​So I thought about naming this post “How To Make Your Tweet Go Viral”, after my (in)famous pool float/women’s menstrual pad tweet hit over 8 million impressions. But then I realized that I had ZERO idea what the hell happened and could speak with zero authority as to how to reproduce these results.
 
Instead, we're going to do a postmortem on the insanity generated from this one itty bitty, flippant, off-the-cuff tweet.
 
First of all, let’s provide some background for those of you who don’t know me. I try to navigate the fine line between promotion as a developing author, but also avoid totally outing my physician self. Why the secrecy? Because most physicians are now employed, and their respective Big Brother (BB) employers are increasingly becoming too involved in their non-physician lives. Case in point, an ER doctor colleague who finally “came out” with her real name on Twitter. Turns out she was writing thoughtful, patient-care focused, and status-quo challenging blog posts. No HIPPA violations, no snark, nothing inappropriate to any objective observer…except her employer. Dismissed without due process or recourse. Just because they didn’t like the hint of being challenged, and rather than deal with patient care issues raised, they preferred to fire the physician instead.

Over a week’s vacation from Day Job recently, I had one of my hardest running weeks, probably ever, as I’m training for a trail marathon. In case you didn’t know, trail marathons are just like regular road marathons except muddier, buggier, longer, and nastier than their refined road-based counterparts (which are also no cake walk). During that same week off, I had one of my toughest writing/editing weeks in a very long time. Given that one of the training runs was over four hours long, I had time to think. A lot of time. Too much time.
 
Seems that marathon training and writing aren’t that much different, after all.
 
Before I leap into the analogy, I need to make myself crystal clear on both topics. Full disclosure. I am in no way a great athlete. This chunky bod is getting dragged 26.2 miles (hopefully) because, well, the challenge is there. I’ve wanted to do a trail marathon for >15 years. Now is my chance, and you bet your left bunion, I’m downing the biggest bag of Cheetos + a Blizzard after I finish/collapse/die as I cross the finish line in dead last place. Also, I will not be setting any land-speed records. In many respects, that’s like my writing career. I’m not a bestselling anything. The writing happens because I need to/want to/enjoy it and I want to always improve. You can bet that writing consumes a huge amount of time and it’s exhausting. Also, Cheetos.