Hey, a second day in a row with a baseball theme! My dad would be so proud.
1. Learning how to use Scrivener, the writing software that’s so complicated there’s a whole industry that’s grown up around it to teach people how to use it successfully. I don’t know how many tutorials I’ve watched or read; everyone said it was the very best tool for writers out there, so I was determined to master it. Now I’ve attained at least a certain level of comfort.
2. Establishing a morning routine. This is still pretty shaky, but it’s coming along. So many successful people emphasize the importance of sticking with a schedule, especially when you first get up and your time is pretty much under your control. I’m still lying in bed too long–I need to take the advice I gave myself in my book and pray specifically that God would help me get up. It’s very hard to stay in bed after you’ve prayed that prayer!
3. Working consistently on house and garden projects. Also still a work in progress, but as I see how gratifying it is to finally see a project through (such as cleaning out about a decade’s worth of pine needles under our big Ponderosa pine), I’m inspired to keep chipping away. So last night I did indeed go out to work some more on staining the deck railings instead of sitting and watching the DNC on television. After about an hour it was too dark to see, but I’d gotten a section done. Tonight I plan to do the same.
4. Finishing a cross-stitch project. In the grand scheme of things this is pretty small. To me, though, it’s kind of a talisman, a reminder that if I keep doing little bits of something eventually I’ll get it done. (This type of thinking doesn’t quite work if the project keeps growing, but it does if it’s a self-contained one. So if a writer completes a page a day of his book, in a year he’ll have a 365-page book. That’s the law of consistent effort.)
Here are some projects that still need work (out of many that I could list):
1. Consistent housecleaning according to a schedule.
2. A certain number of hours per day working on writing projects that might conceivably make some money. Right now I’m revising and expanding my material on the masterwork Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, material I originally wrote for the members of my community chorale. But I realized that it was probably good enough that I could sell it to other groups as a way for their members to understand what they’re singing. I have lots of other material which can also be used in this way, but my goal for the summer was to get this particular set of essays completed. How far have I gotten? Well, the introduction is finished!
3. Consistent organization of writing and financial materials. I did get a checklist finished of all our monthly bills, so I’ve made some progress, and I’ve set up a filing system for the material I write for these blogs, so that’s a start. Right now, though, there’s a backlog growing of unfiled blog materials. Sigh.
What projects do you have in mind that you could keep swinging at?