Weekday Work Schedule

March is the month of being awesome, so I am trying to do a new thing every week in that vein. Last week I created my goals for the month and started in on all of them - with mixed success. But my overall effort pleased me (no burning out so far!) so I'm not going to detail the failures.

This week I am implementing a structured weekday work schedule. It's something I've tried in the past, but I always ended up taking a day where I said "fuck it" and spent the whole day watching TV and eating cereal straight from a box. Ugly, I know. But I think I've set myself up for a relatively painless segue into a structured workday this time because for the past month or so I've been good about working every day and - much more importantly - treating it like work.

("Work" has always motivated me. Ask any boss or teacher I've ever had; I was one of their best employees/students and they never had to wonder if I'd have something done on time or if they'd find me idly not working whenever they stopped by.)   

Here is the schedule I am striving to maintain, starting today:

Wake up at 0700 - doable since this is when the boy's alarm goes off.

0700 - 0800: Make breakfast (COFFEE) and read a book.

0800 - 0900: Blog stuff / social media stuff.

0900 - 1100: Work on Holyoak Five.

1100 - 1200: Pick something in the house to clean. (I use Unfuck Your Habitat for motivation and you should too.)

1200 - 1300: Make lunch and read some more of that book.

1300 - 1500: Work on current WIP novel. (For now, Grave of the Goddess.)

1500 until the boy gets home or until I'm done: Clean the kitchen.

Wish me luck! I'm confident in my abilities to focus, but I have the worst time forming habits. I have actually put an alarm into my phone for every single one of these time frames just to keep me on task. Or, you know, cause guilt if I'm backsliding.

How's everyone else in the Write Motivation community doing with their goals? This week I hope to start making the blog rounds during my social media hour in the morning to do some cheerleading. :)

On Being 27, and My Monthly Goals

Yesterday was my birthday. And now I'm 27. There is a funny thing about this age – and by funny, I mean morbid. Have you ever heard of the 27 club? By pure coincidence (I'm sure), several famous musicians have died at the age of 27. Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin… Just to name a few.

Okay, I don't actually think I'm going to die this year, but I am morbidly convinced that something awful is going to happen to me or someone I love. Is that stupid? Maybe, but it's there. I've been obsessed with the idea of the 27 club for a long time; I'm even writing a book about it - A Hunter's Fire.

At any rate, I think 27 is going to be much better than 26. On a superficial level, I like odd numbers better than even numbers. Also, the number seven has always been kind to me. Both 17 and 7 were wonderful ages for me. Not to mention, I still have three years to go until the dreaded 30. So that's not too bad.

Enough of that. Let's talk about writing.

January was a total wash in terms of writing. I was supposed to be finishing Grave of the Goddess, but I barely got anything done on it. February was much better: I started writing Holyoak Five, and that has been going swimmingly. (If you haven't read this story blog yet, please consider checking it out. Link is below, or in my sidebar.)

I want March to be my month of Awesome. Because I'm still unemployed, I'm able to be extraordinarily productive in terms of my writing. I want to take advantage of that for as long as I possibly can. So in that vein, let's take a look at my goals for this month.

MARCH GOALS
 1 - Participate in Write Motivation
2 - Blog post about writing once a week
3 - Booking Through Thursday post once a week
4 - Post an episode of Holyoak Five every Friday
5 - Finish reading at least 4 books (in an effort to catch up to my Goodreads challenge)
6 - See note.

Note! I posted on Write Motivation that I wanted to catch up on my backlog of critiques for Grave of the Goddess's first chapter, BUT I think it's far more important to just finish the rough draft before I start in on the rewrite. I was hanging with my boys yesterday, and they agreed with me about this. So I'm adding a goal of ~500 words a day of work on GotG for March.

All right. Wow, if you stuck around through all that, thanks. My final note is this: I followed everyone from the Write Motivation roll call sheet on Twitter and by blog, and I'm hoping to participate a good deal in a community of motivated writers. Here's to making friends and enjoying the community spirit.

Hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting to say. This post made me feel wicked self-conscious. o.0

Resuming Course

I was doing well with the posting for awhile. What happened?

My typical sinking-back-into-bad-habits happened. I'm pretty sick of resolving to do things and failing to follow through. You think that would be enough to motivate me to, you know, STOP FAILING. But it doesn't. Sigh.

At any rate, here I am now, more than a month since my last post.

Feel like I've finally settled into my job. Nice feeling. Though I still worry about working for what is, essentially, a paper company. Nobody buys paper anymore; it's definitely a dying industry. All I have to do is look around Holyoke to see what kind of destruction dying industries wreak on people's lives. (Let alone my experiences in Worcester.) But I've adopted a wait and see approach to this job. I'm trying to give it a few months to really get a feel of whether this is going to be successful for me long-term or not.

LESS THAN A MONTH FROM CLOSING ON THE HOUSE. Yes, that deserved the caps-lock frenzy.

