Now that the “advent” series is over and the new year is in full effect, I’m moving on to putting plans in motion.
I’m not big on making resolutions as I feel those have been, at least for me, a fast track to frustration when I fail to meet them. But my “plans” could be resolutions, perhaps it’s all semantics?
My only real resolution is to brush my teeth twice a day. I wrote on a FB post about why:
I have most of my life simply brushed my teeth once, in the morning. This functioned to keep my teeth in sterling shape as I kind of lucked out on the genetics part. However my pitfalls into depression after the breakdown of 2008 ruined my teeth because I rarely brushed at all when I was in a low. So, at this point, they are in a far more precarious place and I just need to take better care of them. While getting to a dentist is a high-priority goal for 2017, in the meantime, I think committing to brushing twice a day is a good step forward.
So there is my resolution.
Now, my plans are based on my Four Important Things philosophy, and boil down to using one of my important things (writing) to supplant another important thing (day!job) so that I can then free up that space for a new important thing. In fact, that was something I stated in that very post, back in mid-2015…I just didn’t realize that “therapy” was going to become my fourth important thing for the rest of that year through 2016. Therapy quite literally supplanted writing during that time — oh, I did blogs and some minor writing projects here and there, but it was one of those “pasted on” things, and so was duly shuffled aside when I was tired or stressed.
These are my Four Important Things as of today:
- Day!job (takes up the most time, that’s for sure)
- Writing career
- Art classes/study/practice
- Self-care
I put self-care on there to keep myself from burning out, which I am prone to do. In fact, my friend Patricia chastised me about it because, uhm, being overzealous with unreasonably high expectations of myself is something I’m occasionally known to do. Sometimes. *shifty eyes*
Self-care consists of meditation, walking and playing with Keely, and dancing (of the free-form-in-my-living-room-stress release variety).
The writing career is going to be the tricky one, and requires me actually, you know, writing. A lot. I’m aiming for a reasonable (for me) 2k words a day on weekdays; editing on the weekend; and “business” stuff on Sunday (marketing, technical stuff). I’ll be doing self-publishing because I’ll be writing romance stories, sf, fantasy…I’m not the kind of writer who can churn out boilerplate niche genre stories, so I have to capitalize on what I am good at which, hopefully, is writing good stories people want to read.
Is this a turn-key method of swift financial independence? Hell no. I have no idea how long this will take, and neither does anyone else — some people make a lot of money self-publishing their stories right out of the gate, others churn out stories for years without going anywhere.
But it’s time for me to put pedal to the metal, burn rubber, and hit the road…and by “road” I mean “sit down and write like a mofo”.
TOMORROW: How I plan to avoid burnout and not crash my plans by being unrealistic and overly demanding of myself.
