What I'm up to

I haven't been posting much here for a while. All my blogging effort has been going into Living Skillfully: Change Your Life, my personal development blog, and guest posting on other related blogs to build more traffic and subscribers. But it's time for a roundup of what's been going on.

I'm about to bring out another online course, Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding (there's a $20 discount offer if you sign up before 22 November 2010).

I also want to put together a small stop-smoking product before the end of the year, since cigarette tax goes up here on New Year's Day and that will stimulate a few more people to look around for effective ways to stop smoking. I'm approaching quitting smoking in terms of a personal development challenge rather than from a strict medical model.

I haven't just been writing about personal development, though. I'm doing some too. I've started getting up earlier to exercise, which is going well (I'm progressing through the Hundred Pushups challenge). Conveniently, this builds the same muscles that I use to paddle my new kayak, which is a lot of fun.

Starting in February, I'm doing a 10-week improv class. My day job may also pay for me to go to a public-speaking course run by Toastmasters.

Very slowly, I'm working on a Young Adult novel called The Y People, which is a bit of a hat-tip to the X-Men while being almost completely unlike it.

I've moved all my creative stuff over to C-Side Media at last, and I'm thinking about starting a new blog there (because I don't have enough blogs). This one will be about the process of self-publishing, basically how you can publish your book for free. It's a topic I have useful knowledge on and it would benefit other people, plus if I get people subscribing to it there'll be some splashover to my other projects. I'll announce it here as and when. (You can subscribe to get all C-Side Media updates on any of the several C-Side Media blogs.)

I'm also planning a podcast in the New Year on personal development, in which I'll interview other personal development bloggers. Steven Aitchison has agreed to be my first guest. It'll probably be monthly.

So there's plenty happening in my life in 2011. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to know more about any of it.

Yet another blog begins

So, another blog. Why?

I realised last night, talking to Andrew (my spiritual director), that my online presence is kind of scattered and that reflects a slight lack of integration in my life.

I have a blog over at the Cityside community which I only post to occasionally, because I only put things there that I think may hold some sort of interest for that community (and at that I'm probably wrong half the time).

I have an old website at Geocities which is kind of an archive of my old articles and such going back 20 years. Most of it doesn't reflect what I think any more, but it may be helpful to people who are still at that stage of faith (in fact, sometimes they write to me and say it is), so I keep it.

I have my creative website, C-Side Media. I could blog there but then I'd have to build a comments feature (most of the code is my own), and creativity isn't all I do. Much the same goes for my hypnotherapy website, Hypno NZ. That's set aside for what I hope will be my new profession; a lot of my interests don't really fit there (and again I have written most of the code and don't need the grief of writing a proper blogging app).

I post on several forums. Story-Games is the one where I have posted the most - it's a forum for people who design and play narrative-focussed roleplaying games - but that's led me to the quirkily titled I would knife-fight a man, where the discussion includes sex, God and roleplaying games. I mostly weigh in on the God discussions.

And some of my fiction is at Xenoglyph (you'll have to get a user account to see it).

So that pulls together my online presence. I'll probably copy some of the posts I've made at the other sites over here too.