Sunshine in June – Setting Goals for Moving Forward

May was a little bit of a mess in my life. See, I live in Texas, and we’ve been hit with the craziest amount of rain lately. Thankfully, I’m not in an area with disastrous flooding, but we have had a few roads closed here and there, and the farm is one big puddle. Ordinarily my horses would enjoy having three weeks off from riding, but even they haven’t had that much fun.

But its the second day of June, the third day without rain, and things are looking pretty bright around here – at least for the time being. And sunshine means I’ve got some motivation to get things done.

That being said, here are a few of my goals for the month of June, writing-related as well as personal… trying to keep it reasonable over here!

• Follow a careful diet and exercise plan as part of my path back to health.
• Ride my horses as often as possible before the summer heat sets in.
• Be prepared and ready to go on July 1st – Camp Nanowrimo!!
• Purchase and move this blog onto its own domain. Finally.
• Continue with improvements in content and design here on this blog.

I don’t have a reading list specified for this month. Instead, I’ve piled up all the books I had on my shelf that haven’t been read yet, and I’ll work through as many as I can get to.

So far, I’ve made several good steps forward in achieving the above goals, so I’m satisfied.

What are your goals for June and how do you plan on achieving them? Let me know in the comments below!

Inspirational Blogging

Weekly or monthly blogging events are seriously one of the best things ever. I love finding them, saving them for later, and reading the various tagged posts. I am, however, quite horrible at actually participating in them. Until today.

Today’s blogging event comes to you from Thistles and Whistles, a fun, inspirational blog about, as she puts it, “books, film, and life”.  Since February she has been hosting a weekly blogging event known as “Take-A-Step Thursday” that invites us to take a step back and look at what has inspired us this week, and what we were inspired to do.

So here’s my participation.  Enjoy.

I really, really love Wicked. Great musical – so many life lessons in it. I’ve listened to this song [Defying Gravity] for a long time, but this week, something in it struck a chord with me, and I’ve been pulling it up several times a day to take a listen, humming it under my breath at work, and even forfeiting the radio in the car to sing it at the top of my lungs (yes, I just admitted that).

I don’t know if I could tell you why, but something about the song and the situation that Elphaba finds herself in inspires me to do something more with my life, something new and different.

So, what have I been inspired to do?  Well, the biggest thing is that I really want to get back into the theatre, so I’m headed out to auditions tonight to see where I can be of some help.

In the little things, I’ve been inspired to pick up my productivity habits again – the ones that I dropped for a while due to being burned out in several areas. I’ve gotten more writing done in the last week than I expected, and I’m proud of it!

So, what have you been inspired by lately?

Appreciating the Arts

On this blog, I’m a writer first and foremost. But in my personal life, I’m labeled as a musician first, then a writer.
See, I’ve always enjoyed anything that could fall under the category of “arts”. I attend college for music, participate in theatre, and draw or paint in my rare spare time. I just really really enjoy the process of being creative.

One of the things I’ve learned a lot of in recent years is how to appreciate things, even if I don’t exactly like it. I definitely prefer certain types of music, but you might not know it by looking at the variety of playlists that I’ve put together on Spotify. Last night I was listening to a selection of my favorite Broadway showtunes. Today I am playing music exclusively by Faun. This afternoon it might be jazz. I’m totally open to trying all types of music, because even if I decide that its not something I really enjoy, I can appreciate the musical work that went into it. The same goes for literary works much of the time, as well as paintings and sculptures and the like.
So I pose this question to you… Do you have one area of the “arts” that you love, or do you enjoy all of them because of the creativity? What are your experiences with the different visual and performing arts?

Finding The Creative Balance

May has been a very interesting month so far. I made some goals at the beginning of the month, which sadly have not been followed as well as they should have been. But, even though my specific goals haven’t been working out as well as I had hoped, I still feel like I’ve gotten some really good stuff done.

Last weekend and the weekend before I was out-of-town taking an opportunity to have some fun and learn about something new. I’ve been working pretty hard on my new writing project, even though sometimes I feel guilty about it because I neglect to write blog posts.

It’s the little things – like pie.

Even though I’m getting some really fun and great things done, they weren’t exactly what I had planned. And sometimes, they’re not even what needed to be done. Because I can write stories all day, but if I want to sell them, then I need to write blog posts, and update my Facebook page, and do marketing. And there are some days where I’m motivated to do that side of it, but most of the time, I prefer to write fiction.

So how do you find a balance between the necessity and the desire? For example, I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch, in my pajamas, eating my breakfast while balancing my laptop on one knee and writing this blog post. And so far, that’s all I’ve gotten done this morning. If I were more balanced and productive in the things I do, I could have eaten breakfast an hour ago, spent some time organizing a few scenes for my project, and then written this blog post, with plenty of time to spare before I have to leave for work.

But I think part of having a “creative mind” or being an “artist” is that sometimes we’re not as balanced as we would like to be. We get distracted and inspired at various times throughout the day and more often than not, we don’t stick to a very specific schedule.  (Unless I’m the only one out there like that – let me know if I am!)

Today, for me, the balance is allowing myself some freedom. Maybe all I really got done before work was write one blog post, but that’s okay. One blog post is a great thing, and because of it, I feel much more comfortable sitting down with my fiction project this evening.

Share your thoughts in the comments below – how do you strive to keep a creative balance?