That exciting announcement I mentioned last week will be shared, first, in my upcoming newsletter, scheduled to be delivered on June 5th!
I've had an amazing quarter and I've been busy this week putting together this newsletter – my second ever newsletter – to share it all with you.
I also submitted 4 poems for consideration in a literary journal, completed edits on a flash fiction story, submitted two essays to be considered for syndication, and shared a micro-blog (AKA: short essay or long social media post) inspired by my daughters' birthday to Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and TODAY Parents.
To top all that off, there was the holiday weekend, it is the last week of school, and I've been preparing for our upcoming vacation.
It has been years since we took a trip where we'd have limited internet access via our phones and no computer access. I'll admit that as excited as I am to get away from it all, I struggled a bit with what to do with my social media while we are away. I've put way more energy than I should have into slowly building my page's followers.
At first, I worried that if I simply stopped posting for a week, my accounts would quickly shrivel up and die from inactivity. I seriously toyed around with the idea of just scheduling my one post a day on Facebook and letting it run on autopilot. But, then, I worried about having things post and not being able to check in to make sure there weren't any troll comments, or even having nice comments sit without interaction, and what if there was a major tragedy in the news and my scheduled post would appear insensitive. *sigh*
Have I mentioned I tend to overthink everything?
The solution seemed simple enough but I was struggling with that a bit, too, because I usually steer clear of publicly advertising when we are away from home. I know I'm not the only one who worries about this, though it often feels like I am when nearly all the social media accounts I follow have no hesitations about posting in real-time while they are on vacations.
I am not one to post in real-time anyway. With my anxiety, my usual routine is to plan and schedule the next day or two's posts in advance so that I don't waste an entire day feeling pressure to post something and over-analyzing it. But in this case, with our limited internet access, it wouldn't even work to post real-time. In fact, since we know we won't have much reception, we've decided to take this opportunity to completely detox – we are going to turn our phones off and put them away. We'll even use a stand-alone camera.
So, it came down to whether or not I'd be comfortable announcing that we'd be away.
After way too much back-and-forth, after scheduling, cancelling, rescheduling, and re-cancelling posts, and after talking it over with my husband, I finally decided that I should just be open and authentic and, well, really take the break.
So, I'm planning a post to explain that I'll be away and my social media will be silent for a week. And I'm sure all will be well when I return.
