Surreal Tales of Social Networking

Social networking is a rather curious thing. It compels people who don’t even know each other to make connections.

In the case of writers (especially niche writers), it often attracts folks who are friend-collectors.

I think what annoys me most about friend-collectors is they often don’t stop to at least find out who you are before sending that friend request. Then they get all huffy with you when they find out you practice a religion they don’t like, or when they unwittingly find out you’re into something that they’re not.

You could disclose everything about yourself on your ABOUT page, and douche bags like this still get pissed off, like it’s your fault, when they discover that “surprising” thing about you that wasn’t so surprising after all (if they’d just read your ABOUT page).

Case in point, I get a lot of friend requests from people who are Daemonolaters, Satanists, Thelemites, general occultists, and other writers simply because those are the circles I travel in. I don’t send a lot of friend requests myself unless I know someone, or I know their work, or I know who they are. For the most part, people send me the requests. I simply approve them to my public writer profile on FB because I have no idea who is kindred, who is a reader/fan of my work and who’s just out there friend collecting. I rarely unfriend people myself unless I unwittingly get a troll or discover a racist or bigot on my friends list.

The fact that it’s a public profile and I accept friend requests from anyone who asks has resulted in a couple of very confused and offended people who obviously didn’t bother to find out who I was by reading my ABOUT page before clicking that “Send Request” button.

In one instance one of these folks wrote a rather scathing comment to one  of my word count posts saying, “I find your self-indulgence charming. Are you ever going to finish this book you keep telling us you’re writing?”

I honestly thought he was kidding.

You see, from the time I accepted the friend request from him to the time he posted the above, I’d written about five books (that were already published and heavily advertised on my page) and was working on the sixth. I had no idea that he really had no clue who I was or what I did for a living, despite the fact that it’s REALLY obvious.

Now maybe it’s all the pen names that confused him. It can be kind of hard to keep up with me. However, my ABOUT page explains my pen-names, lists them and the genres I write in, and even gives links to my Amazon author pages. All four of them! It’s kind of hard to miss the fact that I’m an established, published writer.

So imagine my surprise when he wrote me a PM telling me he was unfriending me because he felt I was too self-indulgent with my writing and all I ever did was talk about books I was writing that never materialized, and post book advertisements for ‘other’ people.  Wow. Who wasn’t paying attention? That guy.

I was certainly glad to be rid of him.

Another one of these people who embarrassed herself was a fellow writer with whom I’d done readings with at Mile-Hi Con several years earlier. She sent me a friend request. I read her ABOUT page. I remember liking her. She was a nice lady. She was also VERY Wiccan. I knew this going in. I guess I assumed she’d read my ABOUT before sending me the friend request, just as I read her ABOUT before approving her.

Well, that was short lived when she learned I was a Daemonolatress. It was when I pimped my book Curses, Hexes & Crossing that she became deeply offended that I had written such a thing. That earned me an immediate unfriending after a stern PM chastising me for daring to write such a book condoning execration magick.

And yet I had been completely transparent in the ABOUT section of my FB, allowing anyone who wanted to send me a friend request ample opportunity to find out everything they ever wanted to know about me before hitting the FRIEND REQUEST button.

I guess the moral of the story is this: Check out who you’re friending before you send friend requests, and before you send the strangers you friend nasty e-mails telling them why you’re unfriending them. If you unfriend someone because they practice a religion you find scary, they’re into BDSM or because they write a lot and talk about writing, and this is clearly stated in their ABOUT –  you simply make yourself look like a douche bag who isn’t paying attention.