I remember the day my life as an author totally changed in an irrevocable way. It was as if the sun had suddenly burst through the clouds and I could see what I’d been missing all those years.

It was the day I first discovered what a hashtag is. 

For years I’d had a difficult time figuring out how to keep track of my writing. Since I write long novels I was always losing my thoughts and ideas in the throes of a thousand delightfully written pages.

You know the struggle:
*What’s the name of the main character’s mother’s grandma’s first car that was stolen in 1963?
*Did the best friend want to be a fabric designer or owner of a ceramics factory when she grew up?
*Is the dog a Border Collie or Basset Hound?

Every author on planet earth has a hard time remembering these small (but incredibly important) details from time to time. I’ll admit that I probably had a harder time than most people, probably because I like to have complex characters and so, therefore, I had lots of little details to make them feel more realistic. (I mean, come on. Nothing screams The author really did a lot of work creating these characters! like reciting all the names of the main character’s friends from first grade. And, if you’re extra cool – like me – you’ll even include middle names. Just a word of caution: Don’t listen to the naysayers who tell you that kind of info isn’t important and bogs the story down. They’re just jealous that they aren’t willing to put as much work into their own character’s backstory.)

But back to the hashtagging.

Apparently, people use hashtags as a way to keep things categorized and therefore easy to find. (Look at techy little me! I even took a screenshot of an explanation so you could see it for yourself.)

After I discovered that, I began using hashtags in all of my writing. Like, ALL of it. #WayCoolIdea As it turns out a lot of people don’t even know what hashtags are, because I received a couple emails back from publishers I’d been asking to publish my book, and they were like “No thank you, and in the future if you’d like to appear professional, you might want to refrain from using hashtags in emails.” Which of course shocked me, because #HashtagsAreTools and #HashtagsRock so I emailed them back and offered to teach them out to use hashtags properly, and can you imagine? They never even replied to my (very nicely worded) email. #Rude

Not that I’m worried though. I’m the one who will have the last laugh because I’ve got approximately 12,540 (okay, yeah, I counted) hashtags in my newly finished, thousand-page, handwritten manuscript which is going to make editing a total breeze.

That is if my Google searches ever decide to show up helpful information.

#DontTellMeHashtagsDontWorkOnPaper
#PleaseWork
#AllThisWorkForNothing
#HashtagsDontDoThisToMe
#WhatIsThePointOfAHashtag
#OkayThenBeThatWay
#HashtagsAreLame

– – – –
So, if y’all didn’t gather this, today’s blog post was written in jest.
#IHopeYouEnjoyed #WelcomeToMySenseOfHumor #PleaseLeaveAComment #ByeForNow #ThisHasGotToStop #Wow

*****

This post was one I originally wrote in August 2017, WordPress pulled it up for me recently and I was amused by it so I thought I’d share it with y’all again. Welcome to my sense of humor. 😉