the NPR article was fear-mongering, and we shouldn't let these sorts of fears get the best of us, or something to that effect. So this guy answered me telling me I shouldn't blow off the risk and good luck with my pregnancy because I had probably been exposed to Zika.

I responded to him saying I don't need luck. I've had several ultrasounds (for completely unrelated reasons) and they've measured the baby's head multiple times and he's growing just fine.

To which several people then replied in so many words that clearly my ultrasounds were flawed and didn't pick up the birth defects and my baby would no doubt have microcephaly. One went so far as to say I would no doubt have to have a late-term abortion at 30 weeks. (As I write this I am 31 weeks.)

It was so important to those people to cling to their fears about Zika and their need to police pregnant women that they told me, a real person who is pregnant, that her baby is going to die at 30 weeks.

By the way, if I did get exposed to Zika and my baby was harmed, you know what can be done about it? Absolutely nothing.

But the thing is, I really don't believe that I was. I know my baby is okay. And I also know it probably wouldn't be good for him if slather myself in pesticides because I'm afraid of catching the Zika virus in an area of the world which, as far as I know, still hasn't had any local cases.

Okay I feel better. Thank you for reading this whole thing, it's a bear. But these are just two examples--people police pregnant woman all the time and it is SO TIRESOME. After several pregnancies, in some ways being preggo does get easier, but in others, NOT SO MUCH. Like when people think they are being helpful when they tell pregnant women how to live their lives.

Have you ever dealt with this sort of "well-meaning" bullshit?
Do you feel entitled to tell pregnant women what to do and not to do to have a healthy pregnancy?
Please, comment and let me know, though be careful if your answer to the second question is yes. I have pregnancy hormones and I know how to use them.

Twitter: Spam vs. Marketing

A few months ago I took down all of my programmed tweets that directly marketed my ebooks. I did this out of frustration with how many of these tweets I was seeing in my own stream. They vastly outnumber tweets where anyone actually says anything about how their day is going or whatever. When I attempted to make  list of tweeps who "tweet real stuff" I only managed to accumulate 24 people, out of a potential group of nearly 2000. This makes Twitter really boring to me. I felt like I was just looking at a stream of spam, and it didn't help that 4 out of 5 of these marketing tweets used quotes from the novels with grammar errors or style issues in the quotes. One vampire novelist's quote said something along the lines of, "A dead body! Someone sucked his ass dry!" Now, just give that one a minute to knock around in your head. Not a pretty picture, is it? A couple of times I couldn't help myself--I had to @ the person with the troublesome tweet and point out the problem. This was never received very well (I can't imagine why!). Seriously, though. You're tweeting something from your book. Why not choose a line that actually flows well?

Yeah, that's what I end up thinking, too. They've probably already chosen the best line in their book.

But I digress.

Back to my point: I got fed up with all the marketing tweets especially since most of them seem to come from people who otherwise are not engaged with Twitter at all, or very little. I nixed my own, and kept an eye on my sales. At first, nothing changed. Then I had a couple of pretty dry months. Then, April happened. In which I more than tripled the the best month of sales I ever had before on Amazon, and had my second best month ever on B&N. What changed?

Well, in April I was giving away two books. I released The Plane and the Parade so I was giving away The River and the Roses. And I had just started giving away Myadar's Snare then, too (I still am; get it here.) And because I wanted to be sure everyone knew about these giveaways, I did a lot more tweeting about them than I had been. I also sent out some direct messages--I really hope those didn't annoy anyone, but since what I was DMing about was free, I decided it was a risk worth taking. Since the free books are located here on the blog, I can't be sure that the tweets led directly to the sales--after all, for that to be the case, a lot of people would have had to click through on the pictures in the margins here or on the links on the ebook description page or something. I also joined several Goodreads groups in April and added my books to a few bookshelves, so it's quite possible that made a big difference--although I only did that with the Myadar books, and I sold a bunch of Veronica books as well as Broken Ones, too, which I didn't post.

So I've decided to give marketing tweets another try and see what happens. Right now, I'm only going to send out 2 or 3 a day. This is extremely low. Michael Hicks, who is my hero because he started out like any indie publisher and worked his way to where he quit his day job and bought a house in Florida with a pool, for pity's sake, sends them out every 60 to 120 minutes, for instance. He's being moderate compared to some of the spammers I mentioned above. I just really don't want someone who only has three dozen followers to open their Twitter account one morning and have to scroll through my fifty marketing tweets clogging their stream.

