Writers are also largely introverted, with many (myself included) bordering on social recluse if not nonverbal savant. People hinder our writing life, and we best be left alone to clear our head of external dialogue to focus on that of our characters. Therefore, we’d rather our Internet involvement be on par with Ted Kaczynski’s (albeit nowhere near as violent), since our “social” skills rival those of Burgess Meredith’s character in a famous Twilight Zone episode. Susan Cain, author of “Quiet,” says that social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are actually a boon to introverts who don’t want to “market” themselves in crowded rooms or face-to-face.

But there are still — gasp, shudder, *aaugh* — people (!) on the end of those tweets, not birds on a wire or ravens cawing in Poe’s masterfully delusional echo chamber. Stephen King isn’t life of the party. Must authors, too, model their careers after Kim Kardashian in order to move even 50 copies? That horrendous, promiscuous fame wh*re who literally embodies the term a.s.s. and perfectly defines the word “twit”? If anything, she belongs in a rubber room of her own!

If social media is a must, then someone like me would rather handle it in a cut-and-dry professional manner with no “personal” involvement at all, which is where companies and freelance hires that “socialize” for you come to the rescue: Fiverr, oDesk, Get-a-Freelancer, etc. Writers are sometimes terrible conversationalists; tweets, by nature, are rapid-fire and unpredictable, more like the Birds of Hitchcock fame ravaging the lovely face of poor Suzanne Pleshette. A lonesome dove like me is too chicken to chance there might be vultures in that digital cuckoo’s nest. (Somewhere, a Family Guy sketch looms in the distance, something about words of an ornithological nature.)

I don’t want to talk to people in real-time, online or off. I don’t want to learn HTM or CSS or LOL — I thought three-letter acronyms were the realm of the soulless “intelligence” agencies, not the Internet crammed with idiots. I probably will never meet any of these random people on Twitbrain, Wastebook, or Comp-U-Serve in real life anyway, so what’s the difference if it’s “me” behind the handle or a company in my stead? Why should a writer have to be a one-(wo)man band, when there are people with years of expertise readily available to “handle” these tasks as works for hire?