September Shorts: What I Learned From 10,000 Likes

I was chatting with my daughter one Saturday morning last Autumn and she said the above. Immediately struck by her insight and sweet, naive optimism, I tweeted it.

By Monday morning I had 10,000 likes and over a thousand retweets - the kind of lucky break that'd have the guys and gals in marketing flossing their way to the canteen and high-fiving each other over their soya flat whites.

I have to say, I had an entertaining weekend watching the numbers grow and reading the responses as they came in. But what have I actually learnt from the experience? Umm well four things, really:

1. Not surprisingly, nothing changes. Life goes on. A little like having a book published, once the brief and usually restrained furore is done, normality returns. I got retweeted by Neil Gaiman once - same thing. Brief firework display of interaction followed by long dark fortnight of the soul.
2. People don't like your tweet then decide to check out your work. Most on social try a follow-up that goes, "Whoa, well that blew up, check out my online store here..." but they're wasting their time. Folk hit 'like' on your tweet because - ahem - they like your tweet.
3. I got about thirty new followers. They stayed for roughly two more tweets to see if I was a whimsy-machine with its dials set firmly to 'good vibes'. When they realised I was in fact a fiction-fanboy set to 'ooh look a new podcast about movies', they left again.
4. People are generally nice. Of the 214 replies, 213 were lovely. The other used the vomit emoji pretty liberally.

So there you go, folks. Social's nothing but a mirage.

We may as well just do the work. Sit down every day, try and write something really difficult, come back the next day, do it again. That's the stuff that matters. Now, if I could just get my kid to say something along those lines, I could tweet it...