Tag Archives: creativity

Looking Back and Looking Forward (My 2018 Recap and 2019 Goals)

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Oh, wait, what? It’s a whole new year.

Which means it’s time to look back at all the goals I set (and forgot about) at the beginning of 2018, and set some shiny new goals for 2019. Here goes nothing…

2019 goals

2018 Goal Recap:

  • Publish Esmeralda’s Story: Apparently 2018 was so long that I completely forgot this novelette even existed by the end of it, but you can purchase a Kindle copy of Empty Little Heart: Esmeralda’s Story on Amazon! That’s one goal to strike of my list, at least.
  • Write and revise at least one book: Yeah… this didn’t work out. I did do little bits of work here and there on some of my background projects (and also came up with about a hundred other project ideas, some of which would involve massive amounts of work. Yay!) but I never got even close to finishing one of my many first drafts. :/
  • Get my driver’s licence: This… actually happened. It still doesn’t seem real that I’m legally allowed to just go out and drive a car around by myself, but it happened.
  • Read more: This is kind of a vague goal, but I did ramp up my 2017 Goodreads Challenge Goal of 60 books, which I completed, to 70 books for 2018. Unfortunately, I only ended up reading 67 books out of those 70, so I don’t think I can really give myself full credit for this one.
  • Make more artistic stuff: Another really vague goal which I can’t really measure. I posted only one piece of artwork to Instagram this year, but that’s not really a good reflection of the amount of art I’ve done, since I almost never post pictures of my artwork. I did branch out into soap- and candle-making near the end of the year, which I guess could kind of count as ‘artistic stuff’? But I definitely wasn’t creating as consistently as I would like.
  • Embrace my emo side: I kind of randomly threw this ‘goal’ in for laughs, and then never actually did anything to realize it, besides occasionally wearing my assortment of chokers, my silver cross necklace, and enormous dangly chain earrings, and acquiring one or two new pieces of black clothing for my wardrobe. I dyed my hair at the beginning of 2018, and it hasn’t been redone since, and however much I dream of getting a fancy purple ombre, I’m really not sure when (or if) that’s going to happen.
  • Procrastinate less: This once again unmeasurable goal ended up completely backfiring, and I think I spent more of 2018 procrastinating than doing anything else. If you read my post Vicious Cycles, you’ll know all about the cycle of laziness and always taking the easy way out that I was stuck in. The new year seems to have cleared the air, at least a little bit, and I’m hoping that maybe I can power through it and create new habits of mindfulness and actually doing things before the cycle sets in again.
  • Exercise, exercise, exercise: Like most of my goals in 2018, this started out very well at the beginning, and kind of just sputtered out somewhere in the middle of the year. I’m trying to ease myself back into quick Pilates routines and long walks in the outside air, and I’ve even started going to the gym with my dad and brother now and then. Hopefully I can keep up the momentum this time.
  • Write more blog posts: I wanted to be posting weekly. I was even doing monthly wrap up posts with updates and plans for the next month. But in 2018 I only wrote 36 blog posts, a far cry from the 70 that were posted in 2017. Going back and looking at my 2017 Best Of/Wrap Up post, it’s hard for me to not notice the enthusiasm, the sheer excitement for what I had accomplished, and what the new year might hold in store. I could say that I feel like I’ve lost that, and that I’m disheartened and cynical and don’t know how to  recapture that lost flame, but… that wouldn’t be quite true, actually . There’s a flicker of that excitement inside me now, because I can see where I’ve failed, and I can see ways to fix it. I want to lean into that, to make better goals this year, and accomplish more of them. So here we go…

My 2019 Goals:

Criteria: These goals must be inherently measurable, specific, and able to be accomplished in the next 12 months.

  • Write and revise the script for my new Super Secret Project. That’s right, I said script. And this is not the same Super Secret Sci-Fi project from last year, which is so far on the back burner that it’s basically off the stove at this point. I won’t say too much about this project, as if it works out it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to complete, but it is there and it is humming along in the background, and I do want to put some work into it this year.
  • Complete Create This Book 2 by the end of 2019. Create This Book 2 is the second art-journal-type book from Moriah Elizabeth. I discovered her stuff late last year, and her Create This Book series really caught my eye. Create This Book 2 has 100 unique prompts to inspire all kinds of artwork, which you can create right on the pages of the book. I picked the second book because it has a more manageable number of prompts, and if I complete two prompts each week I can finish the book by the end of the year! I’m hoping that this consistent art creation will help me improve my skills, and that the book’s creative prompts will challenge me to try new mediums and techniques that I would have never picked up otherwise. I’m going to try to post at least some of my artwork on my Instagram, if you’re interested. 🙂
  • Read 50 books. Yes, 50 is a step down from my goal of 70 last year, but I’m heading into the home stretch of school, and things are getting more challenging and time consuming, so with that and my many other projects, I may not have as much time to read as in previous years. I think that 50 is a rather more manageable goal for me at the moment, and it would be much better to meet and surpass a smaller goal, as I did in 2017, then to fail a larger goal.
  • Review more books, movies, and videogames. This goal may sound vague, but I don’t want to set a specific threshold for reviews. I’m planning to at least review the big Marvel films of 2019 on this blog, as always, and continue posting short book reviews on my Goodreads profile. And yes, it has been nearly two years since my last videogame review, but I recently picked up some awesome indie titles with my Christmas money, so keep your eyes peeled for those reviews sometime soon!
  • Post what I want, when I want. Whether it’s poetry, random essays, movie, music, or film reviews, awesome quotes, or what have you, I don’t want to box myself into a set once-a-week-or-more posting schedule. I think giving myself the freedom to miss a week or two without worrying about disappointing people or not meeting my goals may actually help me to post more, but of course we’ll have to see. That being said, I would like to write at least 30 posts on the blog this year. Hopefully, that’s not too much to ask of myself.

