At the beginning of last month I set a few goals, so I thought I'd update you on how they went.
Goal #1: clean
Weeeeeeel, I made some progress here, but it was cancelled out by new mess. There are still two baskets full of clean laundry in my room, but one of them is a new basket with new clean laundry, so that's progress. I did some dusting, but I made all new dust. (I feel this is completely unfair, by the way.) I got rid of some of the junk mail and random paper that I collect like a magnet, but not much.
Bottom line on this goal: my bedroom is still a pit, but not as much of a pit as it would be if I hadn't worked on it a bit.
Goal #2: get my Goodreads Books to Read in 2011 list under 100 titles.
Hahahahahahahahahaha! I did manage to read 12 books that had been sitting on my list for a while, some of them over a year. But I added a bunch of titles, too, and the current total stands at 116.
Goal #3: blog more than once a week
Personal stuff derailed me on this one. I'm getting a handle on it, but no guarantees that I'm going to be any more regular this month than I was last month. But I'm going to try.
And I want to say thank you for all the kind comments on the last post. I appreciate the support.
Goal #3: return movie to Netflix
I did it! And I managed to watch and return a couple other movies, too. Success!
So that's March. Goals for April are:
to finish my taxes (I'm working on them, but slowly)
clear some more floor space in my room
dust and tidy my dresser, which is currently piled high with holiday cards and an inch of dust, in addition to all the usual stuff
blog more
continue to pick a lip balm flavor of the day, because it makes me happy
try to keep my 2011 reading list from growing past 116 this month-- read at least one book for every book that gets added to the list
Sounds good, I think. Doable.
Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Lavender Lemonade
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Goals
Hello! I'm not dead! I'm just up to my eyeballs right now. (How anyone who doesn't work or take care of a family or do anything really can be up to her eyeballs I don't know. But whatever.)
Anyway, I'm here to set a few goals for myself. First (and I can't believe I'm making this my first goal, but that should tell you just how much it's annoying me), I need to clean. I have not one, but two laundry baskets full of clean clothes that need to be folded and put away. There's precious little floor space in this room. I don't need to take it up with laundry. There's about an inch of dust covering everything in the room, and what's not covered in dust is covered in cat hair. Or my hair, because I'm shedding like mad again. At this rate I should be completely bald by next Tuesday. And there are piles of junk mail and general crap everywhere. I can't take it any more. The room must be cleaned.
My second goal for the month is to get my Goodreads "books to read in 2011" list under 100. That's really not all the books I intend or expect to read this year. It grows constantly. But most of the books on that list are things that I've already bought and are languishing in the TBR of Doom. (Sorry, I just read Shannon Stacey's Undeniably Yours, and now everything gets an "of Doom" tacked onto the end. Plus, it really is the TBR of Doom. It's where books I want to read go to be smothered to death under the stack of all the other books I want to read. Scary, scary place, my TBR file.) There are 107 books on the list right now, so if I can read 8 of them, without adding any others (Ha!), I'll meet that goal.
My third goal is to blog more than once a week. That's really kind of pathetic. Even I, who go nowhere and have no life, can usually come up with something to say more often than that.
My fourth goal is to remember to return Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to Netflix. I've only had it for a month now. I've watched some of it, and it's only meh, plus it keeps acting weird and skipping.
So, those are my goals for the month. I think I'll start out strong by sticking the Scott Pilgrim disc back in its envelope (if I can find it) and putting it on the table with the rest of the outgoing mail.
Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gummy Bear
Anyway, I'm here to set a few goals for myself. First (and I can't believe I'm making this my first goal, but that should tell you just how much it's annoying me), I need to clean. I have not one, but two laundry baskets full of clean clothes that need to be folded and put away. There's precious little floor space in this room. I don't need to take it up with laundry. There's about an inch of dust covering everything in the room, and what's not covered in dust is covered in cat hair. Or my hair, because I'm shedding like mad again. At this rate I should be completely bald by next Tuesday. And there are piles of junk mail and general crap everywhere. I can't take it any more. The room must be cleaned.
