This past weekend I took some time off from the Internet and a lot of things that might have been keeping me stressed. It felt so nice to relax a bit and not think about things that I “needed” to do. I spent all of Saturday just reading and working out to my Wii games. Sometimes it’s best to just slow down and relax, enjoy the present.
I’ve been reading a couple of self-help books lately, and one line from Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover has struck a chord with me: to successfully accomplish something, one must have focus and take small steps at a time. It’s not the exact wording of the phrase, but that’s the general idea. It’s stayed on my mind for a couple of days because it has made me wonder if the reason why I haven’t made much strides in my writing projects is because I haven’t had focus. I’ve set out a lot of goals for myself in the field of writing, and a lot of them I’ve been attempting to work at simultaneously, e.g., finishing the first draft of Novel 4 and rewriting Novel 1. Aside from those two big goals, I’ve had smaller goals as well: blog daily in each of my blogs (three of them!), write reviews on Yelp! as often as possible, and so on. The smaller goals have become more habitual just because they are daily things for me; however, even with those, I have fallen behind.
It’s probably due to the fact that I keep just giving a little progress into each area, so it feels slow and frustrating right now. I wonder if I should reduce the amount of goals I have and try to just focus on one. What is more important to me right now?
In other news, late last week I finally received my author photos from NaNoWriMo‘s “Night of Writing Dangerously”. I had nearly forgotten about those photos until I saw the email in my inbox; they were initially supposed to be ready by February, but they probably got backlogged in their work. No worries; I was still glad to see the high-quality pictures. I’ll be posting them up on my website and my profiles as soon as I crop them down a little (they are very large files). I think it’s time to update my author photos anyway; haven’t updated in awhile! The pink jacket can only hold the audience’s attention for so long.
Here’s to (hopefully) a productive week ahead.