Would You? Could You? On a Plane?
My writing journey goes to Europe
My writing journey goes to Europe
There’s a good chance by the time you read this post, I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve only flown overseas once for work. The home office of the company I work for is on the border of Switzerland and Italy, so they flew the entire company out to a hotel for one week. My wife was allowed to come too.
The trip was mostly amazing, but being in a country where no one speaks your language was stressful, and for the first time, I felt how real jetlag could be.
This week, I’m flying for fun instead of work. My wife, our three children, and I are taking a vacation to London, England, for three days and Paris, France, for four.
My biggest worry about the trip is my writing, however. I’ve reached a point where I’m making progress on two different websites, but the time commitment will be difficult to find while I’m away.
How do you continue to write when life has become a blocker?
First, let me explain how I write, edit, and publish, and then I’ll explain my plan for how I will handle everything while I’m gone. Hopefully, it can help you if you ever find yourself in the same boat… I mean plane… or whatever.
Medium Writing
I spend two or three days on every article, and once I start writing, the post usually changes topics once or twice. I tend to write by the flow of consciousness, which can create emotionally powerful articles but also causes them to sound like I’m rambling. Good articles need to be centered around a central theme or topic and not feel like jumping train cars.
Next, I’ll edit the article, revise some sentences, and perhaps remove a paragraph or two. This is followed by formatting, image creation/choosing, and finally, publishing to Medium.
Homepage Writing
Once live on Medium, I copy and paste the article to the publication homepage. The movement causes strange formatting issues to arise, so it’s back to formatting, image uploading, and publishing. This generally takes 10 minutes per article but can take longer if the article has several pictures, quotes, citations, and dividers.
If the article was written by someone else, but they are publishing with The Taoist Online, then the steps are the same, with the exception of writing the story.
Social Media
The one thing I’ve done extremely well has been my social media presence. Being active and friendly on social media is THE WAY I’ve found so much success so fast. I post every article to the following networks:
Discord (three communities), Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flipboard (two magazines), and Mastodon (three servers).
The process might sound like a lot, but now that I’ve done it multiple times a day for the past three weeks, it goes by pretty fast, and I enjoy it. I love sharing my stories with everyone and helping my online friends share theirs. Sharing one story on all my channels generally takes about five minutes. Again, it used to take longer, but now I’ve got it down.
Vacation Plan
So, my trip poses a new problem. How do I continue this process as I’m out every day seeing landmarks and trying not to kill my family? I could post, edit, and share the articles when I’m back at the hotel/Airbnb at the end of the day or wake up early and just post everything I can. Or, I could empower someone else to do it for me, but all of the social media accounts are personally mine.
Solution
I’ll be promoting nathanlovestrees to an editor of The Taoist Online Medium publication, and he will take over publishing on Medium while I’m gone.
I’ll still run through social networks at the end of the day since I’m going to have photos to share and stories to tell.
As for the homepage, Simon Kupfer and I will try to publish when we can, but he is very busy with school right now, and as I mentioned above, moving articles over can be tricky.
Conclusion
The trip is only eight days, and I’ll be back before I know it. I’ll probably be missing a child (jk…maybe), and I’ll get back into writing as soon as I can. I have ideas on broadening the platform with different kinds of content like a podcast and interviews, but more on that when I get back.
Now that you’ve heard my plan for the publication, here is what you can expect from my writing:
Photos and short thoughts
Poems
Short text-only stories
Dedicated publishing and social media times (early morning and late evening BST)
If you find yourself on vacation but don’t want to let your writing and progress fall to pieces, then I hope my plan will give you a starting point to take your own time away. We have more technology and methods of communication than any generation before us, so you don’t have to give up everything just to take a break.
But I do recommend scaling back your operation, finding help from your friends, and have a drink.
I hope you’ll stick around over the next eight days and see what I have in store for everyone. Just remember, if you don’t like my travel journal posts, just come back next week, but don’t unsubscribe :)
Farewell!
