Tag Archives: Goal-setting

Do I Need a Bucket List?  Do You?

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Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List (2007).

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List (2007).

A fellow writer friend once told me:

“When I finish and publish my novel [a long-standing project of hers that’s faced many setbacks along the way], my life will be complete.”

“You mean, that portion of your life will be complete,” I clarified.

“No,” she persisted, “I mean I’ll have achieved my life’s greatest goal.”

“Until you come up with the next great goal, that is, right?”

My friend, after all, is only 37 – a bit early to peak in life, if you ask me.

For many writers, the writing and publishing of a novel – whether traditionally or via self-publishing – can take years: years spent finding the time, finding the motivation, finding one’s voice and message, and, of course, finding the skill to effectively convey it all.

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How I’m Spending My Summer

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Summer

No, it doesn’t involve an awesome vacation, but more on that in a bit.

I’m having a “working summer” this year. This isn’t unlike how I often have “working weekends”, during which I get caught up on all the errands, chores, and other adult-life necessaries I didn’t do during the week because I was busy writing.

Full-time jobs are hell on both writing time and fun, relaxing weekend time, though I guess we all need to suffer a bit for our art.

But I’ve currently got some BIG tasks that need doing.

Hence the working summer.

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Failed New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Make You a Failure

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New Year's resolutions reality

Anyone who knows me well knows that my favourite of all the holidays in the year is New Years.

Christmas, I could really take or leave: it has an interminable, commercially-driven lead-up that starts the moment Halloween ends; holiday travel is utterly wretched, as I lamented in my last post, and I don’t much care for Christmas carols (for all that my one and only successful songwriting attempt resulted in a modern Christmas song).

But once all the hoopla and mayhem of December 25 is passed, the sixth day after the fact is one I look forward to with excitement.

Now, I’ve never been to a swanky New Year’s Eve bash….

I’ve never rung in January 1 with champagne, a sparkly gown, and a kiss from a charismatic stranger at midnight.

The one time visited I New York City to spend New Years in Time Square, I was so many streets back from the action, the TV back at my accommodations offered the best view of ball dropping.

And yet, sexy celebration or not, I still love New Year’s, for I love new beginnings.

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Looking Forward Over Your Shoulder: Keeping sight of your progress

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Long Beach, California

Long Beach, California

There’s a question I’m often asked that I despise above all others:

I hate it more than being asked, “Are you still single?”  (The answer to which, for the record, is yes.  And when phrased that way, it almost makes me want to stay single out of spite.)

More than, “Did you ride your bike in the rain?”

(Answer: I live in Vancouver, BC.  It rains about 300 days a year here.  I love biking.  I hate public transit.  I own a good rain coat and shoe covers.  And you see me do this every single day; this should no longer come as a shock.)

Even more than, “What’s your novel about?”

(Answer: Err, well, it’s a historical fiction…)

This question for which I hold so much disdain is none other than,

“What have you been up to?”

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Is Anybody Listening? A lament (and relent) about Twitter

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I don’t get Twitter.

Or in Twitter parlance: #IDon’tGetIt.

It is, at face value, actually quite simple: an online venue in which one expresses him-/herself in 140 characters, follows the expressions of others, and categorizes his/her own expressions with hashtags for ease of allowing others to follow him/her.

Indeed, Twitter’s liberal use of symbology – #, @, RT, MT, and links beginning with bit.ly or ow.ly or foreshortened forms of other familiar websites (e.g. amzn, goo.gl, wp) – gives it less the air of a web service and more that of a futuristic language.

And who doesn’t think it’s cool to be bi-/tri-/multilingual?

I get all that.

I also get that Twitter’s a great way to keep up with news, which is the primary reason I joined up in the first place.

Only….

What I don’t understand is how some people manage to actually get said news.

Because there is just so much of it.

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Adventures in Reading: Trials of a time-pressed bibliophile

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I used to love reading.

Putting it like that makes it sound like I don’t anymore, which is the furthest thing from true.

Reading is one of my earliest and most enduring pastimes.  As a child, I spent whole Saturdays at my local library.  My childhood summers were a parade of one book after another cracked open in any customary summertime location: the beach, the hammock in the yard, on a family vacation.

There’s nothing I love more than losing myself and my everyday surroundings in a great story.

I just don’t have much time for it anymore.

Of course, I know the adage: “No one has time; you make time.”  I even fully subscribe to this wisdom, in all areas of my life and with all pursuits that are important to me.

And it’s a good thing too, for I really don’t have time.

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Be It Resolved: Goal-setting for Success

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It’s that time of year again.

I have an almost flawless adult record of realized New Year’s Resolutions.  In the past, I have successfully achieved…

  • The Great Weight Loss (which continues to be maintained) of 2000
  • The Commitment to More Diverse Cooking of 2010
  • The Re-Introduction to Reading and the Pledge to More Emotional Expressiveness somewhere in between the above-mentioned two, and
  • 2012’s Experiment Into Internet Dating (which I hated, but that’s a whole other blog post) to cap it all off.

I’m not much of a lover of Christmas, but New Year’s is my favourite holiday of the year.  I love new beginnings – love the intrinsic metrics they provide for making life changes – because, like anyone else, when it comes to my life and myself as a person, there’s always room for improvement.

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