Recent Posts
The Social Media Realignment Experiment: Update
Back in July, I decided that I needed to do something about my out-of-control habits on social media. I was spending far too much time wasting the day away on something that had little importance on my daily life.
While social media has been my lifeline to the outside world for years, I’ve realized how toxic that environment has become. And with everything else going on in the world, for the sake of my mental sanity, something needed to be done.
So, I set out on a mission to realign my social media habits with my goals and aspirations—and it has been a struggle.
The Social Media Realignment Experiment
As part of my daily routine, I track how much time I spend on various tasks. I keep a note of the time I start a particular task and the time I finish. At different points throughout the day, normally when I take a break, I enter my notes into a spreadsheet that calculates the exact time I’ve spent on different tasks and tallies it up across the day, the week, the month, or any other time frame I want.
I will admit that it is a fancy spreadsheet system that I developed, but it works for me.
One task I track is how much time I spend on social media. Being the person who I am, trying to understand the dangers associated with social media and online activities, I need to spend some time on social media. But I am not immune to the time-suck that can occur.
In tracking my social media habits, there have been times when I have whittled away the entire day on social media. In the last month alone, I’ve spent 24 hours on social media and reading blogs. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s approximately one hour per day spent scrolling through the feeds. Yes, it is not 100% doing nothing, as some of it is interacting with writers under my editor’s hat, providing advice and building those valuable connections, but it is an hour a day that I could have been writing.
It is time for me to do a reassessment of my social media platform and to reevaluate exactly how much of that time I spend on social media and what I do while I’m there. Time to bring things back into alignment with my goals as a writer and editor.
It’s just another day…
I’m a morning person, so every day, I get up before the sunrise and watch the sunrise. There is a reason why my Instagram feed is filled with photos of the orange and red and yellow found in the sky. It’s my fuel, and it’s how I keep going.
It wasn’t surprising that this morning when I got up, that I would find messages of “Happy Birthday” and the like. But to me, July 14 is just another day.
I’m not sure if I can express my views in a satisfactory way to others, but I’m going to try. We’ll see how many others feel the same way I do.
Did I kill my story by having the police in it?
Back in 2017, I finally started penning my first crime thriller. The idea had been whizzing around in my head for some time, but finally enough of the pieces had clunked together and I was ready to tell the story of Veronica (a wannabe thriller writer who fell into the middle of the one serial killer case that could mean her own death). I had the opening sequence and the final scene written, and I knew the key moments in the middle, so off I went.
Two full years to write that thing, and a lot of self-discovery about the type of writer I am. I learnt so much about my writing process, and I learnt a lot about what it would take to survive as a writer in this highly uncertain business. (Hint: Perseverance is the key.)
I worked with a developmental editor to make the story top-notch, and come August 2019, I began the query process for that manuscript. I was extremely proud of what I had produced. (I still am.)
Then 2020… and the panic set in.
The story centers around the homicide unit with the Atlanta PD. With the current animosity towards US-based police, was this a fatal mistake? And if it was, how was I to know back in 2017 when I first started writing the manuscript that the entire world would go topsy-turvy in 2020? Hell, how was I to know that in 2019 when I started querying it?
But the more important question: Should I even worry?
Looking ahead to post-COVID life
Every so many months, I force myself to take stock of my current situation and attitudes, reviewing the goals I had set myself and working out if I am still on track—or whether things have been completely derailed.
With all the crazy that the last six months has throw at the world, this particular review seems to be more important than ever.
New Zealand, my home country, has just moved into Level 1 lockdown, meaning that our domestic economy can get a reboot. We still have border restrictions, with all those coming into the country still facing quarantine, but all internal restrictions on businesses and travel has been removed, and life can go back to normal.
But for me, going back to normal is NOT going back to pre-COVID life. There are aspects of that pre-COVID life that I want to leave behind.
So, this review is not just looking at the goals I had set myself at the start of the year, but taking stock of my current situation and comparing it to pre-COVID life. It’s time to decide was post-COVID life will look like—at least for the beginning. I encourage all of my readers to do the same.
An Era of Space in CrazyTown
I think everyone will agree with me that the year 2020 has been a nightmare from the start. Everyone I know has been begging for 2020 to be rebooted, and the world has become a CrazyTown. And with the latest crazy caused by some idiot cop, who in my opinion deserves to be behind bars, it was a breath of fresh air that 2020 finally saw some good news.
It’s May 31, 2020 where I live, and I have just finished watching the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule. It might be hard to believe, but I’m sitting here crying as I type this, and I’m not sure if I can fully explain why, but I’m going to do my darndest to try.
As far as I’m concerned, now 2020 has begun. Sure, it’s nearly half over, but for the first time in 2020, I feel like hope is actually on the horizon and we can breathe again.