A brief update: I haven't given up, quite the contrary

I realised last week that I've been a bit slack in communicating with the outside world since my last post - which is over a month ago now. Given the post was about the days I struggle with all of this and want to give up, it probably wasn't a good way to go quiet :-)Or maybe it was...

Remember my three words?

If you remember my three words for 2016 they are Push, Pull and Be. What I've come to realise is there is a cyclic nature in how I operate in this new world I've created for myself. I'm great at pushing in the first half of the year - but around July it tapers off.This could be for a number of reasons: I get reflective around my birthday (my July); it could be a seasonal thing where my energy ebbs down in winter; or maybe after six months of pushing my brain simply needs a rest. Regardless, I've noticed that this has been a trend with blogging, and other work, for the last five years now. Maybe it's always been there, but doing the blog and online world I've only now noticing it.It's interesting to realise these things about ourselves though - particularly when I realise that this time last year I was pulling my hair out trying to finalise Do Share Inspire in time for the 1 November ebook launch. So it's not like I'm not doing a lot of things (and I mean a LOT), but I've been pulling back from the public contributions, and beavering away in the background.And this week, I'm trying to create a little bit of time to simply BE. I know what the next couple of months look like and I think being for a short while is a requirement before I tackle all of it.

An update on Do Share Inspire

I'm publishing a second edition, which isn't dramatically different at all - for those of you who have the first one. Initially I was just doing it to adjust the margins, and hopefully allow me to bump up the font size a little, without blowing out the page count. Unfortunately, I started looking through it to find paragraphs that just dropped over an extra line and realised my over use of the word 'that'!Now I should explain, when I pulled the blog into a book I did not want to really alter it, and only did a brief tidy up and of course corrections. But looking at all the 'thats' started doing my head in. So I decided to do a more significant edit, focusing on those words that really didn't need to exist.As a result, the overall word count dropped from 126,960 to 122,982. I removed over 1,000 uses of 'that', almost 50 'I think' and almost a third of 'I am' became I'm.Seriously, 'that' dropped from 3,184 occurrences to 1,983 - nothing like identifying your writing crutch!I've uploaded the new version to IngramSpark today, and will hopefully get a proof copy by the end of next week. The Kindle version is now up to date on the system.Did I need to do this? Probably not.Do I feel better about it all since I did it? Yep.Is it my perfectionist gene kicking back in? I don't believe it is, but you may think otherwise.What I do know is that going through this process has given me a renewed focus on a few things - and it seriously didn't take too much time to create a tighter product.It's one of the problems with writing - you always feel that you could do better. But this is the last time I'll play with it - how it is now is how it will always stay (unless I find a huge error everyone has been missing). Back to my three words - now I will simply let it BE.

In other news

There isn't that much else to report, except I want to share a few TED Talks I think you would benefit from watching:

• Ione Wells: How we talk about sexual assault online - this is the latest talk actually and covers a topic that I think is important. It's not importance of allowing safe spaces for people to openly discuss sexual assault (and many other things really) - it's about the importance of not cramming that space with 'reactions'. It's a thought I've often had when perusing social media --- "You don't have to have an opinion on everything, and even if you do it's not a requirement to voice it." It's well worth watching.
• Christopher Bell: Bring on the female super heroes - it's weird how some things are normalised to the point that we can't even see the obvious gap. This is a great talk about the importance of giving girls non-princess based role models to admire - and how the big studios that own these characters need to change the paradigm.
• Rainn Wilson: Ideas worth dating - okay it isn't a talk and clearly I'm sharing this to say 'done that', although I would have loved meeting all of the people whose ideas I used :-) but it's fun.

How's your October going? Anything new or fun to share?