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.

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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.

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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?

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Woman watching the sunset

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.

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Woman looking at what it means to be diverse.

Diversity to the point of exclusion?

They say that dreams are the subconscious's way of speaking to the conscious. It's our way of trying to nut out things that have been plaguing our minds.

I must have a lot of things plaguing my thoughts, because I actually recall many of the dreams that I have. Many of my story ideas have started as dreams. Over the years, I've developed ways to cling to those last images that hit me during the moments between REM sleep and waking. When I sit at the keyboard, I start writing and let the story develop.

However, when I sat down to write the other morning, it wasn't the dream itself that I wanted to write, but rather a commentary on the dream's subject matter. That commentary is this blog post.

My dream was about a woman who wanted to write diverse stories, complete with the erotic scenes, but was constantly persecuted for doing so. In her everyday life, she was forced to write many of her stories in secret, with her friends pounding on the door, demanding that she show them the latest works. But the moment she showed them, out came the judgments and the hatred. So, she was forced to hide what she truly wanted the world to see. It was sad, because her stories were filled with beauty and romance, and a world that was accepting of all—yet, that was not her real life.

I guess you can say that it was a nightmare within a dream, and in many ways, my subconscious was telling me to stop worrying about what might be the world reception to my stories and just share the buggers. Get my writing out there. But there is an underlying fear that goes deep into my psyche.

As I traversed the path from my bedroom to my computer, I knew exactly what had sparked that dream. And I knew that I had to speak up about how things have gotten so out of control on the public stage—terrifying as that thought might be.

There is a genuine fear that hangs over my head about being persecuted for the stories that I write. The world says that it wants diverse stories with diverse characters, but there are those who will publicly attack a writer for even attempting such a thing. At the same time, there are those who will go for the throat when a writer tries to stay under the radar, sticking to stories that rest in the comfort zone.

Yet, those of us who want to speak up about this duplicitous discrimination genuinely feel that we can't say anything at all—for fear of being lynched.

The fear is real, and by making my fear publicly known, I open myself up to attack. But I'm doing it anyway, because if I don't, my dream from the other night—the one where a female writer wrote her diverse stories in secret and never shared them with the world for fear of being persecuted for doing so—will reoccur again and again. I know how my brain works. My subconscious wants me to understand that I, as a writer, should feel confident to write whatever I want to write without the fear of attack—and other writers should feel that too.

I do need to apologize to my readers in advance. This post is long, but it needed to be said.

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