Just a brief post this morning, as I’ll be getting ready for the memorial service shortly. Two things prompted this topic. For one, as y’all know, it’s been kind of a cruddy couple of weeks. And one of the things that totally made them better is a couple of different tweets from sweet, lovely people who wanted to tell me they really enjoyed Riven. I hope I never get to the point where that fails to give me that immediate gut punch of happiness where I’d like to write thank you notes to each and every one.
The other thing is that while I was waxing rhapsodic about Meljean Brook’s Yasmeen and Archimedes, I tweeted at HER how much I truly enjoyed them (the fact that you can fangirl squee at authors directly is one of the BEST PARTS of social media). Got a tweet back this morning of appreciation that totally indicated that Meljean herself has been having one of Those Kinds of Weeks. There was a nice bit of circularity to the whole thing because I get it. I know what a difference that kind of thing can make, so when I really love something, I like to say so directly to the author.
There’s a lot of negativity in the world. And, in fact, we are biologically programmed to focus on it because from an evolutionary standpoint, it helped us survive back in the days when we were running from saber tooth tigers and stuff. These days, not so much, but it stresses us out. So it’s important to PUT SOME POSITIVE out in the world. You never know when such a small thing–a tweet or FB post that takes less than a minute to write–will make a huge difference to someone. So I encourage you, if you love something–be it a book or a song or whatever–don’t just review it (which, in and of itself, is an awesome thing of a whole other caliber), take a moment to let the creator know. Because the world totally needs more warm fuzzies.