Let me just start off by stating that July was one of those months that just vanishes in the blink of an eye and leaves me wondering what the hell happened. I accomplished very, very little of what I intended to, and part of that is because of a little thing you may have heard about called Pokemon Go. That’s not an excuse; I’m just stating the fact that I spent the greater part of the month collecting digital monsters instead of doing literally any of the stuff I should have been doing. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the goals for July.
Goal #1. Take good care of myself, specifically by walking 10,000 steps per day and taking at least 15 minutes per day to do something fun/relaxing.
This goal – and the success or failure thereof – really depends on which half of the month you’re looking at. The first half of July was pretty damn terrible. Part of the problem was that I had an incredibly awful shift at work. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that I had an exceptionally miserable two weeks in Alberta. As a result of that I did as little moving as possible and most of my “me time” boiled down to curling up in bed with a show playing on my computer while I plotted ways I could justify not going into work the next day.
On the other hand the second half of the month was very different. I was home, for one thing, which is always best. For another thing Pokemon Go became available in Canada, and while the addictive little pile of nostalgia has been hell on my productivity, it’s been a blessing on my FitBit. From wandering around town, trying to track down new Pokemon to catch, to simply walking back and forth in order to incubate eggs, I put more steps in in fewer days than I have in ages. Thanks to this game, I managed to partially cancel out the first half of the month and finished off July with seven 10K days and a daily average of 8478 steps. It’s not 10K, but guys, if you’d seen how little I was moving those first two weeks you’d be amazed that I managed to get the average up that high.
Plus mobile games totally count as “me time”, right? Right.
Goal #2. Build more readership/viewership by putting more focus and energy into my blog posts, shooting more fun YouTube videos, and putting more effort into self-promotion.
A reminder, in case you missed it: a few months ago I stopped blogging on a regular basis in order to spend more time on writing fiction, so keep that in mind. 🙂
This goal, unfortunately, represents the downside to becoming obsessed with invisible monsters on my phone. When it comes to the marketing side of things I actually did better during the two miserable weeks at work. Then Pokemon Go finally released in Canada, and Jason and I may have become a little bit obsessed.
During the first half of the month Jason was getting videos edited, getting glam shots of our hauls up on Instagram, and promoting the channel, while I was tweeting, hanging out with followers on SnapChat, working on updating “Nowhere to Hide”‘s description and cover art, and promoting my erotic fairy tale series via a set of new social media created for the series’ pseudonym author.
Once Pokemon Go hit the Play Store, however, everything pretty much ground to a dead stop as the two of us traipsed all over the province in search of our favorite little creatures. We didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until the last two days before I flew back to work when we finally noticed I’d barely filmed any videos while I was home and we hadn’t uploaded anything for a straight week.
Now, in our defense there was a fair bit going on as well. We did a full-day shopping trip around the province to hunt for SDCC Summer Convention Pops. We took another day trip in order to test out the Playstation VR (which was awesome, by the way). And we took a trip back home to spend the end of a local festival with family and watch the fireworks together.
But, mostly we wasted an assload of time chasing pixels across the island with our smartphones.
That said, we did do one thing that was tons of fun and will probably be a great promo tool in the future. We tested out Facebook Live, allowing some of our friends and followers to talk to us in real time. It was a blast, and we’ll definitely be doing it again, hopefully when I get home next time.
So yeah, there were good bits and bad bits, but hopefully we’ll be able to curb our obsessions a bit in the coming weeks and make August a better month.
Goal #3. Write as much as I can, including writing an entire novel from start to finish.
I started out July thinking that this was going to be the best goal, but it went a bit sideways on me around mid-month. In the first few weeks, despite the aforementioned work misery, I was enjoying my new Rocketbook Wave and taking whatever opportunities I could to scribble out scenes for more erotic fairy tales. Then – if you’ll excuse my turn of phrase – some major bullshit went down at work, and I actually got more productive as I took out my frustrations on a new zombie novel that (*cough cough*) takes place on an oil sands facility.
But – and I know this is going to shock you – then Pokemon Go happened. And come on…if I wasn’t getting videos done and was basically completely ignoring all forms of social media, what do you think the chances are that I was writing?
Yeah, yeah, I know…I should be ashamed of myself.
So I finished off the month with about 7716 words, but on the upside the vast majority of those word were fiction, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Also, the new zombie book is highly amusing to me so far, so there’s that. XD
So, all things considered it was a bit of a rollercoaster of a month, and I was left wondering where the hell half of my summer had gone, but it was hardly the worst month I’ve had, that’s for sure.
How was your month? Did you get anything accomplished? Try anything new? Have you been out stalking Pokemon like me? Please feel free to share!
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