Thursday 16th March 2017

First day back at work after my forced illness break and I ‘ve been feeling the worst I’ve felt all week.
I feel like I have a head cold.  My throat is so sore I’ve almost lost my voice and my eyes feel heavy with manflu.  As I said to someone today, probably the act of relaxing has lowered my immune system to an extent that I’ve come down with the first illness available.
This is why I prefer to stay busy.
The day job consisted of a number of meetings this morning.  We’ve got staff off tomorrow and over the weekend so I’m solo covering… which means that either it’s going to be hectic or completely dead.  The day job always seems to swap between those extremes.  I’m also covering on-call this weekend but given that the meal I’m going out for on Saturday is near the office and sparring is cancelled this Sunday, I’m not expecting it to give me any issues.
Continuing on from yesterday I’ve been really deep diving into social media strategy today.  I’ve been doing it whilst working on other stuff so I’ve not been wasting time like I have over the last couple of days.  For my Instagram post today I used a video shot last night of everyone training.  The repost helps give some attention to the School of the Sword’s new Instagram feed whilst giving me some different content.  It went down really well and I connected with a few interesting people as a result.  One was a guy whose entire feed is basically him with fantasy swords.  He asked me for some local clubs so he can start training.
As a result of this and other people’s questions, this evening I did some Instagram Stories covering my weapon collection and some brief information about each weapon.  You can’t say much within the time limit but I actually like how it turned out.  I saved the videos so I can always repost them at a later date.
I’d like to organise myself so I have a bank of content that I can then repost to other platforms months down the line.  This requires some organisation and I’ve not yet thought how best to manage it.  Not too worried as I want everyone to have forgotten about the Instagram Stories by the time I think of posting it as content to Twitter.  But I know I need to come up with some sort of media planner.  In the meantime I’ll just continue to create content.
As much as there’s lot I still want to do, I do look back at 50 or so days ago and already see massive progress in what I’m doing.  I did a big update to my personal Facebook this evening (giving my author Facebook a push at the same time) and I think it brought everything into focus for me.
For example, I watched something today on people creating daily vlogs.  Doing a vlog is a possibility down the line but at the moment it would take too much editing time to do it even weekly at the moment.  But I saw the people in the video talk about how they gather the footage and try and find a theme to the day.  I do that with The Climb, trying to find an event or theme to centre the day’s issue around.  I think this is just one of the ways that The Climb has evolved in just the last month or so.
As I walked into town today I found myself starting to think about rewrites on the novel I’m working on.  I was actually quite pleased with that.  Already I can see a number of characters that need to be strengthened and given bigger roles.  After doing two lots of rewrites for Black as Knight, they no longer scare me and I can already see how the changes I want to make could be accomplished.
I take it as a sign that I’m levelling up as a writer.  I’m sure when I get the next lot of editorial comments back there will be further levelling up required.  I’d heard my agent and many professional writers talk about how you learn from the rewrites – not just in how to make that manuscript better but skills that you can take forward into future writing projects.
I like it that I continue to level up.  I think the moment you stop learning and growing is when your career goes stale.
I finished off the day by planning out the next chapter I want to write.  I have a fairly strict system I use for planning that has done me well.  However, so far this chapter isn’t fitting into that structure.  If that was because I was doing something different and awesome then I’d happily abandon the plan to try it out, but if anything, my planning has shown I’m missing elements for this chapter.
As a result, I didn’t get into writing it tonight.  I need to go away and think about this chapter, what it needs to do, what it’s missing and how I can level it up to make it awesome.
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels.  Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.
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