So we'll see if these tweets do anything. I may eventually up it to 6 a day, although I'm going to give it some time first. I'll give an update when I've seen what happens. By the way, if you don't already follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

How do you schedule your tweets? Have you found that one kind of tweet is more effective for your sales than others (a book description, a quote from the book, a quote from a reviewer)?

When you see promo tweets, is there one kind you prefer? How do you feel about seeing a lot of promo tweets in your stream?

My current "shoulds" of writing

My cbt therapist (or should that be cb therapist?) Shiva, would probably tell me to rephrase this, but there are several things I "should" be doing for my writing right now.*

First of all, there's the sequel to The River and the Roses, which has been through one round of revisions, and probably could stand to undergo about nine rounds more. If I gave it some serious time and energy, I could probably get it up to par for April, and publish it. I even have most of what I need to create the cover. I've been meaning to do this for about six months, with the intention of dropping the price for River to $0.99 once the sequel is out. Why have I not done it yet? Well, aside from the whole pregnancy/bed rest/newborn baby distraction, revisions are... well, work. And often annoying, painful work at that. I read a quote on twitter the other day, I forget from which famous author, saying something about how revisions or rewrites are more pleasant than producing the first draft because you don't have the dread of not finishing the novel hanging over you. I can relate to that, but for me, revisions are way more difficult to get into. Still, and Shiva would approve of this phrase, it would be satisfying to get that item done.

Then there's marketing. I stopped actively marketing my books nearly a year ago, I think, or at least nine months ago. I'm still on twitter and I update my facebook page from time to time, most often to notify you all that I've got a new blog post, actually, but as for directly sending out messages on twitter suggesting that people check out my book, no. Michael R. Hicks, one of those lucky and driven self-pubbed authors who is living the dream (he quit his day job last April, I think it was--I admire him so much!) suggests that the "tipping point" for twitter as a marketing platform is to have 1000+ followers. At the moment I have about 845. I use my twitter account to recommend news articles and just talk about things I'm doing or am interested in. And also let people know when I've posted something new on either this blog or the recipe blog. I don't advertise the family blog because it's much more personal and I figure if you're really that interested in me you'll check it out off this page. And probably most people aren't that interested in me! Anyway, I don't have a problem with people posting on twitter to advertise their books (in fact I try to retweet them when it's clear to me what they are about). Although some people will spam the feed for like, ten minutes, and it makes me wonder whether they've ever read an article about twitter etiquette. So my point is, though, I haven't been doing that. Why not? I feel like until I've got something new to offer, I don't want to risk losing followers because I'm self-promoting for the sake of self-promoting. Probably not sound business reasoning, but there it is. Maybe this week I'll send out a couple of links to my books.

I'm on Pinterest, now, too. Please feel free to follow me. I even have a board devoted to books, although they are books I want to remember to check out, so it seems weird to post my own books there. Maybe I'll create a new board for my books and stuff related to them. I do have a decopunk board where I collected a bunch of stuff to help me world build my current story. So I suppose when (if) it's done and I've published it, I could pin it to that board and it wouldn't be weird.

Speaking of the current novel, it is teetering on the edge of that going-to-be-abandoned cliff because I haven't been working on it regularly and I'll lose so much steam I'll never get it back at this rate. And that would be a shame, I think, because I have some interesting ideas for it. So what would be good there is to set up some sort of schedule or something... and bribe myself with some reward for achieving a word goal too, I think. My attempts to create NaNos outside of the official NaNoWriMo have failed thus far. It's silly, it shouldn't (there's that word again) make a difference whether I'm looking at the official site's graph for the word count or a ticker I created myself, but for some reason, it does. So the trick may be to abandon the large goal of a NaNo and make smaller goals. Shorter term, too. And small rewards as a result. Hm... must give some thought to what rewards would motivate me.

Any suggestions? Must be cheap. We are broke-ish.

How about you, do you have any writing "shoulds" or other projects that need your attention? How do you get yourself on task?

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* By the way, if you have ever struggled with depression or anxiety, I strongly recommend going through cbt. Changed my life, no exaggeration.