Saturday, May 17, 2014

A Stall in Progress

This happens from time to time. I'll be really productive some months (crazy in others, like nanowrimo) but on the flip side of that, there will be weeks or a month where not much gets done. Everything just stalled for the past week or so. But that's okay.

Actually, part of the reason for my recent stall (no blogging, editing, writing, reading) was due to a cold. For the past week, all I've done is work, sleep, go through kleenex and now cough. That was all kinds of fun, let me tell you. *note: sarcasm*  So, that is my "excuse" for not getting much done lately. I felt up to nothing, not even reading a book. My daily writing went to over a week of 0 words per day. So, May is a slack month in progress wise. But now that I'm on the mend, I hope to make the second half at least somewhat productive.

I will admit, I don't feel that bad about not getting stuff done. Sure, it's a set back from some of my goals, like the editing, but at times things happen. Okay, I did feel a little discouraged seeing all those gray zeroes on my writing worksheet. But then I reminded myself that it's okay. I can still keep going and it's not the end of the world to miss a week of writing.

Sure, if things come up all the time and you don't find a way to work around them to get writing and such done, then it might become an issue. But an occasional set back, don't let it get you down. Things happen that get in the way of progress, projects can stall.

I also bring this up because I help moderate a writing web site and now there is a forum where Monday we post our goals for the week (5 days) and Friday we post the results. It's not many days, and some people get a bit ambitious. Honestly, I wish we did 7 day goals but that's a different story. Back to my point... Some people, when posting their results get very discouraged when they "fail" at what they had wanted to achieve. The post is a "woe is me" and "I'm so awful cause I didn't do what I wanted to do" types that start to get defeatist in tone. But try not to do that. I don't make many goals and some of them, I just don't achieve. Instead of getting discouraged, I just evaluate how things went, then figure out my next set of goals and keep moving forward.

This isn't just for writing either. Health and fitness comes with setbacks. Being sick affected how I ate and such for the whole week. Colds are tricky for weight too, for me. Cause I consumed mostly chicken noodle soup, orange juice and sprite, the scale shows a 2 lb loss. Which would be good but once I got back to eating regular food, I usually just gain in back in a few days. Because I can finally eat something besides soup. And it wasn't a healthy loss to being with because it's from eating only like 1000 calories a day and over half of it being liquid form. Plus, this stalls any exercise due to the fact that I slept when I wasn't at work.

Health, fitness, fiction, it all can stall from time to time. The question is what do you do after the stall to pick yourself up and get back to a level of productiveness.


Have you stalled on a project lately?
What do you do to get back into the swing of things?

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Reading Rehash

Yay reading. I mean, hi.


I was quiet here on this blog because I took part in the A to Z blog challenge like last year, except instead of this blog or Dawn Embers blog, I used the book review blog. Which meant I had to read. Yay!  Well, I had some awesome help from three others who did reviews, one of whom did 10 of them for me and is joining the blog as a regular reviewer. So, that blog is doing great but now it's time to get back to having all the blogs getting posts on a regular basis. Like this one.

It was great in that it really helped get me back to reading. Last year I only read 10 books for the whole year. Last month, I read 8 books. Along with a little nonfiction book I finished yesterday, that makes my total so far this year already at 11. My goal was 15, but I'm probably going to try for 25 books this year since I'm already at 73%. I will try to read 2-3 books a month from this point, though if I get more great cause we know during November with NaNoWriMo I probably won't read anything then.

I do like reading though I didn't get much writing done in April. Between work and everything, I got the blog and reading done, but not a lot else. Hoping to get things fixed but I'm happy to be reading again either way. There are so many great books out there. I can't wait.

Books I've read so far this year:

 HIVE (Higher Institute for Villainous Education) by Mark Walden
Ash by Malinda Lo
 If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev
Beneath My Mother's Feet by Amjed Qamar
The Waiting Sky by Lara Zielin
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Revolt, She Said by Julia Kristeva
March on Earth vol 1 by Mikase Hayashi
Touch of a Thief by Mia Marlowe
The Secret Societies Handbook by Michael Bradley


May Reading Plans:

I plan to finish reading The Floating Islands by Rachel Neumeier. I also have picked a few other books to read and we'll see how it goes from there. If I finish a couple of them early I might find a book from the library too. The ones picked are: First Test by Tamora Pierce, The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau and the book "and Falling, Fly" by Skyler White.  Need to pick next nonfiction book too but I'll do that later. Either way, the plan is to keep reading.


That is what I've been doing. What about you?
What book are you reading?

Fun

I write like
Arthur Conan Doyle

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Mark Twain

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!