Monday 10^th August 2020

I think a lot back to April when I did a lot of craft work surrounding theme. I generated some real benefit from this, and feel it leveled up my writing a lot. I feel it was an investment I put into my career that really paid off.

But, now I have no active project, it’s got me thinking that I should be investing in my career again.

I want to diversify as a writer, not because I don’t still want to be an author, but because these are uncertain times, and in uncertain times you diversify.

So, that means being able to do script work, to write for games, to possibly even copywrite. Writing takes so long that having different projects would be good for me. Even if novels prove good for me for the next 5 years, I’d like to be in a position where, if in 6 years, my novel career goes belly up, I’ve been chugging away at other writing skills and have projects that I can bring to market.

I very much see this as a long term investment; to have these things bubbling away in the background, practising the craft here and there, so that if I did ever need to call on those skills, I’m ready.

And the first stage of that is learning.

I’ve started taking notes a lot more since Lockdown. When I find an interesting piece of online learning, I write up my own take on it. It’s nothing fancy, but I take out the key points for me so I can quickly review later if needed.

I spent the evening doing a bit on videogames writing. I’ve done a bit of branching narrative for a videogames company in the past, and I’m not sure (probably the NDA), I never really included it in my writers’ resume. So I updated my website and Linkedin with information I was able to publicly divulge.

I also rewatched a webinar on the business and made a bunch of notes. There’s some actions I need to take, so I updated my goals and year planner to put those on my radar later in the year. I also applied for a mentorship scheme. I’m not sure I’ll get it, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

I was pretty annoyed when that took up most of the evening. I had wanted to also start going over a draft of a novel in Scrivener, to get the manuscript laid out that I could work on a second draft at some point in the future. How I organise manuscripts in Scrivener seems to have been refined in the years since I wrote this and before I even consider looking at a second draft I need to get the current manuscript in a format I can work with. Note to self: whilst not having chapters might seem like an artistic choice, it’s a real bugger when it comes to your current editing process.

I have a bunch of webinars and masterclasses I want to look at on a range of writing subjects so the current plan is to go through those (as well as reorganising this novel manuscript), taking notes as I do. Hopefully, like the work I did on theme, I’ll be thanking myself in the months to come.