Putting Pen to Paper...the Best Place to Start!

Alright, so January was not as productive as befitted the energy in my New Year's resolution post. I'm not reprimanding myself, I had set a lot of goals and I accomplished a great deal, but I have learned that growth and improvement in life can only really happen when one reflects on what didn't go perfectly. For example:

• I exercised A LOT (as usual), but didn't change, and maybe even increased my eating habits...leaving my happy weight goal about equidistant away.
• I had days of moderate and disciplined spending, but then in moments of high stress or low happiness, I satiated myself with a new piece of costume bling.
• I wrote here and there but didn't have a focus.  

You get the idea. And therefore my lesson learned (and I swear I knew this already) is that if you focus on too many things, you get very little accomplished on each one. The frustration of this leads to a place of being tired, overwhelmed and not in the right frame of mind to tackle anything.  And this state makes one very vulnerable to the procrastination bug. Which left untreated becomes a way of life and stretches out until the very moment of the next set of New Year's resolutions. 

This all leads me to the plan for February/March, which is to focus on one thing from my list. The writing.  Because I will never feel good if I have this lingering piece of work sitting there on a corner of my desk, this big dark lump of unfinished business.  Here's The Plan:

The Book

I'm completely stuck. I have 700 hundred pages of early-morning, sleep-deprived words committed to pages and I have no idea what to do with them. I had a plan for the first edit. When that didn't pan out, I felt completely lost in terms of the next steps. The thought of going back into it and trying to figure out which 200 pages of 700 are better than the rest is as desirable a prospect as sitting in a room filled with all my ex-boyfriends and their new wives (yes 95% of them are married or just about). 

The book takes place in the real-life past of my own life. That's a frightening, mildly depressing and painfully nostalgic place. So I probably need to hire an editor. And I'm not really in the financial position (hence the curbing shopping resolution that I haven't quite tackled - as I sit here in the market eating decadent french toast with apples and sausage with a big bag of fresh Joe fresh clothing sitting on the bench beside me).

But I might just need to do it. I'm going to meet with some freelance editors this month/next and explore my options, the costs, etc. I'm also going to meet with a few writing colleagues to brainstorm ideas on next steps.  And I'm going to navigate scrivener, a program that helps you play around with the structure of a story. I want to plot the storyline that I've developed to fit the story I want to tell and see if it makes any kind of logical sense. 

The Blog

Everyone has a blog these days. And without a focus that can target an audience, it just becomes a narcissistic recounting of your thoughts and life. Fine if you are famous and you are therefore the subject of the site, but for the rest of us it just becomes something that your friends feel pressured to read. 

That's okay for now. The object today is just to have a reason and an outlet to write. But there are so many things I would like to talk about, namely the amazing (said with sarcasm) stories that come with dating into your 30s.

But I am very hesitant to be publicly attached to these stories. Namely because in the age of googling dates, I think most of my potential suitors would back away if they knew that I might document them the way that I would (I always wondered how Carrie Bradshaw still got dates after publishing the intimate details of her love life in the New York Post). 

The goal now is to continue to post once a month on this blog. February: check. And I'm going to start an anonymous blog dealing with dating stories. Those of you that know me well will know what it is...everyone else will just have to wait until it's turned into a novel and I have a ring on my finger.  

Daily musings

I'm feeling especially uncreative and overwhelmed lately. But everyone that writes on writing says that the real key, the magic trick, the solution to the block, is just to write... every day. That's a lot and I'm busy. But I'm going to make it a goal to write for at least 20 minutes, 4 times a week.

Getting Published

They say it's easier to get published if you are already published. Hello, Catch 22. I am going to try to publish at least one story (fiction or non) this year.

So that's the focus for now.  What are you going to focus on over the next 3 months?