Hello Steemit!

This is just going to be a brief post. I wanted to take a moment to step away from everything I've been doing and speak honestly about where I've been finding myself recently.

There are people in my life that would say "you shouldn't start your day with an apology". While, on some level, I would generally agree with them, today I'm doing just that. I started using this platform with such positive forward momentum and, over the past few days, I kind of lost track of that.

A few things have gotten in the way of my new favourite pass time recently, be it work, family, friends, whatever. But I haven't lost sight of what I love about this community and I want to make a real effort to get back into the swing of things and make this something that I do.

Working (IRL)

Since November 2017, I've been working on a sound design project for an independent film studio based here in the UK. We're working on a concept trailer for a project, which we'll soon be bringing to Kickstarter, called Retro Grade Future. It's been an incredibly fun and rewarding project so far, but we're in the final month of production and there's a big push to get everything finished off and perfect, ready for release. A project like this takes up a lot of time and my focus has been very much aimed at getting that to a point where the director and I are happy to put this thing out into the world. It's coming, very very soon. So expect another more detailed post about this closer to release.

Trading

I'm reluctant to start posting about my crypto portfolio/trading decision, to be honest. It seems everyone on this platform is doing that at the moment, understandably. But, I don't consider myself an expert on the matter by any stretch of the imagination and, while I am keen to discuss it in a future post at some point, I'm doubtful that I'll be posting about it regularly.

However, I will say that at the moment, as the market is making some big corrections and taking what looks like a huge downturn, I'm not worried and am keen to see this as an opportunity for accumulation and portfolio growth before the next rally upwards. I've therefore been making a concerted effort recently to learn some basic techniques of trading in the Altcoin market, and ultimately grow my portfolio.

Exploring what Steem and decentralised social networking really has to offer

Since joining Steemit, I've been burying myself at every available spare moment in the platform and trying to learn about everything it has to offer. As a musician and music lover, I'm interested in how Steemit can help me bring my music to new audiences and the discussions I can have with people about my favourite subject.

I've been exploring the 3 Ds (Dlive, Dtube and Dsound) and looking at ways that I can use them to not only share my creations but to share my knowledge in music production, songwriting, sound design and composition and to help other creatives here on Steemit grow, improve and thrive. I have some ideas of how I want to achieve that and I will be discussing them in more detail soon in a separate post.

Starting today and moving into the immediate future, I will be continuing to listen to new albums daily and writing reviews. However, as much as I'd like to be able to commit to posting daily write-ups (and that is the ultimate goal), with life, work and everything else that comes with it I'm unsure as to whether that will be possible. I'm going to try, but I can't guarantee it.

I will be starting live Streaming on Dlive very soon (you'll be the first to know), where I plan to stream myself in the studio, creating music, sound design and any of my other creative endeavours. I think it's important that people are able to see the creative process as a whole, to truly understand it and to get a clear picture of how other people go about it. Everyone creates things differently, and having a "fly on the wall" perspective may open up your eyes to something that you hadn't yet considered.

I do want to make a couple of posts about my recent trading decisions, particularly about Hive account@altcoinbuzz, Hive account@travelstheworld and Hive account@louisthomas and about how they've helped me move forward and learn more about this space. However, as I said, I'm reluctant to make this a regular thing, as I don't consider myself an expert in any respect. However, if people like them and they want to see more, I'm open to the idea of the occasional opinion piece here and there.

TL;DR: In short, I want to be more active and more involved with Steemit and the wider blockchain community.