My second goal for the month is to get my Goodreads "books to read in 2011" list under 100. That's really not all the books I intend or expect to read this year. It grows constantly. But most of the books on that list are things that I've already bought and are languishing in the TBR of Doom. (Sorry, I just read Shannon Stacey's Undeniably Yours, and now everything gets an "of Doom" tacked onto the end. Plus, it really is the TBR of Doom. It's where books I want to read go to be smothered to death under the stack of all the other books I want to read. Scary, scary place, my TBR file.) There are 107 books on the list right now, so if I can read 8 of them, without adding any others (Ha!), I'll meet that goal.
My third goal is to blog more than once a week. That's really kind of pathetic. Even I, who go nowhere and have no life, can usually come up with something to say more often than that.
My fourth goal is to remember to return Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to Netflix. I've only had it for a month now. I've watched some of it, and it's only meh, plus it keeps acting weird and skipping.
So, those are my goals for the month. I think I'll start out strong by sticking the Scott Pilgrim disc back in its envelope (if I can find it) and putting it on the table with the rest of the outgoing mail.
Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gummy Bear
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Re-Discovering
Last fall, in a burst of creative desperation, I took Lani/Lucy's Discovery class. I'd just moved away from the home I loved to live with my parents on the other side of the country. The yankee side. The class was my attempt to hang on to my image of who I was as a person before my health trampled me.
It wasn't a terribly successful venture, not through any fault of Lani's. The day after I arrived in Massachusetts my parents got an offer on their house. What might have been difficult suddenly became impossible. I attended all the classes, but there was no time or space or energy to do the assignments or participate in any meaningful way.
At about the same time I got the idea for the book review blog, and suddenly my attention was split even further. About a month ago I decided that I really wanted to get serious about the blog. I want the reviews to go up like clockwork. I want to have interesting reading related essays at least a couple times a month. Good steady content will drive more people to the site and increase comments. Eventually, it will become what I want it to be: a conversation about books among people who love them. But that relies on me reading and reviewing at a steady rate, at least once a week. My current reading project, which should wrap up next week I hope, hasn't allowed that. But after the first of the year I want to be going great guns.
The desire to review, the personal train wreck of the class, and the fact that I've done basically no fiction writing in the last four years led me to the idea that fiction writing wasn't the dream for me anymore. I decided to quietly shelve the idea. Nothing else about my life was what I'd dreamed or hoped or even wanted. Walking away seemed like the right thing to do.
That, of course, is when the itch returned. The idea, the very, very small idea. Someone laughing. They're happy. I have not the tiniest clue who they are or what their story might be. But I think I want to write it. Just for me. Not for a publisher. Not for my imagined future adoring fans. Just for me.
My happiest times writing were back when I first started. Every night I'd come home from work, eat dinner, and then sit down to write on my word processor. (Did you ever use one of those? It was like the bastard child of a typewriter and a Speak & Spell.) Every night I'd work on my story. I wasn't picturing the beta readers, I wasn't wondering what some editor or agent might think. I was just telling my story to a very interested party-- me. I want to go back to that. I want to write because it's fun and I like it, and damn what anyone else thinks. But first I need a story. So I'm going to do Discovery again.
Lani leaves the class recording up and available to class members. Tonight I downloaded them. Maybe next week or maybe sometime after the first of the year I'm going to go through them again. I want to find out who that laughing person is. I want to know why they were laughing. And I want to laugh along with them.
Ordinarily I'd wonder if I was setting myself up for another fall, to do this again after failing so recently. But you know, it's funny. It was only two months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. Like I was a different person then than I am now. I think there's value for me in those lessons if I just play around with it, take it at my own pace, and see what happens.
I still intend to pull my act together with the book blog. I feel bad that I haven't been as steady and organized as I would have liked. (Also, with only two of us reviewing, the work load is much heavier than I anticipated. If anyone else would like to write a review or two, please let me know.) I think if I can develop a routine for all of my writing, and that includes blogging here, too, the whole process will smooth out.
It's the getting started that's hard.
It wasn't a terribly successful venture, not through any fault of Lani's. The day after I arrived in Massachusetts my parents got an offer on their house. What might have been difficult suddenly became impossible. I attended all the classes, but there was no time or space or energy to do the assignments or participate in any meaningful way.
