What people often do for their last blog of the year is to talk about the year they’ve had, the books they’ve read or some of their other social media highlights or lowlights. Today I’m putting fingers to keyboard to see what comes out.
I normally write almost every week, managing to only take a couple of weeks off in a year. This year I’ve had stumbling blocks in a number of different areas of my life. Some of them have been my health, some were other people’s health and some were the health of my blog. I’m not counting the number of weeks I’ve missed writing, I feel bad enough and don’t need to do a count to make myself feel worse.
Next year I hope to have some guest bloggers. I have one that is confirmed and I’d love to twist some arms and have other people write. We’ll have to wait and see because everyone is so busy they might not have the time. At the moment, the guest blogger is going to remain nameless. I don’t want to name and shame until she suggests a date, but it’s probably in about a month’s time.
I have plans for my YouTube channel. This will include choosing a name for the channel, whether I keep the branding I have throughout all of my social media channels or go with something brand new is a decision I will make. I currently have four unboxing videos ready to go live. I do intend to schedule them to include at least a week in between each of them. This will give me some time to prepare more videos. It’s long past time I took another video of my TBR Pile. And I have several ideas for rant videos. I’m not a linguist, nor am I terribly good at grammar, so these videos will definitely be rants rather than well informed. I’m also considering taking some of the books I’ve read in the past and putting some of my words into video form. I’m not sure if any of this will be good or not, but you might want to bear in mind that I don’t edit my videos, any errors I make will not be edited out.
I love watching YouTubers, I have far too many on my watch list. I’ve learned a lot by watching them. One thing I’ve learned is that I don’t think I have what it takes to go viral and monetise my channel. I’m not letting that bother me as I enjoy making the videos far too much. I’m hoping to put some of what I’ve learned into my videos. The first thing is to actually look down the camera rather than seeing how I react. It’s a challenging thing to do and I’ve admired people for making it look easy and natural. I’ve also figured out how to record my computer screen. I’ll need to do a test case to see how this works and if I can put sound into it as well. In fact, I’m doing this as I type by reading out my words as I type them. Maybe I’ll include this in a video or maybe not. Anyway, that seems to work nicely, but I hate editing so I might do another one as a show piece.
I’m also challenging myself to a writing course. It’s an online course and I have one year to do the work at my own pace. I’ve managed to start it and need to schedule time to do the rest. You’ll hear more about that in due course.
As of today I’ve stopped keeping my website and my YouTube channel separate. I’m putting all the things I love to do together and hopefully will make everything work. That might mean including my Zazzle store as well. I have some ideas to spruce up the possibilities for sale, but need to talk to a friend about it first.
I hope to do better next year. I hope you and your family and friends have had (or will have ) a safe festive season. Goodbye old year, hello new year.