Techno-Genius Strikes Again

By Mary Connealy

This week, in my ongoing efforts to promote my book, I created a MySpace page. A lesson in humility if ever there was one. 
 

I've spent the last, oh, it just SEEMS like a DECADE trying to figure out MySpace. 
 

So this weekend, my 17-year-old daughter Katy finally took pity on me and showed me how to invite people to be my friends and how to… forgive me… pimp my page. 
 

Where do kids come up with these things?
 

And why do they have the nerve to say them to their mothers??
 

Anyway, I invited a bunch of people, felt kind of… nervy, you might say, like a bad high school party that you go to and everyone gives you the "Who invited you?" look. But Katy pep-talked me into it, so I did it. 
 

Then after all the invites went out, I tried to… p@#$ my page and… forgive me again… somehow ended up with a stripper as my background picture. She was not there when I selected from among the 1,000 background looks. And sure, they can't show you everything on the background, but c'mon! You'd think they'd include it if there was a stripper!! And she was moving-- shots of her wearing less and less, very high tech in a triple-X kind of way. 
 

And I did this after I invited all these friends. 
 

Because I write Christian Fiction, most of the friends I invited are Christian authors. Excellent. Nice surprise if they come and check things out, huh? I invite you to MySpace and a stripper opens the door. Just the impression I want to make! 
 

So, of course, on the very day someone might actually ask to be my friend...

An aside here-- Whenever I hit the wrong button on the Create Profile page it says things like, "You've got NO FRIENDS" Or "You can't post here because you're not anyone's friend." Very cruel and now I'm… like… clinically depressed because I have no friends.

Anyway… I got rid of the stripper, although honestly I felt like I should witness to her before I deleted her. I'm a Christian author after all and she pretty obviously needs the Lord, but of course I'm not her friend. And I don't want to be her friend. But then I got into this whole WWJD thing. I'm sure Jesus would be her friend. But, I'm having trouble imagining Jesus having a MySpace page, so it's a quagmire of Mary's mind there!

And the only way I could get rid of her was to get rid of everything, including a bunch of scary looking lines of code-- and I don't even really know what code means, except it's numbers and symbols and letters that mean nothing to me. I hated to erase it because once it's gone, there's no getting it back, not with my computer skills. But either the code went or the stripper stayed and honestly, there was just no chance G-String Girl could stay, what with my friends coming over soon, so I had to delete it all.

So, I lost the stripper and everything else too, except my book cover and a blurb about the book, and of course this nice, growing list of friends. Did you know I'm now friends with Tim McGraw? Yeah, right! Me and Tim!

And I tried to create a MySpace blog and instead linked to someone else's blog, but it also seems to be inaccessible to the public so I have a blog that's not mine but you can't see it, so it doesn't matter and I'm afraid to fix it because I'm afraid the stripper will come back.

For now, it's okay-- boring but G-rated. I did write something for my blog but have no idea where it went. And again-- stripper issue-- so I'm afraid to hunt too hard.

So Mary the Techno-genius strikes again.

If you want to invite me to be your friend (and you're not afraid), I'm completely open to it, www.myspace.com/petticoatranch. I now have 60 friends, whom I have stolen from other author acquaintances' sites and honestly do my friends love me for myself? I think not. I'm guessing I'm not going on Tim McGraw's Christmas card list. And how badly can we abuse the word friend, huh? And why, oh why, did Faith Hill dye her hair brunette-- what was she thinking?

So that's Mary's adventure into cyberspace. Just remember the more I drag you inside my head the more you're gonna need a GPS tracking system so when you call for help-- and you will-- the police can find you and save you. And just one more point: I wouldn't be able to help you run the GPS tracker so you'd be on your own there, too.

Mary Connealy has two books coming in February from Barbour Publishing: Petticoat Ranch, an historical romantic comedy about a feisty lady rancher and a befuddled cowboy who was SURE he heard the word OBEY in their wedding vows, and Golden Days, an historical romantic comedy about a young woman on her way home to Alaska who begins to suspect some "accidents" aren't so accidental. 

Mary is a GED instructor by day and an author by night. And, so she can remember whether she's teaching or writing, she likes to wear a little crown and a Wonder Woman cape while she types.

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