This year has been huge for me in terms of chasing my dreams of writing a book.
I did it, I wrote a novel! I’m now nearly halfway through rewriting it, jiggling it around until it makes sense to someone that isn’t me.
The blogging side of my life has changed a lot. It’s no longer the be all and end all. I do still love this corner of the internet and although this year has been less fruitful financially then previous years, 2018 has bore fruit in other ways. Ways beyond my online life.
December is here and although I’m still working on my rewrite I’m also taking things a little slower, ready to wind down after a season of productivity.
Although the majority of said productivity is still unseen by the outside world, be sure, I am ready for a rest.
These past few weeks have seen me join in with a few activities online. Generally I’m much more of a solo artist than member of a group, but after some hermit style months at the start of 2018 I’ve felt the need to reconnect with the online/outside world.
I tried to Blog Every Day in November, you might’ve noticed my flurry of blog posts at the start of last month? I think I got to around twelve blog posts, with skeletons of enough written drafts to fill the rest of November, but I stopped short of completing the challenge. I came to realise that I was giving away all my writing juices to the blog posts, and running out of gas, and time, for my rewrite. I was happy to step away, having learnt an important lesson about my own creativity.
I also took part in an Instagram Stories Challenge. For those of you that aren’t on Instagram, Stories are a behind the scene look at a persons business or life. Often much more candid and less styled/curated than grid photography. Talking to the camera is a key way of connecting to your Story viewers, people, myself included, love to see the real life face behind the Instagram account, and hear the real voice of the person writing the captions. So this was a talking to camera challenge organised by my friend Katya.
I found it did help me get used to chatting to camera. Katya gave us prompts of things to talk about, which is often half the battle when doing stuff like that for me. She is running another right now, so if you’d like to join in and get out of your comfort zone, find her on Instagram here.
Almost finally, something else I’m joining in with for the month of December is Susannah Conway’s December Reflections. I’m doing it in a very “no pressure” way which fits in perfectly with me needing to slow things down. I love the idea of taking the whole month of December to look back with her prompts. I’ll be using them for writing in my journal, or on here (maybe), or as they are intended in the first instance, through photography.
Lastly, something I’ve been pondering on, as I know a lot of my friends have too, is my use of Facebook. I know I need to have a presence on there for my writing and future plans, but it has changed so much from when I first joined around 2005/2006. I could easily write a whole piece on my thoughts about it. I feel tied to it in some ways, things like school PTA, and friends and family I don’t see often. I rarely update my personal page, and if I do it’s usually from “on this day last year” photos. So perhaps closing down my personal page but keeping my blogging/writing page is the answer?
I’d love to know how you are spending December and if you’ve any ideas about Facebook, please do share them below.
susan earlam ~ horror author 
I would love your input