Goals for the New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions–I find it all rather arbitrary and a little poorly timed (I still have a lot of leftover Christmas-related sugar, dangit). However, I do like to take this opportunity to review my year for improvements and consider continuing and new goals for the coming year–things that I can fail at and stumble on without giving up. They’re aims, not requirements. If I’m being honest, I take it all very seriously (I’m a spreadsheet, checklist, graph, and written-analysis kind of person). I make a “Little Book of Goals” that I print out, staple together, and carry around with me, just as a reminder of those things towards which I’m working. It helps me focus my efforts.

2018 turned out not to be my year. Which is okay–it’s going to happen from time to time. I’m not always great with change, and a lot of things changed this year. But those changes have bred new opportunities, which I’m already embracing. For example, while work on Cursed suffered this year, I did a HUGE amount of brainstorming and have completely reworked it so that I’m ready to begin the rewrite. In 2018, I spent a great deal of my time on Toastmasters and violin, and my career in finance has continued on an upward trajectory.

I also learned a great deal about myself this year. I struggled with some dark moods several times, but I’ve managed to pinpoint some of the causes and have been actively working to eliminate those aggravators. I’ve reached the end of my rope concerning not exercising, and my frustration has finally reached a point that compels me to do something about it. I also started listening to myself speak, and I’m actively working to better control my tongue.

For 2019, I’ve already created my little goal book, and I’ll share a few of the goals for each of the categories:

• Fitness: Work out three times a week for >30 mins.
• Spiritual: Five-minute prayer every morning and evening.
• Academic: Complete the Effective Coaching pathway in Toastmasters.
• Literary: Rewrite Cursed (again!).
• Recreational: Practice >6 hours of violin a week.
• Domestic: Build and install custom bookcases.
• Travel: Visit my grandma.
• Intellectual: Read a total of 60 books.
• Financial: Save 50% of gross earnings.
• Health: Go to bed before 10:30pm every night.

There are several more “goals” that I have in mind that supplement those listed here, but I try to keep everything as simple as possible. I’m preparing for some big changes to potentially happen this year: my first personal clients, my own purchased home, greater health (now that I better understand how to get myself there). None of it is guaranteed, but I’m arranging things just in case.

Ultimately, if I can, at any given point, immediately make the things around me just a little bit better than they are–my house, my attitude, my skill level, my understanding, my finances–then my life as a whole will be a little bit better.

So I will leave you with well wishes for your own wonderful new year and the piece with which I begin and end every year (and NaNoWriMo, in fact):

God Bless!

80HA Day 1: In Which I Spend 1.5 Hours Floundering on a Single Sentence

Welcome to August, everyone! I’m going to begin by explaining in a little more detail my intentions for Eighty-Hour August, and then I’ll jump right in!

Eighty-Hour August is my “writer’s retreat” smack dab in the middle of my busy life. In past years, I have taken a week out of August for a writing retreat, of sorts, but this year I want to carry it through the entire month. Wordsmithing, however, is not all about writing, but also brainstorming, editing, rewriting, and reviewing. Measuring my progress by word count would be impossible, and so I’m going to use hours (and minutes) instead. My goal is to devote 80 hours of my month to the craft.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to join, no matter your goal. With Camp NaNoWriMo over and official NaNoWriMo still several months away, I wanted to engage in a “program” that holds me accountable to write, and having some writing buddies wouldn’t hurt!

As for today, I’m calling it a night much later than I anticipated. My Toastmasters meeting ran a little late (I was invited to stay for the officers’ meeting, as I am the VPE-in-training), and I had some trivialities to mind when I came home. An overhead lightning storm, while gorgeous to watch and hear, also threatened my wordsmithing time. I know far too many people who have lost electronics (and even roofs!) to lightning strikes. The perils of Florida living, alas.

That said, my title is hyperbolic–I only spent about half that time on a single sentence–the first sentence of my new Cursed rewrite. The remaining 45 minutes was spent writing more in the first scene, enough to fill up at least a page for the Writers’ Got Talent portion of the conference I’ll be attending on Saturday. I ended up writing 809 words for the day. It’s two pages’ worth of writing that needs serious reworking, but I mention the word count because it surprised me.

Here’s to many good surprises this month!

Current standing: 1.5/80 hours

Camp NaNo18: Day 11

After a long, roller coaster of a day, I’ve written 3,185 words, bringing me up to a total of 36,231 words for the month. I ended up splitting my writing between my brainstorming project (which has now surpassed 30k words) and a short speech for Toastmasters. The latter needs much refinement, including cutting about 300 words to make it a more reasonable length, but that’s for after Camp.

One of the things I’ve noticed this month is my ability to throw away old ideas for this story to make way for new ones. It’s amazing how time can dull the ache of killing your darlings. Given time away from a project, your perspective is altered and your opinion revised, sometimes even reversed. It reminds me of when, about a month ago, I pulled out my old art portfolio, expecting to find that certain pieces I had created were still interesting. But apparently ten years of experience in the real world, improvement in the medium, and the gradual dissipation of my initial love for any of those particular pieces really made a difference in how I regarded them. I was a little appalled by how bad they were!

Nonetheless, in writing as in art, our old work is nothing to feel shame about. After all, it is only on the foundation of that earlier effort that we are able to build something better. There’s never a “perfect,” and, as Michaelangelo (played by Charlton Heston) points out to Pope Julius II (played by Rex Harrison) in The Agony and the Ecstasy, the only time there is an “end” to our creative endeavor is “When I’m finished.” (The question is asked numerous times in the movie–in this clip, only once. If you haven’t already, find a way to see this classic film. It’s excellent!)

And while I’m no Michaelangelo, regardless of the craft, that possibility for improvement gives me something to strive for, something to live for. Without having first come up with those original ideas, I might not have conceived of another, much better idea that will make it into the final story.

Happy writing, everyone!

 

June Update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a real update, but I have been hard at work on the wordsmithing front. The bellows are pumping harder than normal lately, even though my concentration has not been on the words themselves but on longer-term planning.

After a less-than-stellar-but-still-productive April Camp, I have decided to join July’s Camp NaNo. I’ll be going for the November standard of 50,000 (I think), but this time around I’m going to explore some new projects. I’ve consulted “the list” I created of things I like and possible plot strands and narrowed my camp novel choice down to two concepts—not quite plots. The plot bunnies are proliferating like mad this year, so I’m regularly beset by about four hundred thousand other ideas at any given moment.