Oh! And I get to see my parents and also Dylan's new niece (I think of her as nearly-my-niece) next week. That's incredibly exciting for the following reasons:

1. I haven't been home in a stupid long time. 
2. I love babies.  Especially other people's babies.  
3. The Fourth of July is the best holiday ever and the only part of summer I really look forward to. (I know, I'm weird.)

So there's all of that. Oh right. And I decided last minute to attempt to write 50,000 words of a chick lit/mainstream novel that I have only the bare bones of a plot for in the 31 days of July. While I vacation and move and all that. Yaaay...

Yup.

Solutions (Update #1)

Remember how I said I wanted to lose 40 pounds by my next birthday? Well, progress has been... progressing.

Tell me more.

Let's review the past few weeks, shall we?

Now that the boy and I are all moved in to our new place and I've gotten used to commuting two hours a day, I have been trying to focus more on my new fitness goals. It's difficult, but not quite as difficult as I thought it might be. Reason number one for that might be that I decided to give myself some rewards to work toward. More about these later.

My wonderful mother also sent me a FitBit Ultra! This little device is an amazing resource. Wear it during the day and it tracks how many steps you take, how many flights of stairs you walk up, how many calories you've burned, and how many miles you've walked. Wear it at night and it will tell you how long you slept and how many times you woke up during the night (a.k.a. how much you really slept). The Ultra model even gives you personalized messages (No donut!) as well as working as a clock and giving you a progress bar during the day to let you know how active you've been.It keeps all of this information so you can review it by day, by week, and by month. The FitBit has been a great motivator for walking a bit more than normal... Taking stairs instead of escalators... Get to bed earlier... I love it and can't recommend it more, although it is a tad bit pricey.



I've been keeping a food journal as well. Writing down every bite I eat, and as much of what I can drink that I remember. (Honestly, it's harder than you think to remember every glass of water.) I started out doing this on my phone with the FitBit app and the MyFitnessPal app - both of which will count the calories of food you enter. This has proved a bit too cumbersome for my tastes however and I have switched to using my aforementioned Star Wars moleskine. Another great motivator for leaving food on my plate and not reaching for the cookies I know are in the cupboard. It's also been a good place to keep track of my various moods, headaches, and work outs. I'm starting to see a serious relationship between how active I am and how good I feel. And I've noticed that starting my day with protein usually goes a lot smoother than starting it with carbs. Innnnnnteressting.

Today I discovered a local rail trail. Since it rained like the dickens this morning (and work got canceled) I went to check it out and ended up walking three miles through beautiful woods both rural and urban. Even shared a few nice words with a cute elderly couple. It was glorious! I think I'll start walking it every day. Maybe bring my bike down. Eventually start running on it. Tomorrow I'll go check out the other half and see if it's just as good.

If my scale can be believed, I've lost at least one pound so far. That's one down and many to go. My first reward comes when my scale reliably puts me below 170 every time. I'm going to post a separate page to keep track of my progress and rewards. Feel free to drop by with any input and/or encouragement!

So happy with myself today!

Progress (or, rather, lack thereof)

Holy dairy cows, the past couple weeks (read: two months) have been crazy.

I went through the whole moving process - that took about a month total of looking for a place, signing a lease, packing, moving, and now we're still in the process of settling in. I've given up two hours of my days to driving back and forth from work which is just fun.  

And I'm still struggling to write. I've been journaling a lot more... though not in my usual detail or with any of my usual - a-hem - flair. And obviously I've been neglectful of this blog (as well as two others). It's an uphill battle as they say.

At least I'm up in New Hampshire for the weekend. Wonderful family times can't be beat. Good for recharging, etc. I need it after this week in particular. I got stung by a bee for the first time in about twenty years. No anaphylactic shock, but my finger did swell up to a glorious size for three days. Cue me going into a Benadryl induced coma and losing a bunch of time. No writing. No working. No exercise. Zero progress - unless you count healing insect damage.

My motivation for everything in still high, though I feel pretty frustrated. I've been quite good about keeping my food and fitness journal (it's a Star Wars moleskine that I titled "How to Become a Jedi Like Luke Skywalker"). I've been writing something... almost every day. Even when it's only 100 words. And I've been thinking about my writing almost non-stop. I pulled out a couple of old books: How to Write A Damn Good Novel by James Frey and Bird By Bird by Annie Lamott.

They both, of course, have sections addressing the problem of writer's block. Typical stuff, but good to hear. It happens to everyone, blah blah. Don't let it stop you, blah blah. If you're a writer, you'll figure out a a way through it, blah blah. Mostly it's a matter of hitting your head on the keyboard until something falls out.

Anyway, that's what's up with me for now. What up with all of you? Any of you who stop by and read this at point or another, that is....

There can only be one.

I've been so frustrated with my writing lately. Too many projects with not enough focus = not enough writing. Every time I open a word document I just stare at it with this horrible exhausted feeling.

So. I'm going to set aside everything else and just work on Face the Flames. Until it's done. That's right. DONE. All 36 chapters of it. That means no super book for awhile. No Mortal Coils. No Wings of Destiny. No nothing except this, my first and most personal universe.

Bring it!