I’m not one to ‘quit the day job’, I think.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about that sort of choice, the notion of leaving the safety net of a nine to five gig behind and having more time to devote to your creative dreams. With the new year, lots of fellow writers are trying to spend more time drafting, revising, and submitting, and talking about their choices and trade-offs with the other things they’re spending time on in their lives.

It’s even come up on the TV show, ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ Starting with the January 2nd episode, Penny (Kaley Cuoco,) went through some high highs and rapid lows in her quest for success on the small screen, and ended up deciding to give up waitressing at the Cheesecake Factory so as to put more time and effort into looking for gigs and taking acting classes. (Which freaked Leonard out, because he couldn’t identify with taking such a big risk himself.)

I think that on the whole, staying with the full-time day job is the right choice for myself. I’m blessed to have an opportunity to get a good, steady paycheck doing something I love, with people who don’t generally drive me too crazy, and there’s a lot to be said for the value of peace of mind. But who knows, maybe someday I’ll find myself out of a job and pouring my heart into writing all day every day will be the right thing to do!

One more reason to save a little money in the rainy-day fund I guess. What about you? Have you made the big choice one way or another, or taken a third path like some of my good friends here in Hamilton?

I’m still drawing on perspective

Over the weekend I finally got back to some ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ stuff. The next assignment in the chapter on perspective, (after copying somebody else’s,) was to draw an open door by sighting it. I picked the open doorway out of my kitchen, and I think I like how it came out:

For comparison, here’s a (slightly tilted, sorry) photo of the same doorway I took on the iPhone!

My calendar of goal tracking is in trouble!

Because it can’t stay on the wall. 😦

I think it was on Sunday that the calendar fell for the first time, while I was across the room. I let it sit for a while, then figured that maybe that first adhesive hook had run out of life, and that since it stayed stuck for about three weeks, maybe I should just keep going through the rest of the pack of nine, and it could last me for another six months or so.

Calendar goal tracking update!

So, I’m not sure how many of them you can make out, but I’ve written in one hundred and twenty-five letters onto my calendar for the first 21 days of the year. That’s nearly 6 goals achieved per day. Whoo-hoo for me, I think that’s pretty darn good work.

I’ve also added one letter to the ones that I was originally tracking. Since practicing for my next driving test is something that I want to make time for, I’m giving myself a D for every day that I go driving, and I’ve written that in retro-actively for every day that I’m completely certain that I had a driving session. (Including the day of the road test.)

The calendar proudly proves that I am over 20 days for my writing and reading chains, (well over, actually, since I’m continuing chains from 2011,) and I just hit 20 days for a chain of posting a comment to at least one other blog every day, since I started on January 2nd. 🙂

One other item of note is that I haven’t gotten an ‘O for outlining yet.’ I’ve been procrastinating on my goal of brainstorming ideas for a new short story, and ‘The scroll’ has been ticking along pretty well based on the plans I drew up in December. But the O’s time shall come, mistake me not!

(And once again, I can only write in the B for today’s post after taking the picture.)

How are your new year’s goals doing after three weeks?

My new calendar of chain tracking!

To a certain extent, this calendar isn’t technically ‘new’, as I picked it up several weeks ago, at least, when I was just getting started on Christmas shopping. I opened it, saw how incredibly tiny the 2011 months were crammed onto their page, (16-month calendar, indeed!) and decided that there wasn’t much point in even thinking about hanging it until the New Year. And then I was distracted by other things, and wasn’t quite sure how to best hang up a calendar on my apartment walls, and so on.

But this evening, I bused on over to the Dollar Giant, picked up twelve colorful plastic clothes hangers and a package of nine self-adhesive hooks, so my Big Bang Theory calendar is up and in business! What business, you might very well ask?

Since I’ve been talking about the Seinfeld chain for several months now, and talking with Elizabeth Twist about her psychology of stickers, I wanted to have an actual calendar up on the wall to keep track of my various day-to-day accomplishments. I’m not as big of a sticker fiend as Elizabeth is, so I figured I could just write big letters in pen to reward myself for doing things:

W – for writing that day. (200 words or more.)
R – for reading a book or published story, 15 minutes at least.
E – Editing or Holly Lisle course stuff, 20 minutes or more.
O – Outlining or otherwise planning a story, 20 minutes or more.
B – Blog update!
C – Cleaning my apartment, 20 minutes or more.
L – Losing weight, ie exercising for 30 minutes at least. (I couldn’t use W for working out or E for exercise, because those letters were already taken!)
P – Posting comments on somebody else’s blog.

I’m looking forward to seeing just how crowded with letters I can get this calendar! Tomorrow should be interesting, as there’s a big ol’ historical note about the future of the universe that’s commemorated on January 4th.

Off to write a B for Blog on January the 3rd!