I went to the #NewyTwistmas party at Honeysuckle Thursday night attended by 60 plus and had a wonderful time meeting fellow peeps, most for the first time. I chatted to so many interesting people, including @CCLETS a dedicated potter, @whereismymuse a poet and @kimcoo and her husband who are relationship counsellors. It is a community that know me as a writer. That’s who I am – @lakelady2282, BookCrosser, author, amateur photographer. I tweet photos and the progress of my WWI novel The Grey Silk Purse. I also tweet/retweet about books, writing and history. That’s me!

To my friends and family, I am something else. With my family I’m mum and grandma. With my girlfriends I’m just a single woman in my fifties complaining about the lack of interesting men. (I have this theory that 75% of the single male population in their forties and fifties have been beamed to another planet and nobody’s noticed. But that’s another story.) My friends know I write but I don’t think they are aware of how much my writing means to me and in that sense they don’t know me.

My twitter people do. My wonderful Crossing Paths publisher @SkiveMagazine knows how important writing is to me and I love tweeting about his mag. The latest edition is an erotica collection so peeps get out there and buy it. Also @drdrdr09 knows. He became aware of how much I was agonising over finding an historically accurate way to get my main character from Le Havre to Salonika, late 1917 (avoiding submarines and nasty Germans). I tweeted in frustration to my twitter community and he stepped into the breach (WWI speak) and we had a fun time tweeting back and forth.

In my “normal” life, I mentioned to my friends the other day that I was having trouble with my epilogue. There was dead silence and then a change of conversation. In all fairness what can most non-writers say to such a statement? Some people would suggest a writing group. After all you get to sit down with “real” people and discuss writing problems but I’ve tried a few groups and they weren’t for me. (I once joined a screenplay writing group and one of the participants said, “I hate writing dialogue. Do you think that will be a problem for me?” She was serious). I didn’t go back.

For me twitter is my writing group, my photography group, my friends group, my “did you hear they found the cave from Island of the Blue Dolphins?” group. It is my arts world in a way that Facebook (that funny other social media with all the thumbs up things) has never been. It is where I’m lakelady2282 and it’s where on Friday morning I tweeted I had lost my job. I didn’t message my friends. I still – as of writing this article – haven’t posted it to Facebook. Without thinking I just tweeted. It was the community that I wanted to tell.