Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Do chat rooms work?
Networking usually involves face-time. Since this has to be done in real time it's not always convenient. In fact my experience is that the networking event is often shorter than the time taken to make the journey.
So is it possible to network anonymously, using only a keyboard and derive some tangible benefits?
I logged on to the LongRidge Writers Group Lunchbox forum, expecting a moderated session, not realizing that there was none scheduled today.
I ‘met’ a friendly group of eight or so writers using pseudonyms, or more accurately, chat room handles, such as cajunbelle and speckledorf.
They said their “hi”, “hellos”, and asked questions like, “are you a student, are you new, are you on BIP or novel and, who’s your instructor?”
It some ways it may have been testing out my bona fides. I passed this first level, because I am student. The chat jumped topics as you would expect with five or six people typing and pressing ‘Enter’ simultaneously. We covered blogging, websites, Nanowrimo, cats, mothers, wives as I sat patiently waiting until 1:30pm for the 1pm session to start – but of course it didn’t, because this was it.
Poked by ‘reece’ I jumped into action, asking a few of questions that I might use in a one on one setting, but soliciting input from everyone. Some information was useful, all encouraging as befits my ‘new’ status.
Of course, in a true networking sense, the aim is to find somebody who knows somebody who can help with whatever your particular quest entails. This is not the case with chat rooms, since they are essentially anonymous and, because there is little restriction to chat room access, the conversation is guarded.
In fact when I asked questions such as “which publications are open to first time writers?” “does anyone have a list of magazine guidelines?” and other “help me break in” (or out) questions, I was simply told to read magazines and write pieces of work that was so good it could not be turned down. If anyone had a favorite target magazine or editor, they were not about to divulge it.
I can not argue with the advice and one chat room person did give me the name of their blog - http://storycrafters.blogspot.com/ - so that is definitely a start.
I’ll definitely go back and see it what happens next.
