16 Responses to “'Friending' people”

1. germsama 09/06/15 19:02

   

   It’s astounding to me that you even bother with it! I can’t imagine how much time must be taken out of your day with all of these social networking sites.

2. michie3 09/06/15 19:13

   

   I agree with the Lord of Germs. ^-^ By the way, you friended me back almost
   instantaneously. O.O

3. theladywolf 09/06/15 19:18

   

   Yes, I too was friended in an acceptable time frame. I am admiring the discipline of an “allocated time for livejournal.” Very admirable.

4. narniadear 09/06/15 19:38

   

   me too! And she responds to comments! I feel so loved. <3

5. saetter 09/06/15 20:05

   

   I’ll add to the chorus. I was actually suprised to be “friended” back.

   I friend people whose blogs I don’t want to miss.

6. surferelf 09/06/15 20:56

   

   You haven’t friended me, but I’ll tell you what: keep writing books that make me miss my bus stop, and I promise not to care.

7. dmdomini 09/06/15 21:41

   

   Hee hee. You’ve written lots of extremely high-quality books that are pretty much must-reads in the fantasy genre–you totally get a pass. (And, no LJ regulars will be hurt if you don’t friend them…it’s not really expected of pro writers with public blogs. Otherwise the “paperwork” would be overwhelming for you.)

   To be honest, I’m a little surprised you don’t have 1,000+ “friends” on livejournal…the SFF fandom at large must not have realized yet you keep this journal yet. Poke your head on, say, Fangs, Fur, Fey or some other active SFF community on livejournal and you’ll likely get so many “friends” watching your journal you won’t be able to keep up in friending them back even if you wanted to. Right now, I suspect folks just don’t know you’re around. I know I found your journal only because I browsed to either someone else who friended you and was like, “Hey! Robin Hobb! I love her books!”, or I looked up your books as “interests” and found you that way.

8. naamah_darling 09/06/15 21:58

   

   If you hover over a person’s userpic, unless you have the hover menu disabled, you should see a note that says whether they are your friend, or not, or a mutual friend, and if they are not friended yet, you should get an option to add friend. I think that’s only one click to add. I don’t do it that way, I always go read userinfo, but I imagine in your case, this would be totally impractical.

   You haven’t friended me, unless my userinfo lies; I don’t expect you to, as you have better things to be doing than reading LJ, but in the interests of you knowing who I am, I will introduce myself.

   I’m Amanda, and I was at the Conestoga GOH dinner in April. I mentioned liking Fritz Leiber and keeping one’s characters close as friends. I’m in the OSFW and KD Wentworth and Rob O’Barr are old, dear friends of mine, if that provides any meaningful social context.

9. infinite_hiatus 09/06/15 22:54

   

   I agree! GRRM has 6814 friends. Robin Hobb should have at least 5000 or so. I think know one knows she’s here.

10. infinite_hiatus 09/06/15 22:55

    

    Er, that should be “no one.”

11. markbuster 09/06/15 23:38

    

    Thanks for the add. Now get off the damn internet and write me a new book.

12. samaranth 09/06/16 08:30

    

    Thank you for friending back! I really wasn’t expecting it.

    However, this does give me a chance to say how enormously I’ve enjoyed reading the Farseer and Liveship books over the past couple of months. I found it impossible to put them down…so much so that I’d read until the small hours of the morning, or be standing at the stove cooking dinner, stirring with one hand and holding a book with the other. I’d been so immersed in that world I’ve felt a little bereft since finishing them.

    So, many thanks from me for creating such a compelling world.

13. robin_hobb 09/06/16 17:35

    

    In truth, I’m not much good at social networking. Or ’social’ of any kind! I think most writers of my generation fall on the introspective end of the spectrum, with a few notable exceptions. I have a deep sympathy for writers like Salinger who retreat entirely.

    I hold, as best I can, to old ideas of courtesy. If someone drops you a note, you should respond in some way. When I first put up my website and published my email address on it, I was overwhelmed. For two years, I tried to follow Asimov’s example. He claimed to have responded to at least the first letter he received from any reader. So I tried to do that, answering each email with a note, and in some cases sending out free signed bookplates.

    A spectacular computer crash, complete with sparks and smoke, ended that. Eventually I got back on line, but it was without all my reader correspondence, including a large stack of emails yet to answer. I tried to begin again, but started clocking how many hours a day were given to email. And realized I was doing about 7 hours of keeping up with the internet, when I added in website updates, answering on my newsgroup, and mailing out bookplates. And only about 4 hours a day of actually writing books and stories. And about then, the wear and tear on my hands was beginning to show up.

    So. I cut way back. Way back. From time to time, I’ll come here or to Myspace, and spend several hours trying to answer queries and notes, but I no longer do it on a daily basis. I do check my newsgroup at sff.net daily and answer posts there, so I still spend several hours a day on the ’social networking’ end of things.

    And my time here for today is just about up. I’ve got a story that badly needs to be chopped into pieces and put back together in a way that is both interesting and coherent. So Ithink I’ll go do that.

    Thanks for all the response!

    Robin

14. dmdomini 09/06/16 18:24

    

    Friending folks with fewer clicks…

    Regarding friending folks quickly and easily – I use a little program called “Semagic” to update my livejournal. You download it and install it on your computer, and it lets you A) update your journal without actually going to livejournal.com, and more importantly in your case B) allows you to see your friends and friend them back with fewer clicks. It’s a free program, and it’s been maintained by its programmer for at least 4 years so it’s fairly dependable.

    I don’t know if using a program like this (assuming you don’t already) would make things easier for you, but if it does, the program can be downloaded from this page.

    That link in itself is a bit confusing, but basically at the top there’s two blue links. One is [for NT/2k/XP/Vista] and the other [for 95/98/ME]. If you have a PC and not a Mac, you would choose the appropriate link (if you have a Mac this program will NOT work for you), and it will take you to a page where you can save an .exe file to your desktop. From there, you double-click it and have it install the program. The default places are fine, so just hit next or ok or whatever to keep moving along until it’s installed.

    Once you install it, you can click on the purple pen, and then you log in with your livejournal name and pass, and a screen opens up that looks rather word-processery. For friends, the button you want is the one that has three little people on it; if you hover your mouse over it it’ll say “Add friend”. If you click on that, it will open a screen with a button near the top saying “update from server”. Push that so that it gets your friends list up to date, then scroll through the list and look for red arrows. Red arrows means they friended you, but you haven’t friended them back. Then just click on the name, and hit “add friend” on the upper right, then ok.

    Then wash, rinse, repeat. If 50 people friended you, this program will make you zip through friending them back. Just make sure to hit “update from server” each day you go in to do this, so it checks your blog to make sure the program has the most recent list of “friends”.

15. germsama 09/06/16 20:35

    

    Re: Friending folks with fewer clicks…

    dmdomini is right. Semagic is a spectacular program, and it’s made my life on LJ so much easier.

16. danniebrown 09/06/16 23:07

    

    thanks for friending me back too (on both accounts, wow!)

    keeping it short to increase your LJ time. *winks*

    Nadine