Whispering on Twitter

A couple of my very favorite authors and musicians lurk about on Twitter. I both love and hate this. If you follow my Twitter feed at all, you know in addition to the totally useless things I write about (going to vacuum the floors now, oh look! have found apples in fridge, etc.), I also like to tweet about what I'm listening to or reading about at the moment, sort of a review in 140 characters or less. It's awfully hard to do that comfortably when you know the person you're writing about is sort of standing in the corner listening....

I ran into this the other day when I finished Good Omens. My first response was to tweet loudly and long about its merits, but then I remembered that Neil Gaiman is practically the King of Twitter. His followers are legion. I shuffled my feet (metaphorically), made some sort of weak comment about how much I liked it, and saved my commentary for the safer backwaters of blogland, this shallow pool where no one but you and I, gentle reader, ever wades.

I haven't always been this cautious. In fact, when I first joined Twitter and was discovering its vagaries, I was also reading American Gods for the first time, and I was tweeting the lines I liked best. Imagine how stupid I felt when I found out that @neilhimself had several thousand avid followers running around out there.... I shut up pretty fast. I felt like I was caught talking about somebody at a party and was overheard. Not that I was saying anything but good things, but still. It was unnerving.

There are several musicians I love that I had the same experience with. I was tweeting along about how I liked this one or that one, and bam, there they were.... I have gotten almost gunshy about the whole system. In one way it is an amazing chance to interact, even in the shallowest of ways, with creative people whom one admires. And that's something I'd very much like to do.

However, this is where the shy (as in socially inept, not the previously mentioned gunshy) comes in, even over a computer buffer, and especially once I know I've been caught out talking like some starry-eyed worshiper (which, in most cases, unless Elvis shows up, I think I can say I am not), I just don't know what to write. I can't imagine anything I type being useful, interesting, or amusing to those Twitter Titans, and I feel sort of embarrassed about being there. It's exactly the same feeling that drove me out of a concert hall before I could even get my copy of Punch signed by Chris Thile and company, but that was real life. Ah, but talking about the unreasoning weirdness I feel about asking another person to scrawl his or her name across an object may be a subject better left for another blog....

Well, I'm off to take one last tour of the Twitterverse before bed. I will skulk through quietly, wading gently, and making as few waves as possible. I don't think anybody will even know I'm there....probably....surely....right?....