Tag Archives: Instagram

Everything else, Social media

New Facebook and Instagram Accounts

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You may remember that a little over a month ago, my Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended for no reason that I can guess. It could have been that someone reported me, that something I posted tripped a bot/algorithm or they found out I write under a pen name, which is against their TOS for a profile (but not a page, a famous person or a drag queen, go figure).

Anywho, today they disabled them completely, so I started new profiles and pages: Facebook and Instagram. It’s going to take me a while to catch up on all the news that happened while I was away. So please be patient as I rebuild.

While it sucks to lose all my friends and followers, if they are true friends or fans, they will find me again. I am choosing to look at this as an opportunity to start over and have more control over who I friend and what I see. I was in way too many groups anyway. 😉

What I Have Learned from This Experience

  • Build your email list as much as you can. Social media can be taken away from you at any time. (Have you signed up for my newsletter? If not, please do so now in case this happens again–I don’t want to lose you twice! It just might.)
  • Tighten your security as much as possible. FB lets you designate three to five people who can help you recover your account if something happens and I’m sure there are other ways of locking it down. You bet I will investigate every one of them.
  • If you have a page, set someone you trust as an administrator. Any way you can have other people will access to your account (within reason, of course) will help you if you ever get in trouble with our social media overlords.
  • Don’t accept friend requests from people you can’t trust. I don’t want to believe it, but it could have been a friend, family member or fellow author who reported me. So I’m going to be extra careful who I friend. There’s no guarantee it won’t happen with the new accounts. If we know each other well, you are welcome on my profile. If not, everyone is welcome on my page!
  • Be careful what you post. I’m not saying to not have opinions or censor yourself- I certainly won’t because it isn’t who I am. But just to give one example of the world we live in, apparently you can’t use the word “suicide” on any social media anymore. I had the word in a poem. That could be what got flagged. I don’t know how one is supposed to keep up with banned terms, but they do exist.
  • Think twice if you write under a pen name. FB allows drag queens and famous actors/authors to use pen names, but not the rest of us. Just go in knowing this may happen to you. One of my fairly famous author friends has been banned from FB four times for that exact reason. She just keeps coming back.
  • These companies don’t respond to their users. I spent a month and at least a dozen email and form exchanges with them to no avail. I provided multiple forms of ID and proof that [insert legal name here] really is Nicole Evelina. I sent them a “proof of life” photo with things they requested visible on a piece of paper. Yet this morning FB was still claiming I never protested my suspension. FB has no real person you can call and most of FB/Insta’s emails are no reply. Even if you do get an email that looks like it is from a real person and reply back, you won’t hear anything. Plus, the emails you do get will contradict each other. Or at least that was my experience.

So, anyway, here we are. I hope you will follow me on my new accounts. And have you signed up for my newsletter yet?

Just to be clear – I am only calling out drag queens in this post because they are a rare (and hard-fought) exception to the rules. I really like drag as an art form and would never want to disrespect anyone.

Women's History Month

March 3 – Mathematics: Euphemia Lofton Haynes

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(23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) (1)From the Math Department of the University of Buffalo:

Euphemia Lofton Haynes was a principal and deputy superintendent in charge of Washington’s “colored schools” (the schools for African Americans) before she earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics at The Catholic University in Washington, D.C., in 1943, which made her the first African American Woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

The title of her dissertation was “The Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences.”

Dr. Haynes taught in the public schools of Washington, D.C., for 47 years and was the first woman to chair the local school board. She established the mathematics department at Miner Teachers College, where she was also a professor, and was chair of the Division of Mathematics and Business Education at the District of Columbia Teachers College. In 1959, she retired, but served as head of the city’s Board of Education, and was central to the integration of Washington, D.C. public schools.

Women's History Month

March 2 – Science: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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March 2-ScienceFrom National Georgaphic.com:

While she was a graduate student and junior researcher in radio astronomy at Cambridge University in England, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a discovery that changed science. In 1967, she was given the mind-numbing task of analyzing three miles of printed data from a radio telescope she helped assemble. That’s when she noticed recurring signals, later called pulsars. These were given off by the rotation of small stars leftover from huge stars that went supernova.

Her discovery was important because it proved that once supernova happened, the stars didn’t disappear, but rather left behind dense rotating stars.

Despite Jocelyn’s contribution, the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, and another Cambridge radio astronomer, Martin Ryle.

Victoria C. Woodhull, Women's History Month

March 1 – Trailblazer: Victoria Woodhull

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Victoria WoodhullYou knew I had to start with her, right?

In case you don’t remember, Victoria, the poor daughter of a con-man and a religious zealot, was a suffragist in the mid-1800s. She was the:

  • First woman to run a stock brokerage on Wall Street
  • First woman to testify before Congress
  • One of the first women to run a weekly newspaper
  • First female presidential candidate (1872)

Why isn’t she in our history books? Three main reasons I can tell:

  1. She royally angered her former friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They literally wrote the 900+ page book on the women’s suffrage movement, reducing Victoria’s role to an actual footnote. This, then, undermined her importance to future historians.
  2. Not long after her death, a woman named Emanie Sachs published a scathing biography of Victoria that painted her as a harlot and trickster – not the kind of woman anyone would want in the historical record.
  3. She was a woman. (Look at our history. That had to be part of it.)

Victoria Woodhull is the subject of my novel Madame Presidentess, which will be published July 25.

Women's History Month

31 Women of History – March Instagram/Blog Challenge

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For Women’s History Month (March) I decided to do something a little bit different. I’m starting an Instragram photo challenge where you post a picture of a great woman from history (famous or not) for each day of the month. On top of that, I’m going to be sharing a short post (a paragraph or two) each day about my pick right here on this blog. Here’s the list:

Women's History Month - March 2016

I’m hoping some women’s organizations, and of course, all of you, will join me. Don’t use Instagram? Share your picks on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, or whatever social media you like. The point is to make women’s stories known.

Why am I doing this? Well, if you haven’t guessed from my previous posts and choices of novel subjects, women’s stories are near and dear to my heart. I feel a sense of duty to rescue those in danger of being forgotten from being erased or discarded from the historical record. I know that may seem egotistical, but I have to do what I can. My time in an all-girls high school taught me that every woman has a story and they are all equally valuable. So if you like famous women, post about them. If you prefer the obscure ones like I do, make them known. Heck, post stories from women in your family. Just tell their stories.

Be sure to stop back by tomorrow to see the first post in this series. It’s someone we’ve already talked about a bit here…

Please let me know in the comments if you’re participating. I may just pick someone for a prize…