At about the same time I got the idea for the book review blog, and suddenly my attention was split even further. About a month ago I decided that I really wanted to get serious about the blog. I want the reviews to go up like clockwork. I want to have interesting reading related essays at least a couple times a month. Good steady content will drive more people to the site and increase comments. Eventually, it will become what I want it to be: a conversation about books among people who love them. But that relies on me reading and reviewing at a steady rate, at least once a week. My current reading project, which should wrap up next week I hope, hasn't allowed that. But after the first of the year I want to be going great guns.
The desire to review, the personal train wreck of the class, and the fact that I've done basically no fiction writing in the last four years led me to the idea that fiction writing wasn't the dream for me anymore. I decided to quietly shelve the idea. Nothing else about my life was what I'd dreamed or hoped or even wanted. Walking away seemed like the right thing to do.
That, of course, is when the itch returned. The idea, the very, very small idea. Someone laughing. They're happy. I have not the tiniest clue who they are or what their story might be. But I think I want to write it. Just for me. Not for a publisher. Not for my imagined future adoring fans. Just for me.
My happiest times writing were back when I first started. Every night I'd come home from work, eat dinner, and then sit down to write on my word processor. (Did you ever use one of those? It was like the bastard child of a typewriter and a Speak & Spell.) Every night I'd work on my story. I wasn't picturing the beta readers, I wasn't wondering what some editor or agent might think. I was just telling my story to a very interested party-- me. I want to go back to that. I want to write because it's fun and I like it, and damn what anyone else thinks. But first I need a story. So I'm going to do Discovery again.
Lani leaves the class recording up and available to class members. Tonight I downloaded them. Maybe next week or maybe sometime after the first of the year I'm going to go through them again. I want to find out who that laughing person is. I want to know why they were laughing. And I want to laugh along with them.
Ordinarily I'd wonder if I was setting myself up for another fall, to do this again after failing so recently. But you know, it's funny. It was only two months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. Like I was a different person then than I am now. I think there's value for me in those lessons if I just play around with it, take it at my own pace, and see what happens.
I still intend to pull my act together with the book blog. I feel bad that I haven't been as steady and organized as I would have liked. (Also, with only two of us reviewing, the work load is much heavier than I anticipated. If anyone else would like to write a review or two, please let me know.) I think if I can develop a routine for all of my writing, and that includes blogging here, too, the whole process will smooth out.
It's the getting started that's hard.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Better Blogging
I'm really enjoying this blogging thing, and I want to get better at it. So I did the logical thing and checked out a blogging group. Culture shock. They were all talking about stuff like marketing you blog, whether or not to pay to advertise your blog (do people really do this?), commenting on as many blogs as you can so that people will follow you back to your blog and comment.
Basically, it was all about increasing your stats and comments. Now don't get me wrong. I love comments. It always makes me smile when someone takes the time to comment on something that I've written.
But what I'm really looking for is suggestions on how to write a better blog. Maybe I'm naive, but I happen to believe that a good product, more interesting posts, will eventually build a larger readership. I want people to find my blog, through whatever means, and find it interesting enough to want to come back again. I don't want to spend my time trying to come up with something interesting to say about some random blog in the hope that the blogger will come back and comment here. Those comments are like the Twinkies of the blogosphere-- a brief rush but ultimately unfulfilling.
So what should I do to improve my blogging skills? Write better posts! Duh. But what is it that I'm lacking? Focus? Consistency? Is the tone too negative? Should I interact more in the comments?
Lay it on me, y'all. I can take it.
Basically, it was all about increasing your stats and comments. Now don't get me wrong. I love comments. It always makes me smile when someone takes the time to comment on something that I've written.
But what I'm really looking for is suggestions on how to write a better blog. Maybe I'm naive, but I happen to believe that a good product, more interesting posts, will eventually build a larger readership. I want people to find my blog, through whatever means, and find it interesting enough to want to come back again. I don't want to spend my time trying to come up with something interesting to say about some random blog in the hope that the blogger will come back and comment here. Those comments are like the Twinkies of the blogosphere-- a brief rush but ultimately unfulfilling.
So what should I do to improve my blogging skills? Write better posts! Duh. But what is it that I'm lacking? Focus? Consistency? Is the tone too negative? Should I interact more in the comments?
Lay it on me, y'all. I can take it.
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