It’s time for my annual blog post! If you still miss this blog, I hope you know that you can now follow very similar content on my newsletter Mixture! It comes out approximately once a month, and the next one is due on August 9th. Or, if you want it even sooner, supporters on Buy Me A Coffee get it on August 6th already.
It’s still a newsletter about the overlap of science and art, music, culture – all the things that this blog used to be.
I also recently posted on Medium again for the first time in ages. It’s a post about overcoming writers’ block in the face of deadlines, and it has lots of useful tips, such as this one:
Use pieces of paper. Instead of creating a list of bullet points, I use pieces of paper to write down all the things that I know need to be in the story, and shift them around to create the outline. There’s something about physically touching and moving pieces of paper that helps me make sense of the story. If I get stuck here because I don’t seem to have everything I need, I move on to the next steps.
Reading between the lines of that post you’ll also get a sense of why I couldn’t keep up with easternblot.net anymore: I’ve been busy! I’m still fulltime freelancing, although at the moment a lot of what I’ve been working on is behind the scenes so it looks like I’m not doing anything. Nothing is further from the truth, though – I’ve been working pretty much non-stop for two years, it’s just not always something I can show the world. One of the projects I’m working on at the moment will be live later this year, another is just writing social media content for a client, and I’m preparing for some future articles.
I’ll be a bit more visible later this summer though. I’ll be speaking at two conferences: SJF and Science Writers (virtual track). It’s not quite the same as travelling to a physical conference, but the topic I’m speaking about at both meetings is virtual coworking sessions, so it makes sense to do it online.
Speaking of which, I’m running monthly coworking sessions for science communicators and science writers on Discord. If you work in those areas and need some motivation, join the server!
There, now you’re all up to date again. Don’t forget to subscribe to Mixture or follow me on Twitter (where I’m now verified!) if you want more regular updates.