And… that’s it! It may be fewer goals than I set for myself last year, but I think that’s a good thing. I can see my way clear to completing these goals in the next 12 months, and if it all works out maybe I’ll ramp it up for 2020. Who knows! I’m just excited to be a bit more inspired than usual, and I’m hoping that concrete goals and solid plans for implementing them will go the distance that my own sheer willpower, random inspiration, and zero planning skills has gotten me in the past.

Talk to me, friend! Tell me about your goals for 2019, and your plans for implementing them. Are you as surprised as I am that it’s already 2019?? Let’s chat in the comments below!

See you again soon!

🙂

Vicious Cycles: A Short Essay on Willful Self-Sabotage

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Maybe you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks. Maybe you don’t actually care. Either way, I made a goal at the start of the year to write at least one blog post every week, to finally get back into the swing of things and start creating consistently again. Obviously, that didn’t happen. And it’s completely my fault.

This year started off well enough. I was blogging pretty consistently. I was doing pretty well mentally. I thought maybe I’d begun to shake some stuff and get back into the creative lane I’d been riding in 2017. I was exercising every day. I had the will power and the energy to tell myself what I needed to do and get it done. But that didn’t last. It started with staying up a little later to finish a post or get a few more words down. It ended with a garbage fire.

Somewhere along the way, I got tired. Physically, emotionally, mentally. It became easier and easier to watch YouTube instead of pounding out another blog post, easier to scroll through Instagram instead of working on a new book. As my energy levels flagged, I began to take the path of least resistance, the path that didn’t require thought or careful word choice or energy besides the minuscule amount required to thumb through my Twitter feed. It became easier to keep the lights on late rather than lie in bed and wrestle with insomnia. It became easier to say that I’d do it tomorrow, when I was less tired, and easier to wake up even tireder than I’d been the day before. It was easier to not try to fix it or do anything about it. It was easier to promise big things later, and sabotage myself now.

I came to with a shovel in my hands and dirt piled high behind me. I was digging myself into a rut, further and further in, further and further down. Consciously. Knowingly. Willfully. I knew (and I know) exactly how to dig myself out of that hole, but by this point it had become a vicious cycle, and it was easier to keep on digging myself deeper into that rut than to try and clamber out. I had already dug a grave for my creativity. It was easier to bury it than to try for resurrection.

But I know what I need to do, and I think maybe I can do it. It sounds easy; just put the phone down and turn off the lights and rest, but somehow it’s really, really hard. It’s hard to make things. Its hard to want to make things when you’re so tired you can hardly keep your eyes open. It’s hard to want to go to bed when it’s become so much easier to just not. But I think maybe it’s better to struggle against the cycle than to live your life with a need to make things and no ability to do so.

Vicious Cycles

Challenging Ourselves: Why Writing Needs to Be Difficult

Posted on by under For All the Bookworms

Here’s something that should be said more often: Writing is really, really difficult. From the outside, it looks deceivingly simple. You open up a Microsoft Word document, bang out somewhere around 40,000 words, and suddenly you have a novel. What could be easier? Why are those authors over there whining about the pitfalls of editing and the horror that is first drafts? What do they have to complain about? Writing is easy!

I used to think like that. I used to think that if it wasn’t easy for me, than I must be doing something wrong. I must not be a good enough writer. I’m procrastinating too much. My sentences are incoherent. Most the time, I fail to have an actual plot until I’m about half way through the first draft. I must not have had enough practice. I am not worthy to call myself ‘author’ unless I can write a new book every three months and have it be completely fabulous the first time around.

Here’s the thing, though: none of that is true. Writing is not easy. We don’t write because it’s easy. We don’t write so that, someday, it can be easy. We write because we have to, because it challenges us, because we are called to write. We write for the same reason that musicians make music and painters paint.

This might not sound super relevant, but stick with me for a moment: I work at a gym, a jungle gym, where kids come to learn parkour and gymnastics. Before I got a job there, I took classes. My teacher, now my boss, had a few things to say to us students about challenging ourselves. I am greatly paraphrasing, but, “If you’re doing something and it’s easy, then you’re not learning anything,” he told us, “Pick something difficult, something that you can’t do, and do that until it’s easy. Then pick the next difficult thing.”

So when we write, and it seems impossible to get it just right even on the third or fourth of fifth draft, let’s not complain (not too much, anyway). In that moment, you are learning something entirely new. You are learning the ten thousand ways that don’t work in order to find the way that does. You are mastering something difficult. You are improving your writing, even if in the moment it looks like absolute rubbish. Writing is not easy. It’s not supposed to be. If we wanted to do something easy, we would be shuffling papers in an office somewhere. Writing has to be difficult so that we can learn to write better.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this post. What do you think? What are some things you find difficult, or some difficult things you’ve mastered or learned from in the past? Let me know in the comments.

🙂

Challenging Ourselves

Wednesday With Words: A Boiling Imagination

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Today, I wanted to share this lovely quote from Francis Shaeffer’s He Is There And He Is Not Silent, a book which tackles the distortion of truth and goodness in our current culture, and shows how Christianity is the only viable option that can explain our world. This particular quote is extremely encouraging to me as an author and creative person, because, sometimes, Christians get caught up in this idea that we shouldn’t be creative, because it must be wrong somehow.

Creativity

On my reading list this week:

The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery: Another lesser-known novel by the author of Green Gables. It was on our shelf, and I am very good at not reading the things I probably should be reading (*cough, cough* The Mysterious Benedict Society *cough, cough*) so I thought I’d try it out. I’m only a chapter in, but it already promises to be very interesting.

As always, Wednesdays With Words is hosted by ladydusk.

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