Adjusting to the Weirdest Timeline
If it’s OK with everyone, I’m going to briefly address the collosal - godzilla sized - elephant in the room. It’s fair to say my situation has changed a little since last month, as I’m sure yours has too. When this first all kicked off, and I was first asked to work from home, I didn’t think it would quite be as dramatic, long lasting or as deadly as it has proven to be. My first thought was ‘well at least I’ll have more time for my writing’. But we aren’t machines, and it turns out being part of history can kinda suck. My productivity with work has been up and down, my productivity with writing has been up and down, and my general mood/life outlook has been up and down.
Nothing a little Bob Marley and a cold beer can’t fix. But I’m starting to realise that when given the chance, I spend far too much time thinking about doing things, rather than actually doing them. Maybe this is an opportunity to grow.
Sometimes when I look back to my lifestyle a few weeks ago to my lifestyle now, I can wonder how I manage to do things. I thought having my 2 hour commute reduced to nothing would give me more time to spend on personal projects and having fun. That hasn’t necessarily proven to be the case, and I just now move at approximately 2 hours slower pace per day. Go figure.
But I’ve still been making steady progress at the exact same rate I was before. I’ve started an instagram for my favourite Very-Short-Story prompts, which was initially going to be a weekly thing but then became a daily thing. I’m often torn with social media - is it a useful and fun means to grow your readership and make connections, or is it a time sink/vanity project? I suppose it’s a bit of both really, and striking that balance is always going to be difficult. One of the weird things with starting a franchise from scratch is not truly having any content to show the fans, it’s all glimpses and teases, which don’t necessarily do it justice. If you’re reading this - and according to my upvotes, people actually do - thank you for getting on board early. Hopefully I’ll reward your time with good content, and screw it, if you want to get a sneak peak of what I’m working on, drop me a message and I’ll send you a few chapters.
One big step in the right direction is I have a logo now! I’ve been messing around with newsletters to wrap my head around that, and if any of my newsletter subscribers are reading, you might get the first one in the coming months. I want to wait until I have something to show, and since I’m waiting until I have two books written to launch, there might be a little wait. Once I have something though, I’ll probably aim for monthly? Seems to be a good mix of regular updates and not too intrusive in people’s inboxes to me.
Still, I’m hoping to have the first book finished in a couple of months, and will be looking for beta readers, so if that’s your cup of tea, let me know!
This month has been a learning curve. Some days it’s fine, business as usual. Some days it feels like groundhog day. I’ve been to virtual pubs, watched virtual gigs, been on a ‘night-out’ indoors, and hopefully this weekend the weather will be good enough to permit a bbq-for-two. I hope everyone else is doing OK. It’s a brave new world out there, and inside too.
