New Year’s Resolutions, further thoughts on Medium & screen time
The ongoing struggle…
‘Withnail: WE CAN’T GO ON LIKE THIS!’
A while ago (it seems like an aeon) I wrote about my mixed feelings about my Medium journey, and how, overall, I was disappointed with the platform.
Now we’re coming towards the end of the year, and with NaNoWriMo (successfully!) completed, I can look forward to my writing goals for 2024.
Although I have spent a lot of time feeling (and sometimes acting) like Withnail (lol), 2023 has been a very good year for my writing — I got my first poem published in a literary magazine, and a short story has been accepted for publication in Corvid Queen next May. Writing (fairly) consistently on Medium has improved my writing and I think I have become a better critic of films and books as a result. I also found a welcoming community of writers on AO3, and lost (most) of my snobbishness about a whole genre of writing (fanfiction). I also finished writing a play.
This play has been the Anticlimax of the Year. (Considering that it’s about the quest for the Holy Grail makes this fact quite amusing!) I was so glad when I finished it but that soon evaporated at the repeated refusal of theatres to even read it, let alone to accept it. This is something which I will have to spend more time on next year.
Amongst this disappointment, I started to write a novel (as you do) and it is my current project in progress. I’ve invested too much time in this to let it go unfinished — or unpublished. So that’s the aim for next year — finish the novel and get the play performed. Bonus points if I get the novel published too (!!)
A note on screen time
I work full-time and that involves looking at, not just one, but two desktop monitor screens for 7.5 hours a day. Not good for your eyes or for your mental health or your posture.
But it’s frustrating that, as a writer, I have to come home after 7.5 hours of screen-work, to then do more typing. All publishers want typed manuscripts, a pdf or a Word doc…
So the screen becomes unavoidable. We live in a tyranny of screens. It’s interesting to note that the invasive technology in Orwell’s 1984 is called the ‘telescreen.’
My writing process for Medium was intended to be very efficient. Notes that I write in my ‘arty’ journal I would then ‘polish’ into a blog post on Medium. It would just be a matter of typing and editing paragraphs that I would have written anyway... But it turned out to be more time-consuming than I wanted, and after 16 months, not really fulfilling.
Looking back at my early posts, I can see how I have improved; so it’s not all been pointless!
But recently I’ve just been frustrated by The Screens, which is partly why I haven’t posted anything in a while, in addition to other commitments and NaNo. Getting back to writing on paper — pages and pages of it — was refreshing.
I’ve also recently been reducing the time spent watching films and TV. And This past year I’ve probably watched more films than in the previous two combined (my favourite film, Gone with the Wind among them). But that has come at the expense of reading. I have not read as many books as I usually do. But being a good reader of books is essential to being able to read films. As much as I enjoy watching films and analysing them, literature is my main interest.
Recently, I’ve been taking fewer photographs, partly because I’m literally running out of storage, partly because I want to just appreciate the moments when I’m out in nature. One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to quite ruthlessly sort them out and delete where necessary. But this year I have taken some of the best pictures of my portfolio, the dragonflies being the highlight :)
Further to all this, I have become disappointed with Medium’s changes to the platform itself. You can no longer view the number of reads (if there are any lol). Or get those two free member articles each month, which is fair enough, I suppose — except it seems that 90% of all writers on Medium are members — so it’s increasingly exclusive of non-members.
Overall, I’ve learnt quite a bit from writing on Medium but after over a year of it, I’ve simply lost interest. At the same time, it seems a pity to give up on Medium entirely as there are a few talented writers and interesting publications here, so I’ll probably read and post very occasionally.
Best wishes for the New Year,
Pheobe.
