Truth time: I don't remember if I wrote about why I turned my Instagram private, so I'm going to do that here and if I'm repeating myself, well shit, it happens and I'm sure we can all get over it.
As a volunteer with [I'm not actually going to put the name of the organisation because they would not thank me for swearing] I work with youngsters and the age range we as an organisation work with is vast. I haven't worked across the full span of the age range, but I'm only short by two years and that's youngsters so small I'm not sure I wouldn't trip over them. As these lovely young people grow up, they get social media accounts and they sometimes like to find stuff out about the people they interact with - it's fine, we all do it - but there are photos on my Instagram of university nights out, utter rubbish I posted years ago and never deleted because who scrolls back that far anyway (trust me, they do) and there are photos of me at Rocky Horror Picture Show. It is a photo I'm proud of, do not get me wrong, but it's not something I would share with them, it's not an outfit I would even consider wearing around them and the God's honest truth is I forgot it was there until someone said, oh, they found your Instagram and were sharing screenshots between themselves of different photos on there. And it was like alarm bells going off in my head, and the only thing I could think to do was shut it straight onto private mode.
In some ways, getting rid of my public profile of Instagram was actually really positive, because I didn't feel the need to post on there, and I wasn't concerned about the idea of 'if you want to be a writer you're going to have to get better at promoting your own books' and I didn't have to think about content production or all of those things that I was starting to think, hey, if you actually want to do this writing thing as more than just a venting to yourself thing, or just a written version of a Sims game, effectively, you're going to have to get better (not even better, get less shit at) using social media. I know the theory of it, but I'm not good at consistency, I don't want to spend hours on it because it's not the bit I'm good at or that I like doing and honestly, although I knew it was going to affect things like readership to the blog I had already kind of fallen out with writing and started the mental health episode that I had (though it was only bubbling under the surface at that stage).
At present, I have a Facebook page I rarely use, I use my Twitter (and hate it), glance at my Blue Sky (not yet loving it) and that's about it. I had to learn how to embed links into stories on Facebook - post it from Instagram - so that I could get the blog out to my friends lists and hope that made some impact (and it clearly worked, though I'm sure the Google Analytics for the blog are broken given that it recorded a ludicrous number of views from Singapore over a few days this year (though having looked at it, I originally thought it was 2 days, and then it turned out it was over quite a few more days than that, so who knows?) I'm not necessarily thinking I want to try and build the readership of this blog massively, because that would be insane pressure to actually consistently write something worth reading, but I know I will have to go back to having more of a public social media presence, however uncomfortable that might feel, if I'm going to think about publishing anything this year, and I would like that to be the plan, but will have to see how I get on.
I go through fits and starts of using stories, but I think they're going to have to be a bit more of a feature of my life so that I can actually put the links to these blogs out, and then hopefully, eventually, announce a date for the Fairies sequel and a couple of other things I have been working on, but I will be honest, it's doubtful if either of them will make an appearance this year, let alone both.
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