So as you’ve probably noted by now, I’ve dropped out of doing nanowrimo. I was hitting all the daily milestones more or less until the halfway mark, when 1) I finished the novella In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight, and 2) we left for Nebraska to spend Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Between those two things, and the fact that this was our first time traveling with a baby, writing got put on the back burner for a few days, which means no nanowrimo this year.
But now that we’re here in Nebraska and it looks like we’re going to have a pretty quiet and easygoing vacation, I will probably get a decent amount of writing done before we go back to Utah at the end of the month. Who knows—I may even try to jump back on the nanowrimo train, though I’m not going to push for that. This is a vacation, after all. We all need a vacation from time to time.
But one of the things that I do want to get much better about is posting more regularly to this blog. And towards that end, I’ve come up with a plan.
Back in 2016, I deleted my social media and became something of an online hermit. For personal reasons, it was the right thing to do as it helped me to avoid all of the toxic online insanity during the (first) Trump years, and all of the gaslighting and doom porn that became so prevalent during the pandemic. If I had still been addicted to social media during all of that insanity, I would not be in a healthy place right now. But I do think it impeded my ability to connect with and build my readership, and I feel that I need to change that going forward.
Of course, I don’t just want to build an audience on a popular social media platform, only to have that audience taken away from me when the platform arbitrarily changes its policies or monetizes in some disadvantageous way. That was the big mistake that everyone made with Facebook back in the 10s. So my plan is to build up this blog first, which is a platform that I own and control, and repost content from this blog to other social media platforms as I expand my presence there. The goal is to bring my audience here and make this the center of my online activity.
But to do that, I need to post new content to my blog on a regular basis—something I haven’t really done since I jumped off of the social media merry-go-round in 2016. So I’m going to start blogging on a schedule again, taking it fairly easy at first with just two posts a week, but working it up from there.
I’ll be posting on Tuesdays and Saturdays at 11am Eastern, or 9am Mountain Time in my own neck of the woods. Tuesdays will mostly be for sharing links to interesting articles, videos, or podcasts, while Saturdays will be for more long-form posts, like book reviews, movie reviews, and state-of-the-genre type stuff. When I add a third day, that will be mostly for writing and family updates, if that’s what people are interested in. I’ll also share book excerpts, WIP excerpts, and posts about sales and book releases.
So that’s the plan. We’ll see how long it lasts. Now I’ve got a baby to watch and a book to write, not to mention Saturday’s blog post.
