Miss Crankypants has been busy lately, helping other writers join the 21st century. This usually means getting these dear sweet out-of-touch Luddites signed up with all sorts of social media. Now if you haven’t noticed, the words SOCIAL MEDIA are about as popular to writers as THE PLAGUE was to medieval Europeans. But the part that really trips up writers is how to remember all these user names and passwords!
Miss CP has a very long list taped inside her desk drawer, chronicling every single password and user name she’s ever had to register. A lot of these are for sites that went out of style three years ago, but the p-words and u-names are forever memorialized. But back to the newbies.
One very cool writer kept getting locked out of his own Twitter sign in page. He tried various combos of secret passwords and handles he’s used over the years. Nada. The Twitter gods were not amused and he was stuck humbling himself to the low point of requesting a new password. Once delivered, he was able to see that his user name was a takeoff of a character he was writing, oh say, five partially finished novels ago. He really should’ve stuck to his real name, don’t you think?
But what really throws a lot of writers is that old password dilemma: Do I make it easy enough so that I (and 99% of the rest of the world) can figure it out? Or do I make the password so original and obscure that a yegg with decades of code-cracking experience will be scratching his head?
The boastful writer brags that she always writes down the password/user name for every single site she frequents. Now, if she could only remember where all those scraps of paper are–she knows she put them somewhere safe. That’s why Miss Crankypants advises that all writers get their passwords tattooed on their foreheads. Then, when you’re looking for your reading glasses that are perched on your head, you might remember to look in the mirror–just don’t forget to have the password tattooed backwards.